Best of LinkedIn: Venture Capital CW 15/ 16

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00:00:24: So Imagine you're raising a fifty million dollar Series B. You've hit every single revenue target, your churn is basically non-existent...

00:00:34: You feeling pretty good about yourself?

00:00:35: Right!

00:00:37: I

00:00:43: mean that sounds insane, but the bizarre highly mathematical reality of venture capital right now.

00:00:48: It really is!

00:00:49: And if you are a professional navigating the M&A private equity or VC landscape Right Now The noise in market just deafening.

00:00:58: Oh absolutely deafening.

00:00:59: So

00:00:59: our mission for this deep dive Is to cut through all that noise.

00:01:04: We're gonna untack specific operational realities we've seen across LinkedIn over calendar weeks.

00:01:09: fifteen and sixteen.

00:01:10: Right, because we are looking at this radically bifurcated market.

00:01:14: It's completely driven by AI shifting geographical power centers and Honestly, a brutal new environment for both fundraising and deploying capital.

00:01:23: Yeah the overarching narrative here is that the macro data we are seeing right now Is entirely divorced from the micro-reality on the ground.

00:01:30: Completely.

00:01:31: I mean The headline numbers suggest We're in middle of this massive VC recovery But

00:01:35: mechanics underneath those Numbers tell A very different highly concentrated story.

00:01:39: Let's look at actual math.

00:01:41: Mark Dubois Highlighted From recent KPMG And NVCA figures.

00:01:44: Right Q one numbers

00:01:46: In first quarter Global VC hit three hundred and thirty point nine billion dollars.

00:01:51: And you know if you stop reading there, You pop the champagne.

00:01:54: but

00:01:54: we have to dig one layer deeper

00:01:55: exactly just ten specific mega rounds deals.

00:01:58: over two billion dollars each accounted for.

00:02:00: sixty-two percent of that entire value

00:02:02: is just wild.

00:02:03: sixty two percent right?

00:02:05: We aren't

00:02:05: funding a broad ecosystem innovation anymore.

00:02:08: We are writing these astronomical checks to a very select, highly insulated group of companies.

00:02:14: And you know we have to talk about where that insulated capital is going.

00:02:17: AI captured sixty five point four percent of the total deal value.

00:02:21: Wow But here's the kicker.

00:02:23: it was only thirty nine point four per cent of the deal count.

00:02:26: Ah so massive cheques but fewer of them.

00:02:28: Exactly yeah Alex Jay Prince did this brilliant analysis breaking down what happens when you strip those Ai mega deals out Of The Data?

00:02:36: and What Does It Look

00:02:36: Like?

00:02:37: His Conclusion Is Stark.

00:02:38: The venture market isn't recovering at all.

00:02:40: It is, practically speaking still in a deep recession.

00:02:44: Reversation?

00:02:45: Really

00:02:45: yeah.

00:02:46: by the end of Q for twenty-twenty five non AI funding was down to sixty six point two billion dollars which drops it well below twenty twenty two levels.

00:02:55: I mean that kind of concentration just starves the lower end of the market.

00:02:58: actually Alex Baluta shared data showing this sub one hundred million dollar deals are down seventy percent.

00:03:03: seven percent Yeah its ten year low.

00:03:06: but What really fascinates me is how this plays out in the secondary markets.

00:03:10: Alex Prince points out there's a massive dislocation happening right now.

00:03:14: Oh, with the bid ask spreads Right

00:03:17: AI assets hold their liquidity like buyers are willing to trade them at or even above Their last round valuation

00:03:24: Because everyone wants it

00:03:25: Exactly.

00:03:26: But for non-AI names, the bid ask spreads are widening dramatically

00:03:30: and we should probably unpack why that bid ask spread is widening because it's a pure reflection of timeline risk.

00:03:36: you know so

00:03:38: well if You Are A secondary buyer looking at say a traditional sauce company?

00:03:42: Mm-hmm The IPO window.

00:03:44: It's incredibly tight right

00:03:45: now.

00:03:45: rain M&A volume Is super slow

00:03:47: exactly.

00:03:47: So you might be locked into That asset For seven to ten Years instead Of the Traditional Three To Five.

00:03:52: ah I see

00:03:54: To compensate for that illiquidity risk, buyers demand a massive discount often like forty to fifty percent.

