Last Money In

VC SPV Trends Data → Q3, 2024 As we enter the final quarter of 2024, we've compiled a comprehensive analysis of the SPV ecosystem trends observed over the past three months via our newsletter Last Money In. This report combines our firsthand insights as active syndicate leads managing deals and collaborating closely with LPs, along with quantitative data generously provided by our partners at Sydecar, the best-in-class SPV and fund administration platform for venture capitalists. In this post we’ve split this into 2 sections: 1) Quarterly insights we’re seeing in the SPV ecosystem (Zachary Ginsburg and I have run over 180 SPVs in the trailing 12 months) ?? 2) A deep dive into SPV management fees based on 833 SPVs run on Sydecar’s platform in the trailing 12 months Some of the topics in this post include: - Breakdown of management fees on 833 SPVs run via Sydecar - More willingness to pay for management fees - Slower for LPs to commit to deals - LPs are increasingly picky at Seed, but the top deals still raise $$$ - Many LPs write the minimum check acceptable in syndicate - and much more!! Link to full post in comments. -- Powered by Sydecar, Last Money In is the most actionable Venture Capital newsletter with 50k+ subscribers. Written by Zachary Ginsburg and Alex Pattis, the global syndicate leaders with 800+ VC SPVs closed.

Why Your VC Portfolio May Seem to Be Underperforming (And Why That's Normal) If you’re new to the VC asset class, you might be feeling discouraged by the apparent lack of returns in your portfolio. For most firms this is a normal part of the VC investment cycle, known as the J-curve The J-curve shows typical VC investment returns over time: Initial dip: Early-stage investments often show negative returns due to: - Upfront costs and fees - Startups failing fast (60% fail between pre-seed and Series A) Upward trajectory: After several years, successful investments start to generate positive returns through: - Maturation and success of portfolio companies - Exits (acquisitions or IPOs) - Exponential growth of successful startups The Reality of VC Returns - it often takes 5 years or more to materialize. Take Figma: the Seed round in 2013 at $0.09 per share; 5 years later in 2018, it was only marked up 3.7x on a price per share (pps) basis. However 2 years after that in 2020, it achieved a 51x pps markup against the Seed and 1 year after that in 2021, it achieved a 237x pps markup against the Seed; meaning ~98% of the returns for Seed investors in Figma took place 5 years post entry investment. And this pattern is normal for many outlier winners. This is all to say the outlier winners can take 5+ years to significantly impact your TVPI/IRR, etc. so if your VC portfolio isn’t performing early it isn’t necessarily cause for concern. So what should you take away from this:? - Patience is crucial: Expect to feel potentially discouraged for the first few years. - Portfolio construction matters: Aim for at an absolute minimum 25-30 investments at pre-seed / seed (the data suggest much more as missing the outlier is extremely costly) as you need a big winner for the j curve to truly take hold - Access: Ensure you're getting into promising deals; shots on goal help but you need the access If you’d like to read Last Money In’s full deep dive into this topic, we’re including it in the comments for full reading. Powered by Sydecar, Last Money In is the most actionable venture capital newsletter with over 50,000 subscribers. Written by Zachary Ginsburg and Alex Pattis, the global syndicate leaders with 800+ VC SPVs closed.

?? ?? 50,000 subscriber milestone for Last Money In This is cool cause we kinda have no idea what we are doing when it comes to operating a newsletter… (using beehiiv does help tremendously though) But! We (Zachary and I) believe we can provide the most transparent and thoughtful content when it comes to Special Purpose Vehicles in Venture Capital. Happy to report that we’re 15 months in and we have not missed a weekly deep dive on Syndicates. We also write all our content ourselves (no ghostwriters). A combined 800+ (probably 900 now) SPVs run across us and I’m confident we will never run out of topics to write about. -- Powered by Sydecar, Last Money In is the most actionable Venture Capital newsletter with 50k subscribers. Written by Zachary Ginsburg and Alex Pattis, the global syndicate leaders with 800+ VC SPVs closed.

