AngelList: Why Picking Winners Is the Wrong Way to Invest in Startups
Erik Syvertsen, GM of Asset Management and Chief Legal Officer at AngelList, joins David Weisburd to explain why empirical venture data shows picking winners is a secondary skill compared to access alpha. Syvertsen details why seed and growth are two fundamentally different asset classes, outlines the Cathedral and the Bazaar framework for venture access, explores the risks of early secondary sales, and introduces how evergreen 40-Act fund structures like USVC can expand private market access to non-accredited retail investors.
- AngelList data over the past 15 years shows that blind indexing startups would generate an approximate 20% IRR on paper because the asset class mean sits far above the median. Read →
- SpaceX, OpenAI, and Anthropic hold roughly $5.2 trillion in private value, eclipsing the $4 trillion total generated across private markets over the previous twenty years. Read →
- Venture performance shows hard persistence: host David Weisburd cites Professor Steve Kaplan's research showing 52% of top-quartile venture funds repeat as top-quartile performers, and roughly 75% remain in the top half. Read →
- Erik Syvertsen held an allocation in Anthropic's Series C that an external fund manager sold early after concluding AI scaling laws were stalling and OpenAI had captured the market. Read →
- Venture capital splits into two distinct asset classes at seed versus growth stage, requiring completely different investment playbooks. Read →