21 November 2024, Bengaluru: The IndianVCs Venture Summit 2024 brought together the venture capital industry’s most influential voices to address pressing questions facing today’s fund managers. The three-day virtual conference drew over 250 attendees who collectively spent more than 800 hours engaging with industry leaders across 10 comprehensive sessions.
The summit featured insights from global venture capital leaders including Vinod Khosla (Managing Partner, Khosla Ventures), David Clark (CIO, VenCap), Graham Pingree (Partner, Cendana Capital), Winter Mead (Founder & CEO, Coolwater Capital), Karthik Reddy (Managing Partner, Blume Ventures), and Rahul Chowdhri (Managing Partner, Blume Ventures), among others.
On the crucial topic of fund manager evolution, Vinod Khosla shared his experience with the OpenAI investment, revealing it was the largest initial investment ($25 million) he had made in his 40-year career – particularly notable as it was in a nonprofit with no product or revenue plan. This investment was so unusual that it was the only time in his 40-year career that he had to write an apology letter to his LPs. For emerging managers, Khosla emphasized that the key to long-term success lies in team building. “The biggest thing you can do and the hardest thing is to build a team – and a very specific kind of team where every person loves to learn from every other person,” he shared.
Addressing the industry-wide debate on DPI timelines, David Clark, CIO of VenCap, provided clear guidance based on their analysis of 2,660 funds. “DPI in year 3 or year 5 has very little correlation to where the fund ultimately ends up,” Clark revealed, challenging the common pressure to show early distributions. Using examples like Swiggy, which took nearly a decade to mature, he emphasized that early selling of promising companies for the sake of DPI can significantly impact fund performance. “The worst thing you can do is to sell your crown jewels prematurely,” Clark advised, noting that managers won’t achieve top-decile performance by selling their best companies early.
On the critical challenge of attracting global capital, Graham Pingree of Cendana Capital revealed that their most compelling deal flow comes from their existing portfolio of GPs, offering emerging managers a clear pathway to institutional capital. “If you’ve co-invested with someone who has a deep institutional limited partner base, and that fund is willing to go to their LPs and say, ‘hey look, I have this great domestic partner in India that’s helping these companies that I’m co-investing with’ – that kind of endorsement goes a long way for LPs,” Pingree shared a tip on attracting global LPs.
The IndianVCs Venture Summit addressed some of the largest questions fund managers face today – from portfolio construction to DPI management to building LP relationships and creating lasting venture platforms.