Venture Math

Last year I wrote a few posts (here and here) that talked about how skewed venture returns were. The key take-away graphic from that post is below – outsized returns on venture investments are rare. Much rarer than most people realize. A key question my post didn’t consider was what the ideal venture portfolio might look like in the face of these data. Steve Crossan took a stab at modeling the answer to that question using the data from my Outcomes post. It’s an interesting read – you can see his full analysis here. Interestingly, we pondered this exact question at the very start of Foundry Group. Nassim Taleb’s book, The Black Swan had just come out and we decided to read the book and discuss its implications for the venture firm we were about to start in late 2006. I imagine many of you have read the book (if not, I’d highly recommend it) – the basic premise is that humans do a poor job of understanding the likelihood of unusual or improbable events.Black swans are rare but just because you’ve personally never seen one doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Compounding this error, humans are also poor at understanding the causes of these unlikely events after they take place (we misattribute their causes and as a result continue to make poor judgements about their likelihood of reoccurrence). …