Mary Meeker is leaving Kleiner Perkins
recode.net
recode.net
I have really enjoyed her trends compilations. I don't always agree with the various weights she gives things but I love how widely she casts her net. I'm sure she will continue doing them in her new firm so I'm not very worried there.
What I find more interesting in this story is the sort of iceberg calving effect the rise of "incubators" and the lowering cost to first product, has had on the venture community. Where there were once just venture firms some of which were 'early' investors and some of which were 'late' investors, we now have three distinct sorts of entities;
Incubator/seed - a collection of seed investors who are providing both initial funding and initial integration services for startups. Clearly Y Combinator is the "big" one but there are Techstars, 500 Startups, and others that model this same sort of "more than money, we're your launch infrastructure" model.
High Risk money - this is the more traditional VC (but getting squeezed at the 'early' and 'late' ends) which dumps in a bunch of cash and rides it to the exit.
Late stage money - this is the 'time to go public' or 'buy out your competitors' kind of big cash influx that seems to be more and more operated by hedgefunds that are seeking a bit more alpha than they can get in the public markets.
All in all an amazingly complex set of players from what was, back in the dot com days, a pretty homogeneous bunch.
What's changed is really the pre-seed/seed with more granularity, as well as the huge C,D,E etc. rounds that now can be made by massive funds instead of going public.
But the core rounds are mostly similar.
The very earliest one I can find is 2002:
https://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/the-internet-a-per...
Here's the 2018 one:
https://www.slideshare.net/kleinerperkins/internet-trends-re...
>Meeker is leading an exodus of late-stage investors from Kleiner Perkins in its most dramatic shake-up since legendary investor John Doerr stepped back from his role more than two years ago.