00:04:00: Which

00:04:00: sellers are obviously going to refuse?

00:04:02: Right the sellers refused to take that hit so the transaction volume just freezes.

00:04:07: it's essentially two entirely different asset classes operating under the label of venture capital.

00:04:12: I want to push back on the underlying logic of these two billion dollar mega rounds though.

00:04:17: Are we just um Foy?

00:04:20: gracing startups with capital to crown winners?

00:04:23: That's a great visual.

00:04:24: Well, Dan G brought up this exact argument calling it classic herd behavior.

00:04:28: You know investors see great companies raise massive amounts of money and they mistakenly flip the causality.

00:04:34: They

00:04:34: think raising massive amount of money produces a good company

00:04:37: Exactly Which completely abandons fundamental principle of capital efficiency.

00:04:42: Yeah, he actually quoted Jeff Bezos on this right.

00:04:44: He

00:04:44: did!

00:04:45: Bezos famously argued that frugality drives innovation... ...that you have to invent your way out of a tight box.

00:04:51: And if you remove the tightbox by dropping two billion dollars on balance sheet

00:04:56: You might kill the operational discipline made them innovative in first place.

00:05:01: You end up producing these weaker hollow giants who just solve problems with ad spend instead product iteration.

00:05:07: That tension between capital efficiency and market capture is critical now especially because the market has collectively decided that The biggest risk isn't overfunding a company.

00:05:19: It's missing out on AI.

00:05:20: Exactly, Missing out on the foundational layer of AI entirely.

00:05:25: But you know the application to that capital is evolving

00:05:28: right?

00:05:28: We aren't just funding generic horizontal language models anymore

00:05:31: or basic chatbots.

00:05:33: Yeah, the narrative and the money has moved into highly specific regulated industry workflows.

00:05:39: Yeah, Vertical AI.

00:05:41: Kuang Fan shared some incredible Euclid data that proves this shift.

00:05:45: they analyzed over four thousand VC deals

00:05:48: and what did they find?

00:05:50: Well even if you completely strip out the massive open AI in enthrothic rounds vertical AI startups still captured fifty three percent of all venture deals.

00:05:58: Wow More than half.

00:06:00: Yeah, the premium asset right now isn't just knowing how to build a neural network it is domain expertise.

00:06:05: Right!

00:06:05: The

00:06:06: founders winning these rounds are cardiologists former law enforcement construction managers People

00:06:10: who deeply understand specific friction points of an industry.

00:06:14: Exactly Quang highlighted health care specifically which pulled in eleven point eight billion dollars across almost six hundred deals.

00:06:21: That's massive.

00:06:22: Yeah

00:06:22: financial services and manufacturing followed closely behind but healthcare is clearly the epicenter.

00:06:28: Sean Kearney actually pointed out that while nearly eighty-nine percent of Q one twenty, twenty six deal value went to AI broadly.

00:06:36: The real catalyst is its convergence with medicine.

00:06:39: right because the regulatory changes?

00:06:41: Yeah you have the FDA actively accelerating how AI integrates into it's regulatory review process.

00:06:46: It's clearing the path to market

00:06:48: and you have massive corporate signaling too like Google's thirty two billion dollar acquisition of whiz

00:06:54: which heavily targets secure healthcare data infrastructure.

00:06:57: Exactly I mean think about why health care attracts this vertical AI capital.

00:07:01: you have massive highly sensitive datasets trapped in legacy silos plus

00:07:05: massive regulatory friction and

00:07:07: critical life or death workflow inefficiencies.

00:07:09: it is just the perfect environment for a specialized model to create immediate quantifiable value.

00:07:15: Yeah, that makes total sense.

00:07:17: But the disruption isn't just happening to the industry's VCs invest in.

00:07:22: it is fundamentally rewiring the venture capital workflow itself.

00:07:26: Oh

00:07:26: this part of the research is wild.

00:07:27: It really

00:07:28: is.

00:07:29: Laura Foo discussed how Benjamin Orthle at Blue Moon Ventures Is completely reshaping deal sourcing and initial screening using AI

00:07:37: And Niti Koshel provided the operational details on this.

