Did Tiger Global's aggressive growth-investing strategy help or harm the venture ecosystem?

Harry Stebbings · Feb 27, 2023 · hedged

Tiger and Coatue will perform to an averagely good level for their own capital base and LPs, who have different return expectations than traditional VC LPs

Their investors expect a different return profile, so average-good performance meets the mandate

Scope: 'I think they'll be okay'

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Harry Stebbings · Aug 25, 2025

Tiger's returns will be better than people give them credit for — not huge, but they won't lose money

They sit at the top of the pref stack in companies doing $50-60M ARR at $300-400M prices with three to five years of runway, and hold positions in winners like Scale and OpenAI

Scope: okay returns, not huge money

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Hussein Kanji · Jan 20, 2025 · hedged

Tiger in 2021 was selling a capital-deployment product rather than a returns product — buying the index at $200M commitment sizes — and it failed because they overpaid, though the appeal to LPs was rational

LPs with huge sums that must go into tech needed someone who could absorb a lot of money and play the whole market for them

40:37 Tiger sold capital deployment not returns the lp appeal was rational but they overpaid

Harry Stebbings · Jan 20, 2025

The flaw in the index-buying strategy is assuming outcome probabilities are independent of how much capital goes in, so that paying up merely trims a 5x to a 3x

Outcomes are not equiprobable regardless of price and capital deployed

41:10 Index buying wrongly assumes outcome probability is independent of price and capital deployed

Byron Deeter · Aug 25, 2025

Tiger's impact on the venture ecosystem was incredibly mixed — genuine positive disruption and big thinking alongside reckless overfunding and absent governance

They brought creativity and scale of ambition worth applauding, but also deal work and non-governance the industry still has to clean up

68:29 Mixed positive disruption and reckless overfunding without governance

Will Quist · Sep 12, 2022 · hedged

Tiger will retrench and deploy a smaller annual quantum of capital on the private side, but its core hypothesis was largely correct

Companies do become growth stage very quickly, at which point you can take the data, model it and build a portfolio around the standard deviation of outcomes; Tiger's error was deploying too much capital with too loose a filter, not the underlying thesis

39:25 Tiger hypothesis was correct just overdeployed so expect retrenchment not repudiation

Jason Lemkin · Aug 9, 2023 · hedged

Tiger's massive momentum investing strategy was admirable and worked while momentum lasted, but momentum investing stops working once the momentum stops; vehicles like SoftBank's will die and then reappear when multiples get insane again

These are fundamentally high-multiple vehicles, so their viability tracks the multiple cycle

61:20 Momentum investing strategies cycle with the multiple cycle and will reappear