Evolving Perspectives on Venture Capital Fund Sizes and Exit Outcomes

If you tuned in hoping for crisp conclusions on fund performance, you may have left empty-handed.

But if what you came for was a razor-sharp, high-stakes debate on the mechanics of venture economics—then this was your moment. Fourteen minutes of fierce dialogue at the EUVC Summit, and not a second wasted.

Here’s how it went:

“If you're drawing any conclusions from those data sets... be my friend. But we won't do that.

”Why? Because the data is still messy. Still underpowered. And when you're modeling venture returns—especially for emerging managers—it’s more art than science.

But oh, did we try.

This fast-paced exchange brought clarity (and fire) to a few of venture’s most misunderstood dynamics:

• Why the $20B outcome is the new benchmark for greatness
• How fund size maps to percentile outcomes
• The hard math behind Seed-to-Series A attrition
• Why early-stage investing remains low-probability but high-upside
• And the eternal debate: do emerging managers truly outperform, or just dominate a distorted sample?

"If you're really needing data to prove that model—it does not exist.”

We’ll get back to that.