00:07:41: We are seeing tools like adion that can ingest a pitch deck run preliminary financial checks flag structural risks and suggest comparative valuations

00:07:51: And all that in under an hour,

00:07:53: right?

00:07:53: That diligence cycle used to take weeks of back-and-forth between founders and junior analysts.

00:07:58: now the baseline filtering is basically instantaneous

00:08:00: But you know I have to challenge.

00:08:01: The long term impact of this

00:08:03: okay how so

00:08:04: Well, if founders are using AI to write and optimize their pitch decks... ...to hit the exact metrics investors want.

00:08:10: Right!

00:08:10: And VCs are using Ai agents to screen & evaluate those decks based on historical success data.

00:08:16: Are we just watching two algorithms negotiate with each other?

00:08:19: Exactly My fear is that an AI trained on past data will inherently screen out The unconventional Crazy Ideas That Venture Capital Is Specifically Designed To Fund In First

00:08:30: Place.

00:08:31: I mean, it's a very valid concern regarding systemic bias.

00:08:35: Needy Koshel actually addresses this by defining the boundary of what AI is doing.

00:08:45: Like it spots a broken cap table or an unrealistic customer acquisition cost instantly

00:08:50: right the math stuff

00:08:51: exactly Mm-hmm, but he cannot feel a founder's drive.

00:08:55: It can't sense.

00:08:56: The resilience required to pivot when a product inevitably fails.

00:09:00: So the human element is still there

00:09:02: yeah?

00:09:02: The human judgment that gut feel for whether our founder will walk through walls Is still what actually clears the final investment committee.

00:09:08: so the founders story now has to win twice.

00:09:10: Basically, yeah.

00:09:11: You

00:09:11: have to pass the brutal highly conventional logic of the AI screen and then you have to move The human partner in the room with your unconventional vision exactly

00:09:20: And building these specialized vertical models requires deep technical talent and massive late-stage growth capital

00:09:26: which naturally brings us To a major geographical shift we're tracking

00:09:29: right?

00:09:29: Yeah European paradox.

00:09:31: Right

00:09:31: because Europe is producing world class deep tech but its internal capital pipeline Is structurally broken?

00:09:38: Yep

00:09:38: Dima Mikhailov Alberto Mateos and Guido Suroni all referenced the twenty-twenty six European deep tech report, And the foundational numbers are undeniably strong.

00:09:48: European Deep Tech funding hit twenty point three billion dollars representing a massive thirty two percent of All European VC.

00:09:56: The talent engine is just roaring.

00:09:58: Guido pointed out that universities like ETH Zurich and EPFL in Switzerland Are vastly outperforming MIT and the Ivy Leagues when it comes to producing VC backed deep tech startups.

00:10:10: That's

00:10:10: incredible, but let's use a pipeline analogy here.

00:10:13: okay Europe has built the world's most advanced water treatment plants.

00:10:16: their universities and research centers are pumping out incredibly pure innovative IP

00:10:21: But they haven't built that high-pressure pipes required to distribute it globally exactly.

00:10:25: Alberto Mateos noted there is a persistent annual funding gap of up to twenty four billion dollars specifically for growth stage companies.

00:10:33: Yeah, because Europe lacks those late stage growth funds.

00:10:36: Seventy percent of that scale up funding comes from non-European investors.

00:10:41: So the US and Asian investors simply back up their trucks take the purified water And capture all the downstream value.

00:10:47: Right

00:10:48: The intellectual property, the strategic control, the massive job creation.

00:10:52: It all migrates out of Europe just as a company hits its most valuable phase.

00:10:56: it is an existential threat to European digital sovereignty

00:11:01: and governments are panicking.

00:11:02: Waukes-Kahn and Alberto Annetti highlighted the massive system level interventions governments are deploying to try and fix this.

00:11:09: Like, The European Investment Fund?

00:11:11: Right!

00:11:12: The EIF launched a fifteen billion Euro fund of funds specifically back growth stage VCs And the European investment bank committed another seventy billion.

00:11:21: Not to mention Germany Poland UK.

00:11:24: They're all launching state backed sovereign funds.

00:11:27: The scale that intervention is reshaping entire ecosystem.

00:11:31: Yeah.

00:11:31: Paolo Bonomo referenced a statistic from Dragos Novak on this.

