Announcing our investment in Gadze Finance

Building a successful investment franchise over the past few decades required finding a distribution advantage as products have been mostly undifferentiated. The largest and most successful US franchises — Blackrock (founded 1988), Vanguard (founded 1975), and Fidelity (founded 1946) — are now managing close to $20 trillion in assets.  While traditional finance offers few options […]

Q3 2021 Portfolio news

It’s hard to believe that we are heading into the home stretch of 2021. But before we do, let’s look back at the busy summer that the Version One family had! Fundraising and Exits Patch, an API platform for negative emissions, raised a $20M Series A led by Coatue Management with participation from existing investors […]

Resetting venture capital return expectations: is 10x the new 3x?

When I started Version One Ventures in 2012, every experienced VC shared the same rule of thumb: we had to return 3x net consistently to stay in business (i.e. 3x the invested capital net of fees over a period of about ten years for a net IRR in the low twenties). Ten years (almost) and […]