Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:07:18 · Ramtin Naimi, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:07:18] S1: So the math starts to really, really work. [00:07:20] S0: If you were to compare this to 2021, which you lived through and were very active through, obviously, two very euphoric, frothy seeming markets, what are the most notable differences and similarities?
00:07:33 · Ramtin Naimi
[00:07:33] S1: If you look back to 2021, the companies weren't that interesting when you looked at them. Just we didn't have anything else to compare them to. You were looking at SaaS companies growing, what was it, five x, three x, three x, two x, and everyone's like, that's best in class. And you would have companies with, you know, $8,000,000 of SaaS revenue raising a billion dollar valuations, and they had very constrained TAMs. And you kind of had to look at these things for, like, a seven year timeline to get to a 100,000,000 of ARR, and that was what Venture was back then, and that was exciting. And now you look at companies today, you're like, can't believe we've even got out of bed for those types of opportunities back then. So in terms of the round structures, the volume of deals, people feeling the need that they need to keep up with the market is all very similar. In 2021, there was a period of time where if you pretty much ask every VC and even LPs about this similar situation, there's like a six month window in 2021 where VCs were just ripping checks. And if you ask any of those VCs to look back at their portfolio for 2021 in that six month window, a lot of them are like, yeah, we like that grabs our heads and being like, were we thinking doing all of those deals? I'm not saying we're at that point in the market today. Like, we could be in 2019 and not 2021. But some of the things that I'm starting to see happen today in 2021 that was like public market investors trying to aggressively come into venture is very actively happening right now. How frantically people were trying to do deals back then versus how they're trying to do them now. Some of the things we started seeing near the late end of twenty twenty one were companies getting term sheets very, very quickly and then term sheets getting pulled also very, very quickly or reneged or renegotiated in one way or another. And in the last six, seven, eight weeks, I've probably seen a larger amount of deals get renegotiated after being offered than I have since 2021. But the thing that's most dissimilar is kind of the enthusiasm around the companies. I don't think people were investing in companies in 2021 thinking that these companies were gonna be category defining or be global scale companies within eighteen to twenty four months and that you're kinda just seeing in this market play out.
00:09:26 · Ramtin Naimi, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
You're having companies find product market fit at a faster rate than ever. I'm looking at companies in my portfolio that I'm using very actively, and I can't think of anything I invested in 2021 that I was using personally. And now I'm actually starting to see, like, how much value these things can drive. Family members that are using some of these products that never would be an early adopter of AI products or any tech products, period. And they become integrated as parts of their daily life. So I think there's, like, a huge paradigm shift in terms of the technological innovation in this market that people truly believe that if there is a window of opportunity where you can't afford to sit on the sidelines, it's in this moment in time. [00:10:02] S0: Can you drill a level further down the stack, which is to the LP side and the funds that are being raised? So this money comes from funds Yeah. Going into these companies at record paces and amounts. VCs also have to raise money themselves from a group of LPs that have historically been the reason VC exists, endowments and foundations and things like this. And, like, at some point, it seems like what the market is doing is we're all spending so much money so quickly that the sources of capital themselves are starting to ask deeper questions.
00:10:32 · Ramtin Naimi
[00:10:32] S1: So when a venture capital fund typically goes out to raise capital, they're raising for an eighteen to twenty four month window initial deployment period. That means that's the amount of cash they wanna deploy into initial checks, and then they reserve whatever they reserve for follow on to keep financing those companies to maintain their ownership. I think in the last eighteen to twenty four months, the mega platform funds that you guys hear about that are raising these record sized funds have probably raised two to three times in that same eighteen to twenty four month window. So, like, the deployment periods are about three x faster than they thought they would be. Now what's interesting about that is when venture capital firms go out to raise, these are the guys that have their pulse on the market better than anybody. And they always raise an amount of capital that supports their portfolio construction model, which means they want x number of bets with x number of... With x amount of ownership over x period of time, typically eighteen to twenty four months. Every single one of the mega firms has dramatically underestimated how much capital they need to actually get that level of ownership in those companies over that window of time, which basically just means that there's a larger number of companies they wanna invest in than they thought they would. The price of those companies is higher than they thought it would be. And the ownership they got in those companies, in order to get that ownership, they need to invest much more than they initially modeled out. So that's where you're seeing these guys not only come back to sooner than they initially anticipated, they're also coming back for much larger sums of capital. So that's the most interesting thing that you're seeing in this market is LPs are kind of looking at these guys and realizing that there's two things that are happening. They either maintain their ownership in these companies, but they end up with way fewer shots on goal, or they end up with way less ownership in these companies and end up with their same shots on goal. The shots on goal basically is your hedge against not being a great picker.
00:12:13 · Ramtin Naimi
You get the shots on goal that you need to have the number of winners you need to have a good venture capital fund, if you're not getting your ownership, your upside will be capped in one way or another. And then the alternative is you're like, hey. We actually need our ownership. So we're going to just invest in fewer companies this vintage because we have to invest more capital in the companies we wanna invest and get our owners. In that aspect, you just need to be a better picker, but you could still produce outsized returns because you're getting the core positions in the companies that you want core exposure to. From an LP perspective, I think those guys were expecting dramatically more liquidity at this point in the cycle than they've actually gotten. And it's actually funny because you look at LPs that had 35 to 50% of their exposure into venture capital. But if you actually peel that a layer back, it's not 30 to 40% of their... 50% of their AUM in venture capital. It's 30 to 50% of their AUM in, like, three to four companies. And that's SpaceX, Anthropic, and OpenAI, and Databricks, and a number of companies like that. Those are the names that need to generate liquidity for these guys to get their exposure levels to the asset class down. It doesn't actually have to do with all of these companies you're hearing about. There's just a few companies that really move the needle for all of these LPs. And if you're an LP that wasn't in a fund that had a lot of exposure to SpaceX, you haven't gotten any liquidity. Basically, the LPs that are going to generate meaningful liquidity are the ones that have exposure to funds that have meaningful exposure to those companies. Outside of exposure to those companies, LPs aren't getting much liquidity back at all. I think that puts the funds that don't have LPs that have exposure to those companies in a position where they're trying to actually extract new sources of capital for their companies because a
00:13:43 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:13:43] S0: lot of the LPs are limited on cash. The traditional LPs that you and I would think about as the guys who fund the venture capital ecosystem. Could you give an example of a fund, again, without naming it in rough numbers, not specific, of the sort of history and the accelerated pace of deployment?