00:11:34: This influx of public money has flipped the European venture landscape so dramatically that it is now majority-public funded.

00:11:41: Wait,

00:11:41: really?

00:11:41: Yeah.

00:11:42: Fifty seven point two percent of all VC spent in Europe Now comes from Public Sources.

00:11:46: So more than half of the venture capital in Europe Is effectively taxpayer money.

00:11:51: Alberto Onetti points out that this is an attempt to artificially solve the liquidity issue on the supply side, because Europe is late to the global tech race and time as one resource they cannot organically generate.

00:12:05: But

00:12:05: I'm gonna lean on Michael Jackson's stark warning here...

00:12:08: What did he say?

00:12:09: He argued that governments are basically LR-arping as venture capitalists.

00:12:13: Oh wow Yeah!

00:12:14: He explicitly stated no problem in venture has ever been solved by more money.

00:12:19: Pouring eighty billion euros into the top of the funnel doesn't fix the restrictive plumbing at the bottom.

00:12:24: Because capital can keep a struggling company alive, but it cannot mandate operational excellence.

00:12:29: Exactly!

00:12:30: Let's look at the actual operational data.

00:12:32: Mignon-Harris shared a staggering statistic.

00:12:34: only one point eight percent of European VC partners have prior operator experience.

00:12:39: One twenty eight percent?

00:12:40: Yeah

00:12:40: in the US that number is closer to sixty percent.

00:12:42: That Is A Massive Gap.

00:12:44: Right because if a U.S partner sees a scaling issue they've lived.

00:12:48: They know how to restructure a sales team.

00:12:50: A partner with a pure finance background just tells the founder to buy more ads.

00:12:54: Yeah, and Munya noted...the result of this BDB sauce.

00:12:59: companies in Europe are now spending two dollars on sales & marketing.

00:13:03: Just generate one dollar of new recurring revenue.

00:13:07: And

00:13:07: we need pause and emphasize why that specific metric is so lethal.

00:13:11: Right!

00:13:11: Spending two dollars to acquire one dollar ARR in zero interest rate environment Is aggressive but survivable.

00:13:18: But in a high interest rate environment,

00:13:19: it is the mathematical death spiral.

00:13:21: The cost of capital simply doesn't allow for that level of inefficiency.

00:13:25: Add to Daniel Stoica's point about engagement gap.

00:13:28: He highlighted the restrictive European work norms Notice periods for hiring or firing.

00:13:38: He argues this regulatory friction kills the speed and ownership that startups absolutely rely on to survive.

00:13:44: So again, Europe is pouring billions into a system without addressing The operational constraints that cause the companies to stall out in the first

00:13:53: place which naturally shifts our focus from the macro In the regional down-to-the micro.

00:13:57: yeah if you are a founder trying to raise around Or an emerging fund manager tried to raise capital structurally complex environment, the old rules no longer apply.

00:14:08: You have to fundamentally change your mechanics?

00:14:10: Exactly!

00:14:10: Leon Eisen breaks this down brilliantly into The Five P's of Fundability

00:14:15: Process Proof Positioning Packaging and Planning.

00:14:19: Right.

00:14:20: The era of the emotional pitch is over, fundraising is now a strict operational diagnosis.

00:14:24: Yeah

00:14:25: one founder walks into a room and feels expensive while another founder with exact same revenue feels undeniable

00:14:31: Undeniable.

00:14:31: I like that

00:14:32: And if your round is stalling it's because One Of Those Five Operational Pillars Is Broken.

00:14:37: Well part being undeniable is thoroughly understanding the brutal mathematics of investors sitting across from

00:14:43: you Which brings us back to power

00:14:45: law.

00:14:46: Nathan Beckard and Abdelkater Y both hammered this point home.

00:14:51: VCs are not looking for good, sustainable companies.

00:14:54: They're looking for asymmetric power law upside

00:14:58: Exactly Every question a venture capitalist asks during diligence is essentially risk filter designed to answer one question Can THIS specific company eventually return my entire fund?

00:15:09: Let's do the math on that because it dictates everything Go for If a VC is deploying a one hundred million dollar fund and they take a ten percent stake in your company, you have to exit for one billion dollars just for that single investment.

00:15:22: To return the hundred million-dollar funds

00:15:24: right?

