“You’re not quite traditional early stage venture, are you?”

“You’re not really traditional early stage venture, are you?”

I get asked this a lot by LPs meeting us for the first time. The honest answer is: we don't fit neatly into the bucket they already have for "early stage venture manager," and that's by design.

Most early stage venture is built to take maximum risk (and the returns show it) to find the rare needle in a haystack: chase the steepest possible growth curves, accept that a third (often way more) of the portfolio will go to zero, and let two or three outliers carry the fund. That's a good strategy for some firms, and some fraction of a diversified LP portfolio. It's just not ours

We've built Asymmetric to look more like old school growth capital. We write concentrated first institutional checks of $5-10M for high-teens to 20% ownership and take board seats in real businesses with recurring revenue and tangible, huge customer ROI. Two to four new platforms a year, not a deal a week. 

The result is a return profile most LPs tell us they haven't seen paired together before. In five and a half years across 29 companies in Fund I, we've lost money on three. At the same time, we've also had multiple genuine venture-scale outliers, businesses that could return the fund several times over on their own. Fund I is top decile or quartile in every metric, and Fund II is tracking better at the 25 month mark. We're not eliminating risk. We're just disciplined about where we take it: in our forecast of the sustainable quality of the business.

We also hunt for practical, real-world applications of AI where most other funds don't bother: large-scale marketplaces for HVAC parts distribution, sleep apnea clinics, hot water heaters (announcing soon!), pool route consolidation. Unglamorous, until you see how much room there is for today’s cutting edge technologies to make historically ordinary businesses exceptional, with none of the capital competition chasing the next foundation model wrapper. Game selection, more than any individual pick, is the core of the strategy.

The other thing I'd point to is consistency. We raise roughly every three to three and a half years, size funds to match our team rather than the market's appetite, and expect to keep doing the same thing at a slightly larger scale for a long time. We're not trying to be the biggest fund in our category. We're trying to be a fund that's still delivering the same risk-adjusted returns a decade from now.

None of this makes us better than a traditional early stage fund. It makes us different, and that difference tends to resonate with a specific kind of LP: family offices, endowments and institutions that already have plenty of high-variance, swing-for-the-fences venture exposure and are looking for something that behaves more like an all-weather, absolute-return allocation, without giving up the venture upside entirely. If your existing portfolio is full of funds trying to find the next $100 billion outcome, we're probably a good complement, not a replacement.

We know exactly who we are at this point.