Oren Zeev

At least 50% of venture funds either cannot raise or aren’t sure they can, Zeev says — less money is going to venture and a larger share of it to platforms. His barbell: be an Andreessen/Sequoia/Lightspeed-scale platform or a differentiated solo/boutique; the traditional five-six partner firm with nothing special is “worse off on both hands” — corporate to founders, but “you’re not Sequoia.”

Today’s growth expectations are BS: “the math doesn’t change — 2 to the power of 5 was 32 before AI and after AI.” He’d back a 2x-growing company with healthy economics over a 3x with unhealthy ones all day long, and warns growth-only optimization breeds circular deals — “no value was created… but a perceived value was created” — a gray area “before I get to fraud” that will implode for some.

Radical alignment as fund design: Zeev takes 30% carry but pays himself zero from management fees (he reinvests 100% into the fund), is the biggest LP in every one of his 11 funds at ~13-14%, and sees “not a shekel” before LPs get 100% of their money back — roughly 40% of the economics. The contrast: a $10B fund at 2% produces ~$2B in fees over 10 years, starting today, while carry arrives in 7-8 years — so many GPs optimize for raising the next fund, not returns.

The incumbents-die narrative is thought-leader bait: Navan is “100% convinced” to be a huge AI beneficiary with “zero chance” of disruption, and is one of Zeev’s most concentrated positions — support-heavy gross margins that were ~50% three years ago are “dramatically better already,” with almost all support eventually done by AI. The moat is operational complexity, distribution, integration, regulation, and data — “technology is 5% of it… who has the most data? The incumbents.” With SaaS multiples lower than they’ve been in the past 10-12 years because the market can’t yet discern winners from victims, mispricing cuts both ways.

Paper marks are a motivation test, not a methodology question: Sequoia has zero incentive to inflate; an insecure mid-tier fund “will find any excuse to keep prices up,” and accountants “always challenge the wrong things.” Today’s DPI obsession is a cycle that will turn — possibly via a “tsunami of liquidity” in 2026-27 from unprecedented-size IPOs in the works: SpaceX, Stripe, Databricks.

He doesn’t sell secondaries — “everything that I can sell, I don’t want to sell” — but concedes the math can work: when Harry defended taking 3x now over 4.5x in 2-3 years, Zeev’s second-grade-math verdict was that 1.5x over three years with execution and IPO risk means “you should have sold.” Managers may sell to manufacture DPI for fundraising.

On AI labor displacement he sides with “this feels a bit different” over it-always-takes-longer wisdom — “I’m excited because I’m going to make a lot of money, but I’m also nervous.” AI is “the biggest change ever in the history of humanity,” and it’s “the best time in history to be an investor” — while political unrest from the disenfranchised is “very, very risky to humanity.”

🔗 Original source & video: Oren Zeev: 50% of Funds Will Go Out of Business & Why GPs Shouldn’t Tell LPs Their Strategy