00:15:25: Yoreen Hoover explicitly advised that if your ambition is to build a highly profitable sustainable fifty million business You should stay a mile away from a VC office

00:15:35: Because a fifty million dollar exit yields five million dollars for the fund.

00:15:39: It does absolutely nothing to satisfy their limited partners,

00:15:41: right?

00:15:42: They will actively push you.

00:15:43: take all or nothing existential risks to try and first that billion-dollar valuation.

00:15:48: Yeah, Alejandro Cremades noted that venture capital is high risk capital chasing outsized returns via hyper growth in exits.

00:15:56: If your personal ambition doesn't align with the physics of power law You'll get crushed by expectations on the term sheet.

00:16:04: We have to examine how that power dynamic plays out behind closed doors too.

00:16:08: Yeah, Shikam and Glani discussed how early stage deals rely heavily on trust in founder conviction

00:16:13: But reviews appear highlighted how quickly that trust is weaponized by hidden bias.

00:16:18: This story was crazy!

00:16:20: He told a story of a partner killing the deal in three minutes simply because the founder didn't feel like a founder.

00:16:27: Raviv phrased that beautifully, actually.

00:16:29: He said it's just a bias with better posture.

00:16:31: Exactly!

00:16:31: It is similarly biased as local bias.

00:16:33: he noted that nearly fifty percent of US VC investments still land within two hundred and thirty three miles in the investors office.

00:16:40: So you are trusting an algorithm to screen the deck but you're still relying on geographic and demographic comfort To cut-the check.

00:16:47: And that bias has real legal teeth once money changes hands

00:16:51: Right.

00:16:52: Adeo Resi shared research showing dark side this control.

00:16:56: Forty percent of founder lawsuits against VCs involve dilution and freeze-outs.

00:17:02: Let's explain what a freeze out actually is for a second.

00:17:04: Yes,

00:17:04: pretty brutal.

00:17:05: That is when an investor uses their board control to issue new shares at a drastically lower price Intentionally diluting the original founders down to nothing

00:17:15: Effectively stealing the equity they built.

00:17:17: Right

00:17:18: And Resi noted that another thirty five percent of lawsuits involved investors forcing the sale of company on terms that completely wipe out founders' common stock.

00:17:27: While preferred investors get their money back.

00:17:29: Exactly, it's an invisible reality in industry.

00:17:32: Founders sign non-disclosure agreements take a small severance package and venture firm moves onto next deal

00:17:38: It really underscores why understanding governance mechanisms is just as critical.

00:17:45: Yeah, people often call venture capital rocket fuel but a better analogy is viewing it as high-pressure debt.

00:17:52: Interesting!

00:17:52: It requires a hypergrowth equity vehicle built to withstand immense atmospheric pressure.

00:17:58: and if your vehicle isn't designed to hit orbit?

00:18:02: If you just want to build a really great airplane the sheer force of that capital structure will literally tear your cap table apart.

00:18:09: That is a critical distinction to make and you know, it leads to a final thought.

00:18:13: I want leave with drawing on an observation from Matthew Bosch.

00:18:17: Okay?

00:18:17: He pointed out that the software product they required three million euro seed round to build back in twenty-twenty one can now be built by three people six weeks with virtually zero capital entirely thanks to AI coding assistance.

00:18:32: Wow, think about the implications of that timeline compression.

00:18:35: Exactly!

00:18:36: If AI is making it exponentially cheaper and faster to reach market fit while venture capitalists are simultaneously concentrating their capital only on massive two billion dollar infrastructure plays

00:18:47: It raises a fascinating question

00:18:49: Are we on the verge of golden age highly profitable bootstrapped mid-sized tech companies?

00:18:54: Companies simply bypassed the venture capital industrial complex entirely

00:18:58: Right, retaining full control and ownership because the fundamental cost of innovation has dropped to practically zero.

00:19:06: I mean if high-pressure capital comes with that much operational risk and term sheet peril And you can build a product yourself in a month Why would just keep equity?

00:19:15: Exactly!

00:19:16: If enjoyed this episode new episodes drop every two weeks.

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00:19:25: Thank You so much for joining us On This Deep Dive.

00:19:27: Don't forget to subscribe, and the next time you see a headline celebrating massive funding round remember.