Venture Capital Disrupts Itself: Breaking the Concentration Curse
Please note this is a short version of the Venture Capital Disrupts Itself: Breaking the Concentration Curse report published by the Cambridge Associates. At the end of this blog post you can find the link to access to the original file.
Venture Capital Disrupts Itself: Breaking the Concentration Curse
The Old Wives Tale … Conventional investor wisdom holds that a concentrated number of certain venture firms invest in a concentrated number of companies that then account for a majority of venture capital value creation in any given year. Therefore, LPs seeking compelling venture capital returns should only commit to a handful of franchise managers. And those are precisely the managers that do not offer access. Thus, LPs are “cursed” and will never experience the differentiated return pattern offered by venture capital exposure.
… Is Flawed. As the venture capital industry and technology markets have evolved and matured, however, more managers are creating significant investment value for LPs, with value increasingly created through companies located outside the United States and across a range of subsectors. Specifically, our analysis of the top 100 venture investments as measured by value creation (i.e., total gains) per year from 1995 through 2012, an 18-year period, demonstrated:
- an average of 83 companies each year account for value creation in the top 100 investments in the asset class for each year;
- in the post-1999 (i.e., post-bubble) period, the majority of the value creation in the top 100 each year has, on average, been generated by deals outside the top 10 deals;
- an average of 61 firms account for value creation in the top 100 investments in venture capital per year; and
- the composition of the firms participating in this level of value creation has changed, with new and emerging firms consistently accounting for 40%–70% of the value creation in the top 100 over the past 10 years.
In short, the widely held belief that 90% of venture industry performance is generated by just the top 10 firms (which our analysis shows was somewhat relevant pre-2000) is a catchy but unsupported claim that may lead investors to miss attractive opportunities with managers that can provide exposure to substantial value creation.
You can access the full Cambridge Associates report here.
