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Comment by pbreit | Hacker News Reader

Surely they could have sourced such an investment domestically?

I'm not sure you could easily find one LP willing to put up $400 million for a fund that, according to the article, will potentially make more than 1,000 investments. AngelList, because of its platform, obviously has a way to deploy this capital more efficiently than a typical firm, but these types of small early-stage investments are still fraught with challenges and I think sophisticated domestic LPs who have experience in venture capital would be very skeptical.

As the WSJ article implies, CSC may have certain motivations that a domestic LP wouldn't, such as a desire to get capital deployed outside of China. And fast.

Personally, this looks like dumb money hoping AngelList can turn it into smart money. It could very well distort market for early-stage startup investments, but it isn't likely to change the way these investments tend to behave in terms of returns.

There is a big trend in Chinese PE throwing money into the US market with expected returns that much lower than what the western market would expect, and therefore western PE is continually being outbid by the Chinese. So, even if Chinese get lower returns for their capital in the US than typical PE's, those returns are still higher what they would get domestically in China.

Yes, and the Chinese have logical reasons for accepting lower returns because they're exposed to risk in China that domestic PE firms aren't exposed to. This said, it should be noted that when the music stops, these firms aren't guaranteed a return at all. Many of them are going to lose. It's just a question of how much.

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