Be very careful. The IRR for a fund that is very young is deceiving. Fund V, for example, closed at the end of 2016. AT the time the documentation was put together, there could have been very little capital deployed and it doesn't represent subsequent rounds that have yet to be raised.
See link to a chart on returns by year/fund from the article: <a href="https://twitter.com/vcstarterkit/status/1173611439833006080" rel="nofollow">https://twitter.com/vcstarterkit/status/1173611439833006080</a>
I don't have access to the full article, but from the lede this looks like not very well researched journalism:<p>1. A16Z has 17 funds, with varying degrees of investing angles (early stage, crypto, bio, etc). So trying to do a fund by fund analysis is unfair.<p>2. IRR can be deceiving as it's time based. Some LPs invest based on "X Return" or IRR, and so cherry-picking one over the other is disingenuous without mentioning the other.<p>3. The larger the fund, the harder it is to have a higher IRR. A16Z keeps growing the size of it's funds (latest is $1b+). There are just simply not enough good deals out there to deploy that amount of capital. This is just like growing your top line revenue 50% from $1M to $1.5M, vs 10% from $10 to $11M. The former appears to have be semantically "better performing growth", when actually you made $500k more than you did previously.<p>4. The fact that they, a VC firm, are even returning their money means LPs will continue to invest. VC as an "asset class" is notoriously underperforming, with exception to the top 10% of the firms (which A16Z would likely be). Which begs the question, "so what?".
Key points:<p>The funds the firm raised in 2010 and 2011 showed a net internal rate of return of 16% and 12%.<p>The results are a significant drop from the 44% return rate of its 2009 fund.
A few thoughts spring to mind:<p>It seems like the more money you have, the harder it is to deploy it efficiently.<p>It would be interesting to know the influence of David Swensen (the CIO at Yale), who's put a large portion of their endowment into Private Equity and Venture Capital investment, and how other large funds might be mimicking his strategy.<p>People always compare VC vs the S&P500 but I wonder if there's a side benefit to VC in that it's not necessarily linked to stock market fluctuations.<p>Are VC returns in the aggregate going to turn to absolute crap over the next ten years as hundreds of new funds (with a new one popping up every day it seems) all grinding it out - or will we see the opposite, where a lot of these smaller funds have very successful first funds (partially constrained by the sizes they're initially able to raise), only to be dramatic underperformers as they raise second and third funds?<p>Finally, it seems like more money doesn't make for better results (past a point). The Vision Fund being example A.