Seth,

Great post, and I definitely agree with your prediction. I just finished reading Gompers and Lerner's "The Money of Invention," and this the consolidation of the venture capital industry is one of the prediction they make back in 2001. One of the greatest assets a venture capital firm can bring to its investments is the ability to leverage the products and services of its existing investments in order to create synergies that can benefit its portfolio as a whole. This obviously is easier for the mega-funds to do. However, I also agree that the "fringe" funds will continue to exist, since their advantage comes from being able to utilize their specialized industry knowledge, which would be very difficult for an unfocused fund to acquire, in order to provide exceptional insight and guidance to its investments.

Hey Brad,

I'm writing my senior thesis on venture capital syndication. I would be interested in seeing how many of these investments TechStars was the sole seed investor and in which ones they were co-investors. For the deals that included other investors as well as the ones that received follow on VC funding I would be interested in seeing how many other investors were included in the deal. Would love to chat and ask you some questions for my thesis if you aren't too busy in the next couple weeks. Let me know.

-Eric