| “WE HAVE MET THE ENE MY... AND HE IS US” Lessons from Twenty Years of the Kauffman Foundation’s
Investments in Venture Capital Funds
and The Triumph of Hope over Experience http://www.kauffman.org/~/media/kauffman_org/research%20repo... (The whole thing is good read) >The Kauffman Foundation investment team analyzed our twenty-year history of venture investing experience in nearly 100 VC funds with some of the most notable and exclusive partnership “brands” and concluded that the Limited Partner (LP) investment model is broken. Limited Partners—foundations, endowments, and state pension fund—invest too much capital in underperforming venture capital funds on frequently mis-aligned terms. Our research suggests that investors like us succumb time and again to narrative fallacies, a well-studied behavioral finance bias. We found in our own portfolio that: - Only twenty of 100 venture funds generated returns that beat a public-market equivalent by more than 3 percent annually, and half of those began investing prior to 1995. - The majority of funds — sixty-two out of 100 — failed to exceed returns
available from the public markets, after fees and carry were paid. - There is not consistent evidence of a J-curve in venture investing since 1997; the typical Kauffman Foundation venture fund reported peak internal rates of return (IRRs) and investment multiples early in a fund’s life (while still in the typical sixty-month investment period), followed by serial fundraising in month twenty-seven. - Only four of thirty venture capital funds with committed capital of more than $400 million delivered returns better than those available from
a publicly traded small cap common stock index. - Of eighty-eight venture funds in our sample, sixty-six failed to deliver
expected venture rates of return in the first twenty-seven months (prior to
serial fundraises). The cumulative effect of fees, carry, and the uneven nature of venture investing ultimately left us with sixty-nine funds (
78 percent) that did not achieve returns sufficient to reward us for patient, expensive, long-term investing
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