How Many Trillion-Dollar Companies Should There Be?

The success of each fund entirely rests on the top one to three companies in the fund. There’s often even a large gap between the returns from the No. 1 company and those from the runner-up. Fred Wilson, co-founder of Union Square Ventures, uses a heuristic of thirds: “one deal returns the fund, another 3 to 4 deals return it again, and the rest re

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His firm, TVI, had funded Microsoft, Compaq, and other notable technology companies, but it was not these that McMurtry wished to talk about. Rather, he wanted to talk about the companies that did not succeed. He recalled that in the mid-1970s, having been in the business a number of years, he had become depressed because “out of ten start-ups, we

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If you can’t afford to pay your best employees top of market, then let go of some of the less fabulous people in order to do so. That way, the talent will become even denser.