Venture capital's risky shift: Doriot's ideals lost to power law gambles.
insights4vc.substack •
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Promote with Leviathan NewsDoriot's $70K DEC stake becoming 50%+ of ARD's 25-year returns was the power law before anyone named it — he just wrapped it in paternalism. Crypto VC dropped that pretense: a16z crypto's $4.5B Fund IV and Paradigm's $2.5B 2021 vehicle can't return capital without a trillion-dollar outlier, and most of their best TVPI still traces to seed positions taken before AUM ballooned. Deploy $4M and one 5000x returns the fund; deploy $4B and you need multiple Coinbase-tier outcomes just to break 2x.
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