Is the traditional ten-year venture fund life long enough for today's company-building timelines?

Daniel Ek · Mar 8, 2021

Prima Materia's core difference from venture capital is having no timeline — targeting impact in twenty or thirty years rather than five or ten

Removing funding-cycle pressure means questions like 'is this viable in two or three years for my next round or MVP' are discarded in favour of whether the right problem is being solved

Scope: structured as a holding company, not a fund

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Davis Smith · Dec 15, 2023 · hedged

His fundraise failed largely because he was too ambitious in trying to restructure governance to shift power from investors to the company's foundation, and because too few investors will commit to a ten-year horizon

Protecting the brand's purpose and mission required removing investor power over decisions, but almost no investors will stick with something for ten years, and the market timing was very hard

Scope: offered as a combination of factors; he says 'I don't know'; also cites hard public markets

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Davis Smith · Dec 15, 2023

The venture market is missing fund structures with ten- to fifteen-year or permanent capital commitments that founders like him need

He wanted permanent capital and couldn't find it despite the business growing 50% in the twelve months since, which would have made it a great investment; almost all capital is short-term minded

Scope: based only on his own experience in the last twelve months

29:16 20VC: Cotopaxi: From Selling $6M of Pool Tables to Scaling $150M in Revenues and Challenging Patagonia, Fundraising Lessons from 100+ Rejections & What Founders Do Not Understand About VC with Davis Smith, Founder @ Cotopaxi

Steve Jurvetson · Aug 3, 2020

Fund structures do need to change for frontier, society-scale investing — a fifteen-year fund is more appropriate than the standard ten.

He has sat on successful companies' boards for fifteen to twenty years, and every fund he's been involved with ran to fifteen to seventeen years anyway; none were done at ten.

Scope: specific to deep-tech/frontier investing

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Taavet Hinrikus · Apr 28, 2025

A ten-year fund life is too short for the companies being backed today — deep tech takes ten to twelve years, and fifteen if markets turn bad — and the industry needs to recognize this.

Wise itself took roughly a ten-year journey from 2010 to its 2021 listing, though the last three years were effectively liquid; deep tech runs longer still.

Scope: deep tech specifically

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Cem Sertoglu · Nov 20, 2024

A ten-year fund life is too short for seed and early-stage funds, though the deadline is also healthy pressure on GPs to think about liquidity

He knows of no early-stage VC fund that was liquid by year ten, yet the year-ten mark usefully forces GPs to plan for liquidity even when everyone tacitly expects an extension

48:43 Ten year fund life is too short for seed and early stage funds but provides useful liquidity discipline

Zachary Bookman · Dec 6, 2024

Venture-scale companies take fifteen to twenty years to mature, not the five to ten people assume, which means venture funds take fifteen to twenty years to return capital to LPs

As an LP he is still waiting on distributions from legitimate funds, and the underlying companies simply take that long

0:00 Venture scale companies take fifteen to twenty years so funds need that long to return capital