风投行业的结构正在发生变化

    资金分别流向小型和大型风投公司

    就在三年前，还有人说有限合伙人“根本不会开具小面额支票”来为种子阶段风投提供资金。最新动态是，种子阶段已经被广为接受，但问题是“我的种子基金有能力按既定比例为那些最终的赢家提供资金吗？”简单来说就是，如果你按450万美元的融资前价值为打车服务商Uber公司提供了种子基金，而且你有权保持自己的股权份额，你当然希望继续行驶投资权。在私募市场中填补这个缺口的竞赛正在进行之中。

    目前种子基金占所有新设立基金的67%，是六年前占比的两倍。虽然它们只占整个风投行业总资本的6%，这依然是一个重大的结构性变化。

    Money Bifurcating into Small & Large

    Just 3 years ago there was talk of LPs “not being able to write small enough checks” to fund seed-stage VCs. The new narrative is seed-stage is here to stay, but “will my seed funds be able to fund the prorata of their winners?” Stated simply — if you seed funded Uber at $4.5m pre-money valuation you certainly would want to exercise your right to continue investing if you had pro-rata rights. The race is on to plug this gap in the private markets.

    Seed funds now represent 67% of all funds being created now, which is up 100% from 6 years ago. And while it only represents 6% of the total capital of the VC industry — this is a meaningful shift in structure.

    另一方面，在过去几年中大型基金变得更大，这大幅提高了风投行业的整合规模——目前在风投领域，66%的有限合伙人资金都集中在后期或完整周期风投公司手里，此类资金在2014年的规模可能达到170-200亿美元。

    为什么会这样？

    • 许多养老基金规模过大，无法进行小额投资，它们都愿意按0.5-1亿美元的规模向其他基金提供资金。如果它们不希望自己在一只基金中的份额超过10%，相应的基金规模就应该在5-10亿美元之间。

    • 基金中的基金（它们从大型养老基金、主权财富基金等基金那里融资，然后将这些资金分解成更小的单位）所销售的经常是“渠道”。它们所说的其实是自己可以通过关系来投资红杉资本（Sequoia）、基准资本（Benchmark）、格雷洛克（Greylock）、凯鹏华盈（Kleiner Perkins）和加速资本（Accel）等风投巨擘，而规模较大的基金往往无法实现直接投资。

    当然，找到过去5-7年中最佳“新兴经理人”的难度要大得多，合广投资（Union Square Ventures）、星火资本（Spark Capital）、首轮资本（First Round Capital）、真资本（True Ventures）、格雷克罗夫特（Greycroft）、晶圆集团（Foundry Group）和Thrive and Upfront Ventures等公司的表现都不错。难点在于如果没能进入前一两轮融资，你就再也无法投入资金，原因是它们也会出现“超额申购”现象。

    走在前列的基金中基金意识到，它们的差异化源泉更多地在于把资金投入新出现的市场领跑者，而不是老牌风投公司，原因是大多数有历史的基金中基金都有一定的老关系。

    最让人困惑的数据是那些资金规模在1-5亿美元之间的“传统风投公司”。自2008-2009年“大衰退”以来，这些风投公司一直处于萎缩状态，从获得资金的风投公司数量以及此类风投公司的总资金规模来说都是这样，这种情况似乎和成功的新兴基金的崛起形成了鲜明对比。截至2014年，传统风投公司的数量及其所获资金在短短六年时间里减少了一半，原因是资金转向了更早或更晚的投资阶段。

    At the other end of the spectrum large funds have gotten even larger in the past few years which has massively increased the amount of consolidation in our industry as 66% of LP money into venture is now concentrated in late-stage or full-cycle VCs, which is likely $17-20bn in 2014.

    Why is this?

    • Many pension funds are simply too large to write small checks and favor the ability to write $50-100 million checks to funds. If you don’t want to be more than 10% of a fund that implies fund sizes in the $500 million-$1 billion range.

    • Fund of funds (who take money from large pensions, sovereign wealth funds, etc. and break it into smaller sizes) often sell “access.” What they’re really saying is that they have the relationships to be able to invest in Sequoia, Benchmark, Greylock, Kleiner Perkins, Accel, etc. and the bigger funds often can’t get in directly.

    Of course it’s much harder to identify “emerging managers” who it turns out have been some of the best performers over the past 5-7 years such as Union Square Ventures, Spark Capital, First Round Capital, True Ventures, Greycroft, Foundry Group, Thrive and Upfront Ventures. The challenge is that if you don’t get into the first 1-2 funds you don’t get in at all because they, too, become “over subscribed.”

    The pioneering fund of funds realize that their source of differentiation is much more about getting into the newer market leaders than the established venture capitals since most historic fund-of-funds have some level of old-line access.

    The most puzzling bit of data was that “traditional VC” — funds in the $100 million-$500 million range — seemed to be shrinking since the Great Recession in both numbers of VCs getting funded and in terms of total dollars in this class of VC and this seemed to fly in the face of the rise of successful emerging funds. By 2014, traditional VC would have halved in just 6 years in both number of funds and dollars allocated to category as dollars are shifting earlier & later.