Follow me @samirkaji for my thoughts on the venture market, with a focus on the continued evolution of the VC landscape.
As we continue to grow Venture Unlocked, we are now going to release short conversations highlighting a specific point of view of our guest. These points of views may come through a tweet, an article, or conversation, and our goal is to unpack these interesting views in short form.
Our first guest in this format is Ed Suh Founder and Managing Partner of Alpine VC.
Ed recently penned a tweet that I thought was interesting around the evolution of venture and the parallels to the industry to other asset classes such as private equity and hedge. I wanted to go deeper into his tweet, which we did during our short conversation. Hope you enjoy!
About Ed Suh:
Ed Suh is the Founder and Managing Partner of Alpine Ventures, a San Francisco based technology venture capital firm. Ed previously led seed, early stage, and growth stage investments in Silicon Valley for nearly a decade across two prominent multi-stage venture firms: Goodwater Capital, a spin-out of Kleiner Perkins and Maverick Capital with over $5B of AUM, and Redpoint Ventures, a leading Silicon Valley venture firm with a 20+ year track record of leading consumer and enterprise software investments. Ed has backed multiple unicorn startups including Monzo, Everlywell, Jasper, Greenlight, and Stash.
Previously, Ed was Head of Business Operations at Stitcher, the leading independent podcasting app, acquired by SiriusXM for $325 million and backed by Benchmark, NEA, and New Atlantic Ventures, as well as an investment banker at Merrill Lynch focused on technology M&A. Ed was also a member of the original growth team at Facebook, and a software engineer at Plaxo and Citadel Investment Group.
Ed earned MS and BS degrees in Computer Science from Stanford University, with a specialization in Artificial Intelligence.
In this episode, we discuss:
(01:26) Discussion on venture capital becoming mainstream and its comparison to other asset categories.
(03:01) Evolution of venture capital, industry scaling, and differentiation challenges.
(04:42) Venture capital's evolution in comparison to private equity and future implications.
(06:44) Fragmentation in venture capital and its impact on alpha and risk profiles.
(09:37) Dynamics between large venture capital funds and emerging managers.
(11:51) Further insights into venture capital evolution, manager selection, and fund roles.
(13:57) Venture capital's current stage in its evolutionary cycle and future themes.
I’d love to know what you took away from this conversation with Ed. Follow me @SamirKaji and give me your insights and questions with the hashtag #ventureunlocked. If you’d like to be considered as a guest or have someone you’d like to hear from (GP or LP), drop me a direct message on Twitter.
Venture Unlocked Shorts: Why VC has gone mainstream and the parallels to private equity and hedge funds