Village Global's Venture Stories

Eric Woo (@ericjwoo), co-founder and CEO of Revere, and Spencer Tyson (@SpencerGTyson), Head of Investment Ratings at Revere, join Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), Head of Investor Relations at Village Global. Revere has pioneered the world’s first rating system for venture capital funds.Takeaways:- Venture has changed a lot over the last couple decades and continues to evolve quickly. In the last decade emerging managers has become its own sub-category, and venture as an asset class has bifurcated into specialist and generalist investors.- Revere has found through their extensive data analysis that funds that are diverse outperform, funds with a female GP outperform, solo GPs outperform, and career operators outperform those with a fund management background.- Fund benchmarking requires more scrutiny. The same data can be presented in very different ways depending on the use case. For this reason, Revere uses a standardized rating system to equip allocators with the tools to evaluate funds.- At the median, first funds do reasonably well, second funds do worse than the first, but third funds shoot up in terms of performance.- Revere looks at data, process, and repeatability when they are evaluating managers. They consider sourcing, qualifying deals, winning deals, value add, as well as whether firms stick to their stated portfolio construction.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Jon Korngold joins Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations, on this episode. Jon is the Global Head of Blackstone Growth (BXG) and Co-Head of Technology Investing at Blackstone. Prior to joining Blackstone, Jon was Head of General Atlantic’s Global Financial Services and Healthcare sectors.Takeaways:- The vast reach of Blackstone, as one of the biggest asset managers in the world, allows them to apply their huge base of operational infrastructure to “make the winning company, not just find the winning company.”- Entrepreneurs have accepted that we are not going back to 2021 valuations. There will be many casualties on the road ahead. Jon worries that VCs are doing certain complex deals to protect their marks and that there will be a number of zombie portfolios coming out in the next few years.- The correction has a silver lining: lots of tech transformation comes out of a downturn. This is a healthy thing, like a brush fire in a forest. Also, startups have more and more talent available to them as the cost of leaving an existing job has never been lower.- When Jon meets founders he pays attention to how often they let the people around them speak. Great founders are humble and surround themselves with people who challenge their thinking.- Jon recommends that people spend time working and living abroad if they can. He says that his time spent overseas has informed his thinking on markets and given him a competitive advantage at work.- The sign of a good board member is that they never show up to a board meeting and learn something they didn’t already know. They sit on a low number of boards, are actively keeping up to date on the company, and are deeply involved with the company. Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Marc Iserlis is a film/TV producer and documentary filmmaker joins Village Global's Head of Investor Relations Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi). Marc is currently building tokenized film financing at Republic, an alternative fundraising platform.Takeaways:- Marc’s ambition is at Republic is to allow individuals to join in the success of film production through an equity "fan raise" that allows fans of a particular project to invest directly in its production and share in the project’s success.- The rise of streaming platforms and recent changes in how films are financed has resulted in commoditization.- China and India’s film industries are rising stars but the US is still the global leader in big films.- Telling a good story is perhaps the hardest thing in the world to do. - An audience appreciates subtlety in storytelling. Writers know the right things to withhold from an audience to make it satisfying.- Stage is an actor’s medium, film is a director’s medium, and TV is a writer’s medium.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha) and Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) are co-authors of The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. In the book, they look at the best of Silicon Valley startups and derive entrepreneurial principles that can transform the career of any professional across all industries. They revised and updated the book for the new world of work in 2022 and released a podcast series about it which you can listen to at thestartupofyou.com.This episode of the Village Global podcast shares a few select segments from the Startup of You podcast relevant to founders, investors, and anyone working in tech.They discuss:- Hustle, and investor Chris Sacca's creative way of getting his foot in the door when he was first starting out in his career.- Name dropping. Your network is a key part of your career. If you have a powerful person in your network you might be eager to let others know that, but they talk about how to let others know about your network thoughtfully and with tact.