Sam Parr spent 18 years pulling his venture returns, which averaged 10-12% annually, and moving that money into private investments. He now calls it disastrous. He underestimated his own skill in public markets and chased the 20% returns he saw others make, missing the compounding power of what was already working.
This is where the biggest mistake I ever made was. Half of my life is trading public equities through, you know, observational investing, social, or conversational data. The other half of my life has been an entrepreneur, and I've been an early-stage venture investor for 20 years. I'm actually invested in 160 early-stage companies. My performance investing in early-stage companies is pretty much average. I want to say maybe 10, 11, 12%. Annualized returns. So I have pulled out almost all of my gains every single year for the past 18 years and have taken that money and invested it in the private market. And that has been really unfortunate because the opportunity cost of my capital is so high. But I never even believed in myself that much on the public side that I could continue to do that. So I was never like, oh, well, I'm just going to keep doing 7 20-some-odd percent average returns, that never really seemed feasible.
