Same $2M fund, 5-year horizon. Spread it wide, or concentrate and double down. Each partner takes a roll, and the room's data reveals how the power law really behaves.
| Team | Side | Companies | Reserve | MOIC |
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No runs submitted yet.
The room submitted a handful of funds per side — enough to feel the power law, not enough to trust it. Below is the same two strategies run 5,000 times each. This is the real distribution your live runs were sampled from.
~Half of venture deals return less than the money invested; only ~4–5% return 10x+; roughly 0.4–1% return 50x+. Just ~1.1% of investments return an entire fund — and 90% of funds that returned 3x+ owned at least one of them.
If a 50x+ hit happens ~1% of the time, a 20-company portfolio often contains zero of them. Enough positions is how you reliably catch the outlier that carries the fund.
A 15-investment fund behaves like a real VC fund — wide dispersion, bottom quartile loses money. Push toward ~500 and returns compress to a public-equity-like band. Since ~two-thirds fail, you need ~60–210 first checks to end up with 20–70 survivors; ~100 is a practical floor.
Both shapes have produced top-quartile funds: concentrate (~15–30 investments) vs. diversify (75–100+). The right answer depends on fund size, stage, and your genuine edge in sourcing and selection.
Reserve strategy runs from "upfront ownership" (0–30% reserves) to "double down" (50–75%). Effective follow-on backs winners as they clear real de-risking walls — and staged deployment manages timing, the #1 driver of startup outcomes.