- Navigating status. Like it or not, status matters. We talk about how status dynamics play out in the workplace and how you can skillfully navigate them.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Ben Casnocha (@bencasnocha) and Reid Hoffman (@reidhoffman) are co-authors of The Startup of You: Adapt to the Future, Invest in Yourself, and Transform Your Career. In the book, they look at the best of Silicon Valley startups and derive entrepreneurial principles that can transform the career of any professional across all industries. They revised and updated the book for the new world of work in 2022 and released a podcast series about it which you can listen to at thestartupofyou.com. This episode of the Village Global podcast shares a few select segments from the Startup of You podcast relevant to founders, investors, and anyone working in tech. They discuss: - How the founders of Airbnb were relentlessly resourceful and hustled to overcome hundreds of rejections when they first conceived of the business that today is worth tens of billions of dollars. - Reference checking — why it’s important and how to do it well. - Risk — why we're evolutionarily wired to overestimate the risks involved in a given decision, why it's important to take smart risks, and a few frameworks for thinking more rationally about them. Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Louise Story (@louisestory) most recently was the Chief News Strategist and Chief Product & Technology Officer at The Wall Street Journal. Louise also spent more than a decade at the New York Times. She joins Olga Serhiyevich on this episode to discuss:Her unique role at the Wall Street Journal and some of the products that she built, including AI/ML models to alert reporters when stocks were moving in certain ways that let them get ahead of emerging stories, as well as an early version of ChatGPT that let a user ask a question about what a political candidate thought on a given issue which pulled an answer from transcripts of their interviews and speeches.The shift to following people rather than news outlets.The importance of a strong legal department at a news outlet that protects journalists and stands up for freedom of the press.Her forthcoming book on the black-white wealth gap and the fact that at the median, black individuals in America have 12 cents in wealth for every one dollar that a white person has.Why telling stories through people is the best way to keep an audience’s attention.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

David Boehmer (@DavBoehmer) speaks to Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi) about the talent intermediation industry, the evolution of business models in the sector, and creating a talent marketplace at Banff.Takeaways:- Chance often has a significant impact on a person’s career but David says that a life’s impact is too important to be left to chance.- David likes to think of a career as a river. You can be swept downstream by momentum and wake up 20-30 years later without realizing that there might have been a different river that could have been better suited to you.- It’s important to manage your career proactively, the same way that you save for retirement before you need the money.- You should give the people around you explicit permission to give you direct feedback.- Sometimes his clients convince themselves that they want a job because they are in demand for it but they should instead think hard about what they really want and not just take a job because they are wanted.- Some people say that if you put your head down and work hard you will get discovered by the right types of people. David says “throw that out.” Your LinkedIn profile, your reputation, and your network matter immensely.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Rohit Krishnan (@krishnanrohit), venture capitalist and author of the blog Strange Loop Cannon, joins Erik on this episode. Takeaways:- Many of the people at the top of their fields today say they would never get hired if they were just starting out today. Today’s selection process at elite institutions has become more stringent but has dropped the interesting variance that exists at the top of the pyramid. Plenty of people have gamified the selection process. If you’re hiring, you want to find the interesting misfits.- Higher ed used to be fantastic but now it is groaning under its scale. There should be more of a focus on job training rather than general liberal education.- Billionaires should be more eccentric and experimental. There aren’t enough idiosyncratic billionaires in the world. - It’s easier than ever for information to get from one place to another with the rise of the internet but it also means that it’s easier than ever for ways to use that information to make money to get from one place to another. This has resulted in the barbell distribution of outcomes that we see these days.- Clustering has important benefits. There’s something about bouncing ideas off of other people and egging them on in person that is special, despite the connectivity that the internet has brought.- Hierarchies make it easy to get things done in general, but hard to get any one thing done. - There are many more areas where we are not polarized than where we are polarized these days. Changing someone’s mind is a function of time and encouragement and repeated explanations, rather than forcefully convincing someone you are right and they are wrong.