How I Invest with David Weisburd E229: Inside Industry Ventures: The $8 Billion Firm Backing 650 Venture Funds
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Oct 22, 2025 Jonathan Roosevelt, Managing Director at Industry Ventures, shares insights on navigating the $8B venture landscape. He discusses the evolution of Industry Ventures into co-investing and the significance of seed relationships in sourcing deals. The conversation explores the distinction between evaluating early-stage vs. mid-stage investments, emphasizing the power of customer diligence over traditional metrics. Jonathan also highlights the value of asymmetric information and inflection points in decision-making and advises emerging managers to offer unique, unscalable value to compete.
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An $8B Balanced Venture Platform
- Industry Ventures runs a balanced platform with about $8B AUM split between secondaries and co-invests. It combines secondaries, directs, fund-of-funds, and tech buyout strategies into one repeatable model.
How Co-Invests Started At Industry
- Industry Ventures expanded into co-invests after early seed fund relationships led to follow-ons in companies like Stripe and Uber. That early luck and LP relationships prompted a dedicated co-investment fund around 2010.
Different Mindset For Directs Versus Secondaries
- Direct investing at Industry requires a different cultural lens than secondaries because it accepts earlier-stage risk. The firm pairs humility and cross-team listening to bridge later-stage secondary instincts with mid-stage direct diligence.