What size checks do LPs write into Venture Capital SPVs? For Riverside Ventures, see below: ??10k+ average deal commitment = 314 LPs ??20k+ average deal commitment = 131 LPs ??30k+ average deal commitment = 53 LPs ??40k+ average deal commitment = 46 LPs ??50k+ average deal commitment = 40 LPs ??100k+ average deal commitment = 15 LPs My Takeaway... I think many might be surprised how small a ton of LP checks are. Many likely compare this to venture funds whereas syndicates are just going to have smaller checks from LPs who are almost all investing individually, and typically smaller amounts. When we say you can angel invest with as little as $1k, we are not kidding, it’s really true. As you can see above (from the many LPs not including in the $10K or higher average check size), many do! Considering we have had 2,940 LPs invest with us and only 314 LPs average above $10k per investment, then we have TONS of LPs investing in the $1k to $10k range, which is where most LP commitments land per deal. Again, this likely sounds like small dollars but this category is core to our syndicate and core to our focus with Last Money In and Deal Sheet to democratize the asset class. While I feel this seems like a small check to many outside the syndicate ecosystem, I think it is a good thing if this is because LPs are building larger portfolios to spread out their capital commitments across 10-20-50+ deals over the years. It’s also safe to say that many of these LPs have similar commitments with other syndicates, so it’s not that their entire portfolio is composed of our deals and rather 3-5-10-20+ different syndicates. This is the right way to tackle early-stage investing as an angel/syndicate LP in my opinion. Full post link in comments. -- Powered by Sydecar, Last Money In is the most actionable Venture Capital newsletter with 50k subscribers. Written by Zachary Ginsburg and Alex Pattis, the global syndicate leaders with 800+ VC SPVs closed.

?? How Last Money In Grew Their Newsletter to $700k In 14 Months Had a great time chatting w/ the king of newsletter growth, Matt McGarry. Sharing some of his newsletter feature of us below w/links to the full write up and podcast in comments. ******* ? In just 14 months, Alex Pattis & Zachary Ginsburg grew their newsletter Last Money In to over 41,000 subscribers and ~$200k/year in ad revenue. He also runs a paid newsletter called Deal Sheet that he started in Feb 2024. Deal Sheet has a $4k annual subscription fee, approximately 165 subscribers, and is now over $500K ARR, 7 months after launch. That’s a $700k business built on the back of newsletters. Pre-existing credibility... Prior to starting their media company, Alex and his co-founder Zach Ginsburg led more than 800 SPVs and deployed over $200 million in deals. They spent years building their network in the SPV space and establishing authority and credibility. Picked a niche... Alex and Zach realized there was a gap in the market. While there were tons of VC newsletters, there wasn’t anything covering special purpose vehicles. So they built it. If you’re personally struggling to find a niche for your newsletter, I wrote about it here but below is a quick recap: 1) What unique experiences and skills do you have? 2) What are your passions and interests? 3) How lucrative is this niche/topic? 4) How exactly can you monetize? The next step is to select a niche that fits this criteria: 1) You have genuine interest in it (so you can consistently write about it) 2) You have experience in (so you can create insightful content) 3) Has lucrative monetization opportunities (so you can build a successful business) Building an owned audience... Alex initially wanted to start a podcast about SPV investing, but?Sam Parr?advised them not to. Instead, he recommended starting with a newsletter because it's shorter and easier to capture someone's attention, own the audience, and collect data. With an owned audience you can collect and store valuable audience data like engagement, location, interest, purchase behavior, and more. Plus, if your newsletter is successful, you can always turn it into a podcast. Have a clear audience... Since their first post 14 months ago, Last Money In has been serving two audiences: 1) Individual accredited investors who have invested in syndicates and deals with Alex and Zach 2) People looking to start a syndicate of their own and want to learn how to do it Consistency... Alex and Zach publish Last Money In every Wednesday. Every week they switch who writes the newsletter and have a brainstorming session to come up with topics to write about.?They also keep a spreadsheet with a backlog of ideas that they continuously add to. ******** Link to full Newsletter Operator Post & Podcast in comments.