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Lorin Gu, founding partner of Recharge Capital, joins Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations at Village Global to discuss:- Why Recharge structures its investing thematically, rather than by asset class.- The three themes that they believe have multi-decade headwinds behind them: semiconductors, women’s health, and fintech/crypto.- What Lorin learned from working with David Swensen, including the importance of the qualitative measurement of the people running the fund alongside any quantitative analysis of fund strategy.- How asking fund managers about their motivations and how they make decisions can determine the outcome of an investment.- The current wave of technonationalism around the globe.- Lorin's media diet and his interest in art.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Alex Chalunkal is Chief Investment Officer at a family office where he manages a $1B+ portfolio focused on impact, venture, and climate tech investing. He was interviewed by Olga Serhiyevich, Head of Investor Relations at Village Global. Takeaways: - Alex says that the consensus is that there will be a mild recession in 2023. - He says that the energy transition, health, and climate are key sectors he is focusing on. - Technology is an important tool to help improve the labor shortage in the US because tech creates more productive workers who can get more done with less. - Structured equity can be an important tool for companies with stable revenue and cash flow. There are many covenants that are often added to a debt product so it’s not necessarily the right tool for a company that has lots of potential volatility in revenue, product, or pricing. - Alex is excited about climate tech investing. He says that in the US we have the raw materials but not necessarily the policies in place to combat climate change so investing in areas that are aligned with policy is key. Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform. Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal. Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Ian Bremmer (@ianbremmer), president and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media joins Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), Head of Investor Relations at Village Global for a conversation about global geopolitical trends and their impact on technology. Takeaways:- Ian has been in the room with world leaders as they make decisions about how to prepare for potential wars. He says that it’s easy to criticize their decisions afterwards but having been there has given him an appreciation for just how difficult it is to make those decisions under constraints and how little ideology plays into those decisions.- The US is no longer willing to act as global policeman, architect of global trade, or cheerleader for values the way it has in the past. No other country is wiling or able to fill that void, which leads us to a “GZERO” world where there is no clear leadership.- Tech companies like Microsoft and Starlink acting as sovereigns in Ukraine helped the country stay independent and likely kept Zelensky in power.- Ian says that the US and China are not in a Cold War and are not headed for a Cold War. He says that the leadership of both countries isn’t interested in a Cold War from a political perspective and that there is too much interdependence between the two nations for tensions to be ratcheted up.- Ian says that AI and algorithms have become deeply political without us realizing it. Tech companies have been A/B testing not for what makes for a better society but for what leads to more addiction. He says this is the most disturbing and destabilizing trend in tech today.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Mo Islam (@itsmoislam), co-founder of Payload Space, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:- There is no doubt that we are in the early stages of the space economy, Mo says.- The cost to go to Mars will be paid many times over by the young engineers who will be inspired by the mission.- There are three main buckets in the space economy: space for earth (companies creating products for humans on earth via their space endeavors), space for space (companies serving other companies in space) and beyond earth (“science fiction”-type activities like colonization, mining, and exploration).- The International Space Station cost $100B to build.- SpaceX built the Falcon 9 at 1/10th the cost that NASA estimated.- In the 1960s there were only two space programs but now there are 80+ and they are all trying to get an economic return on investment.- Mo’s contrarian take is that launch is actually underhyped. Very few companies have a launch vehicle that has made it to orbit with a significant payload capacity.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Ari Schuler, CEO of goTenna, and Andrea Garrity, Chief Growth Officer of goTenna, join Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon join us on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:- goTenna was founded after Hurricane Sandy when a brother and sister didn’t know if the other was safe because the cell network weren’t working. It has since grown into the company that it is today, selling to government as well as consumers.