Grand Visions and the VC Model

Thursday Mar 18, 2010 by Dave Broadwin - Partner, Emerging Enterprise Center at Foley Hoag

Having recently had a pretty bad skiing accident that required surgery and will require a long recovery (while chasing my son down the lift line at Ninety Nine 90 in the Canyons), I have not been able to write many posts, but now that I am past the initial stages of recovery, I have had some time to think about the tech world again.

Here is one of the somewhat intractable issues that have troubled me. I know, from internal research at our firm, that the average life of a venture financed client (from the time the company becomes a client until exit) is about 10 years. I also know from discussion with a VC friend that the average time to exit for companies in his portfolio is 8 years (at least that is what he is telling people). Remember, these are average numbers, so many investments take longer to get to exit. Also remember that our firm’s numbers reflect investments from a broad variety of VCs from the top tier to the little know funds. My friend is with a top tier firm, so their results may be somewhat better than those for the industry as a whole.

OK, so why waste time thinking about this number? Well, most funds have a ten year life. Ideally during that term, the fund is fully invested and fully liquidated. Most (all?) funds provide for extensions to liquidate laggard investments. Even still, limited partners in VC funds would like to get their return in ten years – that’s the plan.

If you know that your average time to exit is 10 years, then you know that investments made in years 3, 4, and 5 (let alone anything after that) are, on average, going to run way over. This accounts, in part, for the phenomena that many VC fundss will linger long after they are unable to raise new rounds.

But, it also may have an impact on investment style. Except in the earliest years of a fund, VCs will almost always be in the position of being under pressure to look for an exit. I am sure there are many ways in which VCs try to mitigate this pressure (doing follow on investments in new funds might be one, but that is a hassle for other reasons).

I suppose it is impossible to know how much pressure this situation exerts upon VCs to favor tightly defined business plans with a clear path to an exit over grander visions? I have commented elsewhere that VCs seem to me to favor narrowly focused tightly defined business plans that address clear pain points and have obvious exits. VCs also seem to me to have become very focused on domain expertise within their investment portfolios. This makes sense, why invest in something you don’t know about? But it also leads to a certain orthodoxy in the nature of investments.

In some sense the life of a normal fund is not suited to the life of a normal company. As a result, VCs are structurally driven to favor narrowly focused investments over grand visions.

Dave Broadwin is a Partner with the Emerging Enterprise Center at Foley Hoag.  This blog post was originally published on February 26, 2010.  You can find this post, as well as additional content on the Emerging Enterprise Center Blog.

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