Super cool to be featured on the beehiiv blog on our path to a $500k ARR Newsletter! "Last Money In has already secured six figure sponsorship deals, while their paid newsletter, Deal Sheet, has reached $500,000 in annual recurring revenue (ARR) in just under seven months! Thanks to Alex and Zachary—both noticed a need, and they carved out a unique?niche?with their newsletters.? In this case study, we’ll learn more about the genesis of Last Money In and Deal Sheet newsletters, building a community with a subscription model, and the creators behind the newsletters." In the beehiiv blog you can read up on: - The Inception of Last Money In Media & Deal Sheet Newsletters - The First 1,000 Subscribers Odyssey - Next Stop: 70,000 to 80,000 Subscribers - Joining the Ranks of Successful Creators on beehiiv - Buzzing on Profits With Monetization - Why Trust Me - Building A Newsletter Foundation For Novices - Syndicating Success, One Newsletter at a Time - And more! https://lnkd.in/eYBhybRG

Get Your Deal Featured: Sydecar x Deal Sheet collab! This is for anyone syndicating a private market SPV! Here’s how it works: 1) Submit your actively investable deal for a chance to be featured in an upcoming Deal Sheet newsletter, a platform that delivers top startup investment opportunities directly to accredited investors seeking their next big opportunity. 2) Submissions will be personally reviewed by myself and Zachary Ginsburg, creators of Deal Sheet. 3) The most compelling investment opportunity will be selected and featured in an upcoming Deal Sheet newsletter, giving you direct access to a network of accredited investors w/high interest in startups. Submit your deal here → https://lnkd.in/eS-SYJtr

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We’ve canceled over 170 SPVs over the last five years. It’s worth noting that we never went to market for 90%+ of these canceled SPVs, but nonetheless the amount of deals we started and/or built partial/full materials on that we never went to market for surprised even me. But for the 10 to 20 SPVs that we did bring to market and ended up canceling, why did that happen? Interestingly, there is no singular source - sometimes it’s bad behavior from LPs (e.g. leaking information), other times it’s the company blocking the transaction or withdrawing allocation, sometimes it’s due to the GP not being able to raise enough capital or the round falling through, among other reasons. In this weeks Last Money In Media article, we’re deep diving on this topic, specifically covering:? - The 8 main reasons Syndicate GP’s cancel their SPVs? - Why new market conditions and fund admin changes have led to a rise in the number of canceled SPVs - The rise of phantom allocations in the SPV ecosystem? - Anecdotal stories on the worst instances that led to an SPV getting canceled? - And much more If you’re interested in reading this article, we’re including a link in the comments for full reading (completely free). Powered by Sydecar and Forge, Last Money In Media is the most actionable venture capital newsletter. Written by Zachary Ginsburg and Alex Pattis, the global syndicate leaders with 800+ SPVs closed.

Should you scout for a VC Fund or a VC Syndicate? As someone who scouts for VCs and who has scouts source deals for Calm Ventures, my unbiased take is that scouts will likely see more carry and far faster distributions scouting for syndicates versus funds. As a scout, you should still take advantage of scouting for select funds, but the bar for them to take on a deal will be 10x+ higher - and not necessarily due to deal quality but due to fund constraints (stage, criteria, ownership requirements, etc.). Additionally funds usually offer a fraction of the carry percentage that syndicates do for scouts and have other terms that can limit or eliminate your upside in the scenario the fund doesn’t do well even if the deal you sourced performs. In this weeks Last Money In Media article, Alex Pattis and I are going to explore this, specifically uncovering: - The Power of Deal-by-Deal Carry for Syndicate Scouts: ?? We dive deep into the mechanics of deal-specific carry and its profound implications for scouts. Learn why this model allows scouts to potentially see faster, more frequent, and ultimately larger returns – even in a portfolio with mixed performance. - High-Volume Syndicates > Selective Investing Fund: ?? We explore how syndicate leads, unencumbered by traditional fund constraints, can invest in a higher volume and broader range of companies, ultimately leading to a much higher % of your deals getting taken on and as such more carry in more deals to the VC scouts. - The Syndicate-Scout Symbiosis: ?? We reveal why syndicate leads are not just open to working with scouts – they're actively seeking them out. Understand the strategic imperatives driving this trend and how it's reshaping the venture capital ecosystem. Notably many VCs seek scouts as well - but with many caveats that make these programs unmotivating.? - Junior VC's Secret Weapon: ?? For early-career VCs, we unveil how scouting for syndicates can be a way to get direct ownership stakes in companies your already vetting. - When Scouting for a VC Fund should be Prioritized Over a SPV: ??there are some economical and also non-economical reasons you should scout for a fund over a syndicate including improving your job prospects, which we get into. We dive into this and much more in this week's article. We’re including a link to the article (completely free) in the comments. Powered by Sydecar and Forge, Last Money In Media is the most actionable venture capital newsletter. Written by Zachary Ginsburg and Alex Pattis, the global syndicate leaders with 800+ SPVs closed.