The thing about early-stage venture is that the exit environment and the entrance environment should have absolutely zero connection to each other...and yet they do
If you are investing in a founder-stage startup today, it won’t exit for some 7-10 years. So even if the IPO market is hot or the late-stage market is hot, that has nothing to do with you.
That is, if company A had a $5 million pre in 2009 because the economy is awful and the same company has a $10 million pre today because the IPO market is open, you should expect to have made twice as much investing in 2009 as today
And since that’s true for every company in your portfolio, you should expect a 2009-era fund to have twice the overall DPI as a 2019-era fund
I dunno. This seems so obvious to me. And yet early-stage valuation clearly correlate to late-stage valuations as if exit windows weren’t transitory and impossible to predict
