In recent years the rise in prominence of smaller, typically seed stage focused venture funds has transformed the landscape of early stage investing. This rise is driven by many factors, most notably the dramatic decrease in the financial, human, and resource capital required to start and grow companies. At the same time, mobile innovation has…
Upon June’s Brexit decision, TTCP analyzed our UK holdings, comparing the returns and multiples of the country to our other holdings. We shared our findings last month here on the Top Tier blog. As we dug further into the data, we discovered some other interesting geographic trends. We looked at all realized exits in our…
Recently there has been a lot of discussion in the venture capital industry about valuations. Are they too high? Are venture returns still attractive? We’ve all seen the charts showing that pre-money valuations are on the rise year-over-year. We find it difficult to draw comparisons over time because a shift in the nomenclature of funding…
What is Brexit? On June 23rd, Britain voted to exit the European Union, creating the now popular term Brexit. This is akin to Texas voting to leave the United States. Few thought it possible that the Exit camp would win, and many were shocked when they received 52% of the votes. Those in the Remain…
There have been some recent posts and tweets from Fred Wilson, Bill Gurley and others about the first, second and third tier cities for start-ups. While we agree that Silicon Valley is clearly the first tier market, over the past several years we have purposefully invested in what we believe are some of the best…
This is a follow-up on the post we made earlier this week that discusses the difficulty in analyzing past performance of VC funds because of team changes. In that post we said, “[Evaluating] Performance is tricky, however, because you have to carefully focus on the … team that delivered those returns.” As a Limited Partner,…
We were just in the middle of (yet another) healthcare study internally when the news of AbbVie’s $10.2B offer for Stemcentrx came out. This post was already in the works and was going to talk about why we still put about 20% of our investment dollars into the healthcare space (the rest goes to technology…
Top Tier Capital Partners recently sent a venture market survey to a number of our General Partners seeking first-hand insights regarding both their investments and feelings regarding the overall market. The Respondents Of the 75 General Partners that responded, most invest in early stage technology companies with a healthy mix of healthcare mixed into a…
Since the New Year, the team at TTCP has received several questions regarding our view on the recent volatility in the public markets and how it might impact our portfolios. While we typically invest 65-75% of our funds of funds portfolios in early stage venture capital, we inevitably have exposure to the public markets through…
The team at Top Tier knows how stressful the holidays can be, especially hunting for that perfect gift. To ease your holiday season grief, we have handpicked a few of our favorite products from different retail categories including entertainment, fashion, creative, food, health, fashion and, of course, toys. Still haven’t found what you’re looking for?…