What is Venture Capital?

What is Venture Capital?

Harry Davies

Early stage business funding specialist

In the first video to this new series on Venture Capital, Harry defines the roles of Venture Capitalists, and outlines the setup of a VC fund. This includes a mixture of both Limited Partners (LPs) and General Partners (GPs). He further goes on to discuss how each of these stakeholders are paid.

In the first video to this new series on Venture Capital, Harry defines the roles of Venture Capitalists, and outlines the setup of a VC fund. This includes a mixture of both Limited Partners (LPs) and General Partners (GPs). He further goes on to discuss how each of these stakeholders are paid.

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What is Venture Capital?

10 mins 5 secs

Overview

Venture capitalists provide investment into early, seed-stage companies with high potential for growth with the expectation of huge profits. The venture capitalist realises return for their investors through the differential between the equity they purchase at an early stage of the company’s lifecycle and the price they receive for it upon sale.

Key learning objectives:

  • Describe venture capital

  • Describe the setup of a VC fund

  • Understand how the general partners of VCs make money

  • Understand how firms split the carried interest between individuals

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Summary

What is Venture Capital?

  • Venture capitalists facilitate investment into early-stage, private startup companies, often at substantial risk and in environments of high subjectivity and high ambiguity
  • In the last 30 years venture capital has delivered 19% annual return at a lower volatility than many stock market indices
  • Venture capital is always nearly a long-term investment - building a company takes a long time, so it’s not an asset class for short-termism. A clear example of this is Benchmarks investment into Uber in 2011, turning $11m into $6.8bn in just eight years

What is the setup of a VC fund?

The VC fund consists of the following:

  1. Venture fund - This is the vehicle used to make investments into new companies, and it is made up of a number of different stakeholders
  2. Limited Partners (LPs) are the institutional investors who invest their money into a fund with the expectation of return upon their investment. These are typically large public and corporate pension funds, insurance companies, fund of funds, sovereign wealth funds, etc.
  3. General Partners (GPs), they are responsible for the day-to-day management of the fund, marketing of the fund, and they make decisions as to the investments that the fund makes

How do the General Partners of VCs make money?

A key challenge for a fund structure is to align the interests of the LPs and GPs, so most venture capital firms are rewarded through the ‘two-and-twenty’ model.

What is the two-and-twenty model?

  • The ‘two’ refers to the management fees the General Partners receive from LPs for fixed remuneration, operating expenses, office space, the hiring of staff to source and manage investments, and other day-to-day costs. This is typically around 2% of the fund each year
  • The ‘twenty’ in the model refers to carried interest. Carry is the percentage the GPs receive from the profit returned to investors, which typically varies around a standard 20%

How do firms split the carried interest between individuals?

  1. Some funds decide to split carry based upon individual performance
  2. Others might share equally amongst everybody
  3. Or something halfway between the two

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Harry Davies

Harry Davies

Harry Davies has spent the last few years investing in and supporting early-stage technology startups, and has worked with over 200+ startups. He started doing this at Wayra, O2 and Telefonica’s startup accelerator, where they would invest in companies that had a strategic fit with Telefonica, across telecoms, fintech, cyber security, healthcare and more. Harry has since moved to Tech Nation, a UK Government backed body that supports the UK tech sector.

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