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Okay - let’s get into this week’s piece.

TL;DR:

• 📰 News

• 🔗 Links

• 🐥 Tweet

• 📶 Recs

• 🗳 Poll

NEWS
The new kids on the block 🆕

Ethan Kurzweil (Bessemer Venture Partners), Kristina Shen (Andreessen Horowitz), and Mark Goldberg (Index Ventures) are rumored to be starting a new early-stage investment firm according to Axios.

Why it matters: 

This is still a rumor (for now), but there are a few signs that things are real.

• Shen announced her departure from a16z to start her own venture firm, months after The Information reported the same about Goldberg.

• Kurzweil announced last week that he was leaving Bessemer to form a new firm.

• Kurzweil and Shen previously worked together at Bessemer for several years.

• Shen and Goldberg know each other from being on the board of compensation management startup Pave together, while Kurzweil and Goldberg served on the board of customer support chat company Intercom.

What happens next: 

Like everything else, the venture capital world runs on incentives, and carried interest is the primary incentive driving career decisions.

Splitting up carry is easy when you’re starting out, but it becomes a lot more complex as you scale AUM. Bringing in A players means you have to split up more of the pie, and that split comes out of the pockets of the existing partners.

Kurzweil was one of the first investors at Bessemer; today it has close to 400.

Shen joined a16z when it had <400 employees; today it has close to 700.

Goldberg was one of the first at Index; today it has close north of 100 employees.

Each of those firms today are drastically different than when each of them started, and there is simply less carry to share among more people. Not saying that’s the only reason that established names leave a fund, but we imagine it’s one of the main reasons.

We’ll keep monitoring the situation, but we expect more partners at mega funds to start evaluating whether it’s the right time for them to pack it up and start their own fund.

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LINKS

🧠 Mental models thread: 20 mental models to change how you think

2️⃣ Second-order effects of modern tech: A collection of thoughts

📶 Growth hacker is the new VP of marketing: One of Andrew Chen’s best essays

👷‍♂️ Building an internet empire: How Greg Eisenberg thinks about building

🌲 Don Valentine lessons: A dozen things learned from studying one of the greats

🔎 How Bedrock sources: How one of the top funds finds their winners

➡️ Meta Ads Guide: What we’ve learned about running ads on Meta

📶 how much do VCs make? (2024 results): Our latest breakdown of what you can expect to earn as a full-time investor

💰 Are you underpaid? We built a tool to assess whether you’re overpaid or underpaid using our VC comp data

🧭 Confluence.VC Navigator: Our internal navigator tool to help readers find what they’re looking for

TWEET

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JOBS

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RECS

• The Early: A new place for junior VC resources and content

• High Yield Harry: Where we get our favorite finance memes

• Mainstreet Memos: Democratizing venture, one newsletter at a time

Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.

Feel free to unsubscribe whenever this stops becoming valuable to you.

- Clay

RESULTS

Here are the results from our poll question in last week’s piece:

Which synthetic luxury product is the most exciting to you?

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Lab-grown leather (6)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Synthetic pearls (4)

🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Lab-grown wool and cashmere (5)

🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️ Synthetic silks (7)

🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩🟩 Lab-grown exotic woods (12)

🟨🟨🟨🟨⬜️⬜️ Synthetic fragrances and oils (9)

🟨⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️⬜️ Something else (4)

47 Votes