An excerpt from a YouTube talk by Jason M. Lemkin (recorded Apr 11, 2024) where he recounts an anecdote about an early LP meeting: institutional investors focused primarily on returns and asset-category buckets (e.g., IT vs. biotech) rather than strategy documentation. The clip illustrates a broader claim that asset category and headline returns drive allocation decisions.
What did you mean by that? Because I thought that was very interesting as. As a. As a gp. Yeah, I just remember I told you the story before we met. Like, when I first started Inventure, the first LP meeting I went to was a huge. A huge entity in New York, in Manhattan, on the 48th floor of Whatever. And we came with, like an 80 page spiral bound notebook of all the strategy and the thesis and all the best. And they just turned to the very end, the last page of the returns, studied it for about 90 seconds, looked up and said, so are you guys IT or biotech? Like, he only cared about the numbers and which are the two buckets of this asset category for a slot, right? And so then I'm like, okay, I get it. We're just a product.
