At first I wondered why they would write an article bragging that they spend over 75% of their time trying to bring in just 20% of their income. It would obviously be more efficient to focus on increasing the 80% or firing some people and focusing on keeping the 80% the same.<p>Then I realized this is a publicity piece to get startups to allow AVC to invest, assuring startups that AVC will stick by them even if the startup isn't great.
> There will be roughly ten investments per fund that will return maybe 5% of the fund (the third and fourth quartile). We spend a lot of time on these investments and it is difficult work that I have written a lot about over the years. <i>The time and money we spend on these investments is not rational but we do it anyway.</i><p>I notice this in my own work all the time. Some sort of human condition, probably, that "requires" I focus on the biggest headaches to try and solve them, despite probably being a lot of other more beneficial things to focus on when thinking about long term results.<p>As for the whole argument around the second quartile, this just seems to be the ecosystem of venture capital. A business with [insert healthy, reasonable, steady annual growth metric here], fantastic by most standards, doesn't initially cut it when VC portfolios require so much bigger returns to remain viable against other asset vehicles. But then suddenly that's not the case anymore, once the business has I guess proven itself as being a success relative to other fantastic flare-outs who once had much higher expectations.<p>I always think about that scene from Silicon Valley about 'pre-revenue' being more exciting for investors: <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BzAdXyPYKQo</a>
Soooo... be in the top half? Seems reasonable but as you select into more competitive demographics, it gets quite challenging. If you're up against teams of PhDs at well funded companies, that's strong signal that it may get hard to stay in the top half.