Last year marked the 25th anniversary for Upfront Ventures and what a year it was. 2021 saw phenomenal returns for our industry and it topped off more than a decade of unprecedented VC growth.
The industry has obviously changed enormously in 2022 but in many ways it feels like a “return to normal” that we have seen many times in our industry. Yves Sisteron, Stuart Lander & I (depicted in the photo below) have worked together for more than 22 years now and that has taken us through many cycles of market enthusiasm & panic. We’ve also worked with our Partner, Dana Kibler who is also our CFO for nearly 20 years.
We believe this consistency in leadership and intuition for where the markets were going in the heady days of 2019–2021 helped us to stay sane in a world that momentarily seemed to have lost its mind and since we have new capital to deploy in the years ahead perhaps I can offer some insights into where we think value will be derived.
Focus on Cash
While the headlines in 2020 & 2021 touted many massive fundraising events and heady valuations, we believed that for savvy investors it also represented an opportunity for real financial gains.
Since 2021, Upfront returned more than $600 million to LPs and returned more than $1 billion since 2018.
Considering that many of our funds are in the (Read more…)