- Ari and Andrea suggest that startups refrain from complaining or dwelling on how tough the procurement system is to navigate in the US government. They say “pass the test, don’t fight the test.”- Andrea says that much of innovation is personality driven — finding the right people who will run through walls when everyone else gives up.- There is plenty that they would change about the government procurement system. If one agency has found a tech useful, other agencies should be able to also use that tech without going through all the paperwork and bureaucracy over again.- The fact that US doesn’t manufacture much at home and would be stranded if a major war started tomorrow is of concern to them.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Joe Connor (@josephjconnor), founder of Odyssey (@WithOdyssey_), joins Anne Dwane and Lucas Bagno on this episode. Takeaways:- ACT test scores are at the lowest level in 30 years. 42% of students met none of the college readiness benchmarks.- District schools are not providing what parents need so children are leaving them in large numbers.- Parents have realized that they would be better off unbundling education so that children receive different parts of their education in different places, not just at a single district school.- Odyssey is fundamentally changing how education is funded in the US.- The US has 132,000 K-12 schools. For context, there are 13,000 McDonald’s locations. Teachers are the second largest occupation category in America after retail clerks.- Parents have been able to successfully push for programs like Odyssey’s by contacting their state senator or congressperson.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Ian Cinnamon (@iancinnamon), co-founder and CEO of Apex Space, and Max Benassi (@mxbenassi), co-founder and CTO, join Lucas Bagno on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:- The cost per kilogram to get things into space has gone down dramatically over the last several years. - Satellites have two parts: a payload and a bus. The bus is the actual structure of the satellite and despite all the hundreds of billions of dollars invested in launch companies, basically no venture money has gone into satellite bus manufacturing.- Satellite buses are currently designed from the ground up and assembled by hand in small volumes.- Apex (apexspace.com) is working on building scalable and reliable satellite buses.- The founders fundamentally believe that humans will be a multi-planetary species and that in the future all these spacecraft that will be carrying people around the solar system will not be made by hand. - Despite the economic downturn, there has never been a better time to be a founder. Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Ben Van Roo (@DavidNorthStar), co-founder and CEO of Yurts AI, joins Lucas Bagno on this episode of Solarpunk. Takeaways:- The Small Business Innovation Research program was originally developed as a grant program to allow small companies do innovative research. The gene for cystic fibrosis was discovered from the program.- If you’re a small company and you get an SBIR contract, you should not count on getting a government contract.- It has been very difficult for software companies to get a program of record contract because that has not been the typical model of defense in the past.- The nature of war is shifting away from large platforms and big garrison-style bases.- There have been 20-30 “SBIR mills” that have taken $3.5B combined in phase 1 and 2 contracts. Ben would put hard caps on the amounts that companies can get from the program and the types of companies that can apply to the SBIR program.- Commercial technology has outpaced the defense industry by far.- It’s very difficult for small companies to even fill out the forms required for the SBIR program. Making it more friendly for newcomers would make a big difference to the program.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Deep Nishar (@deepnishar), Managing Director at General Catalyst and formerly of LinkedIn and Google, joins Anne Dwane on this episode. Takeaways:- The best product hires have the brain of an engineer, the heart of a designer, and the speech of a diplomat. - When you’re interviewing people for product roles at startups, don’t ask people what they would do but rather what they have done in the past. You want people who have a sense of adventure and can work without a lot of structure.- The first fifty hires at a company completely define the company culture.- Tech debt is a fact of life. Don’t worry about it until you get to MVP.- When you’re a founder, consider whether you want a poet or a librarian as a product leader. A poet will take on product strategy as well as execution, while a librarian will take product direction from you and implement it.- Truly world-class product leaders can build not just a product, but a product operating system — the product that builds more products. Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Christian Brose (@cdbrose), Chief Strategy Officer at Anduril and author of The Kill Chain, joins Lucas Bagno on this episode. Takeaways:- The US military and its procurement system has been built for equipment that is big, heavy, and hard to replace — things like ships and aircraft carriers and tanks. - Commercial technologies can contribute to a military with equipment that is more agile, lower cost, and easier to replace.