A venture investor had one deal carrying his entire fund. His partner told him to take some money off the table before his wife killed him. He said no, and kept rolling every dollar of profit back into the company. Scott Voss, who has spent 27 years at HarbourVest, on why the best investors he has met refuse to de-risk their winners. "You gotta take some money off the table. Your wife is gonna kill you." "Look, Scott, this keeps us aligned. It keeps us hungry." Voss watched this play out with a friend who caught a power law outcome early and just kept re-upping through every new investment and continuation vehicle available, moving all his earned economics right back in. Most people would call that reckless. Voss calls it the reason his friend never lost the edge that made him great in the first place. He has seen too many investors take the big monetization event, relax, and quietly stop being dangerous. Getting rich is not the finish line. It is usually where the decline starts.

A venture fund put close to forty percent of its capital into a single company. Before most LPs would even let a GP finish that sentence. @aramverdi , Partner at @AccoladePrtnrs and former investor at Andreessen Horowitz, on why real conviction looks reckless from the outside. "We're totally fine with that level of concentration. We just back the fund." "We didn't push back. We're totally fine with it. We love GPs who have conviction." Diversification is sold as safety, but the math of venture punishes it. If you own five percent of a company that gets diluted down to two and a half by exit, you need ten separate billion dollar outcomes just to return half your fund. Almost nobody has ten of those in a portfolio. What you can have is one runner you actually believed in early, sized at real ownership, held all the way through. That is the entire game. Diversification protects you from being wrong. Concentration is how you get paid for being right.

AI’s next commodity isn’t chips — it’s compute itself. 💻 New episode with @bavaria_kush (22 year old a16z-backed @OrnnExchange CEO) on why GPUs will trade like oil, the coming futures market, and the real bottleneck everyone’s missing.