Sebastian Mallaby: belief

Transcript context

…In that underlying mental model, the excess returns can stay more or less forever. More capital coming in won’t bid down the returns much? I think that’s right. The returns have been pretty good, at least for the better venture capital funds. Here, we may want to come back to that caveat. Going back to the beginning of the story in the ’60s with Arthur Rock, the pioneer of venture capital, right through to today, you do see good returns. Sequoia, which I regard as the top venture capital partnership in Silicon Valley, has generated returns of about 12 times investors’ money this century. That’s 12x. That’s 1200 percent — pretty good. Why isn’t that skill replicable if the returns to replicating it are so high?…

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