- People in the government are, in 2022, trying to figure out what the military is going to need in 2032. This eliminates incentives for disruption and surprise. The military gets what it wanted, even if what it wanted doesn’t solve the problem.- It would be ideal to bring capitalism into the procurement process so that there are new incentives and real competition.- China has been using a systematic, methodical strategy since the 1990s with the aim of displacing the US.- There has never been a competitor to the US with the scale that China has in more than a century.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Ross Douthat (@DouthatNYT), New York Times columnist and author of The Decadent Society, joins Lucas Bagno and Ian Cinnamon on this episode. Takeaways:- Since the moon landing, we have entered a period of stagnation. Confidence and optimism have declined and culture has entered a repetitive spiral where patterns from the 60s/70s have been repeating themselves.- Government has become less effective and more gridlocked over time.- The world’s richest societies are dealing with a population problem. They are not reproducing themselves, which has led to aging societies that are “stable but stuck” because they are resistant to change.- The internet has been more of a conduit to cultural repetition than people think — old music is often most popular music on streaming services.- The traditional story of science has been that it triumphed over religion but science emerged from an extremely religious society and it would be no surprise to Ross if as religion decays scientific progress might as well.- Ross says that we need a renaissance to get ourselves out of the age of decadence — a reaching back into the past while synthesizing all the advancements that have come about in the meantime.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup

Steve Kim (https://www.linkedin.com/in/stevenrkim/), Partner and head of Investment Strategy at Verdis, a 9-generation single family office, joins Olga Serhiyevich (@olgaserhi), Head of Investor Relations at Village Global, on this episode. Takeaways: Early stage venture is a power law asset class where the returns of the asset class are driven by outliers. The best way to increase probability of getting asset class rate of return is by increasing variance in the portfolio through diversification. Pattern matching tends to reduce variance and contrary to industry’s beliefs, is undesirable from the systematic approach perspective. There is no limit to diversification beyond practical limitations of being able to see and invest in all the relevant deals for GPs. 20-30 portfolio companies is a typical level of diversification in other asset classes including growth equity and buyout where returns are normally distributed. In early stage venture (pre-seed to Series A) this level of diversification is less likely to produce industry average returns on a consistent basis. The average rate of unicorn production is 1-2% in the industry but it varies across sectors, vintage years and geographies. So, Verdis chooses to maximize diversity across the number of companies, sectors and vintages because there is no clear indication in data that subsets of those are more likely to produce outliers but invest with a bias towards key geographies due to higher concentration of unicorns there. Most of the outliers in the US of the last decade came from two geographies - California and New York. The magnitude of these outliers was also significantly greater than unicorn companies built elsewhere. For example, on average it takes 4 non-California outliers to equal the magnitude of outcome of a California unicorn. Startup exit data from other geographies looks a lot more normally distributed which calls for a different approach. Data-driven investment strategy’s main drawback is the backward-looking nature of the approach. But it’s useful in that it provides a systematic approach to guide portfolio construction. If managers believe that the part of the VC asset class they focus on follows power law distribution, then they would want to have the most diversified portfolio as possible with a lot more than traditional 10-20 companies. In the power law world, losses don’t matter. One of the key insights from investing in venture for almost two decades is that most managers are going to stage-drift. Allocating to emerging managers who often focus on early stage due to smaller fund sizes and comfort with first check investing is one way for LPs to hedge against stage-drift. In Verdis’s view, low reserves and quick capital deployment cycle is advantageous to LPs focused on multiples not IRRs.Thanks for listening — if you like what you hear, please review us on your favorite podcast platform.Check us out on the web at www.villageglobal.vc or get in touch with us on Twitter @villageglobal.Want to get updates from us? Subscribe to get a peek inside the Village. We’ll send you reading recommendations, exclusive event invites, and commentary on the latest happenings in Silicon Valley. www.villageglobal.vc/signup