Chainfeeds Summary:
"The VC industry is in the process of shifting from a 'judgment-driven' to a 'deal-winning-driven' paradigm."
Article source:
https://www.techflowpost.com/zh-CN/article/30358
Article Author:
TechFlow TechFlow
Opinion:
Erik Torenberg: The venture capital industry is undergoing a profound paradigm shift. In the past, VCs were more like picking targets at a conveyor belt sushi restaurant: as long as their judgment was strong enough, they could find winners. But today, the ability to win deals has become just as important, if not more important, than picking winners. In an era where founders have more choices, companies remain private for longer, and competition for top projects is extremely fierce, VCs are no longer just providing capital, but providing the real interface to success. Institutions must provide comprehensive support across recruitment, market expansion, branding, public relations, government relations, and global networks to win in the competition. Therefore, VC is shifting from a fund-based logic to an institutional logic: not only pursuing maximum returns on a single fund, but also building a compoundable competitive advantage and a long-term moat. Scalable VC is not a corruption of the traditional model, but a response to the demands of the new era. The idea that "the number of winners is fixed" no longer holds true. In the past, there were only a dozen or so companies with annual revenues exceeding $100 million; now there are hundreds, and their size far surpasses that of the past. From billion-dollar unicorns to OpenAI and SpaceX, whose valuations are practically synonymous with trillions, the output of tech companies has expanded exponentially. Software is not only devouring the world, but also, driven by AI, entering infrastructure and the atomic world, making companies highly capital-intensive. Large AI labs are building data centers and controlling chip supply chains, while defense and automation companies are investing huge amounts of capital. Modern tech companies often need hundreds of millions of dollars in funding from the outset. In this environment, venture capital cannot meet market demands without scaling up. Scale expansion is a response to the expansion of opportunity sets, not blind expansion. The future venture capital ecosystem will have a "dumbbell structure": at one end are a few ultra-large-scale, platform-based institutions, and at the other end are highly specialized, network-intensive small boutique funds. The middle ground is the most dangerous—insufficient scale to support large-scale deal competition, and lacking sufficient differentiation advantages. Large-scale institutions provide founders with full-cycle support from early stages to IPO through platform capabilities and resource integration; boutique funds create value through deep expertise and unique networks. The two are not contradictory, but complementary. Just as software has transformed countless industries, venture capital itself is being disrupted. Denying the legitimacy of large-scale venture capital is like denying that the three-pointer changed basketball. The world has changed, new rules have been established, and only those institutions that can evolve alongside their founders will be the winners of the next era.
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