VC Investing for Individuals - Financial Benefits (Part 2 of 4)
This is the second post in a four-part series to help individuals understand the ins and outs of investing in early-stage VC funds.
In the previous post in this series, VC Investing for Individuals - Fund Structure, I wrote about the rise of the solo GP raising micro-VC funds (funds < $50M in AUM) and how that trend has opened the asset class to more accredited individual investors. I outlined how VC funds are structured as limited partnerships and defined the terms LP and GP. I also wrote about the lifespan, investment period and capital call period - terms that define how VC funds are raised and deployed over a 10-year time frame.
In this post, I'll begin to discuss why individuals might consider adding an investment in a VC fund to their taxable portfolio or retirement account.
The main benefits of investing in an early-stage VC fund are:
This post will focus on the potential for high returns and portfolio diversification. VC funds, especially early-stage funds that invest in seed-stage startups, exhibit some special characteristics that make them unique from a potential return and portfolio diversification perspective.
The potential for high returns
The first characteristic of early-stage VC funds is that they offer returns that exhibit high positive asymmetry. Positive asymmetry simply means that the potential upside is greater than the potential downside. Investing in seed-stage startups that have extremely high potential, by nature lends the investment to exhibit high positive asymmetry.
A quick example: Think about the return potential in terms of how far an investment has to run to the upside. In most other asset classes, even high-flying publicly-traded stocks, the likelihood of the asset 40x-ing or more is very low. It's quite possible that a stock (or a rental property) can double or triple over a 10-year time frame, but highly unlikely that it will ever 40x. However, if a startup grows from seed to IPO, 40x-ing is indeed in the cards and very common. It's simply a function of potential.
Small companies (startups) tackling large market opportunities have very high potential.
Portfolio diversification
An important point - and maybe not immediately obvious if an investor is evaluating an investment into a VC fund in a vacuum - is that an investment in a VC fund is not your only investment as an individual investor. If you're accredited by net worth, you by definition have investable assets of $1M or more between your taxable investments and retirement accounts. An investment in a VC fund represents a small slice of your overall investment portfolio. And this small slice can offer big benefits to your overall portfolio. VC funds can accept investments from retirement accounts, as well as taxable dollars.
In the image above, I compare Portfolio 1: a 50% public stock | 50% bond portfolio, with Portfolio 2: a 50% public stock | 10% VC fund | 40% bond portfolio. We're assuming the following historical average annual returns for the three component assets:
If you begin the 10-year period with $1M in investable assets in Portfolio 1, a 50|50 balanced portfolio, you should expect the value of that portfolio to be about $1.8M after 10 years. Not a bad outcome.
However, if you add an investment in a VC fund as described in Portfolio 2, you drastically increase the upside potential of your portfolio, while capping your downside risk.
The worst you could possibly do (assuming the stocks and bonds perform as expected) by adding a VC fund, if the VC fund catastrophically goes to zero, is $1.7M (maybe slightly lower for all the math majors out there). This is 5% lower than Portfolio 1, the 50|50 portfolio, and most would agree that it's barely noticeable. This outcome is also highly unlikely since a VC fund itself invests in a diversified group of 25-30+ startups.
The expected return of Portfolio 2, the balanced portfolio with a VC fund tilt, is $2.4M. Looked at another way, the expected return of Portfolio 2 is 33% higher than Portfolio 1. And that's just the expected return. Early-stage VC funds have been known to deliver 10x returns or more over their lifetimes because the upside potential is extremely high (positive asymmetry).
Another interesting quality of an early-stage VC fund from a portfolio diversification perspective is that early-stage VC funds are typically not very correlated to the broad stock, bond and real estate markets. This lack of correlation can help smooth out the bumps in your investment portfolio over time.
Other benefits of early-stage VC funds
The benefit that I'll discuss in the next post in this series is tax-advantaged returns. US-focused early-stage VC funds have another very special quality that is relatively unknown and little-understood among individual investors. This special characteristic is that most, if not all, investments in a US-focused early-stage VC fund will be considered qualified small business stock (QSBS) for tax purposes. And returns could be tax-free at the federal and state levels.
The final post in this series will be around professional development opportunities that micro-VCs are well-positioned to offer to their Limited Partners.
Legal disclaimer: This is in no way an invitation or solicitation to invest in Outbound Capital's VC funds.