E68: How Theory Ventures Differentiates in a Crowded VC Market

"Turpentine VC" | Venture Capital and Investing

This week on Turpentine VC, we feature a compilation episode of our popular interviews with Tom Tunguz, General Partner at Theory Ventures who just announced a $450M second fund less than two years after launching. Over the course of the episode Tomasz explains their concentrated portfolio approach, and expands on their key theses in AI, decentralized infrastructure, and the future for data businesses (like Databricks and Snowflake).

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LINKS:

Tom’s Website: https://tomtunguz.com/

Theory Ventures: https://theory.ventures/

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FOLLOW:

@ttunguz

@Theoryvc

@eriktorenberg

@TurpentineVC

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HIGHLIGHTS FROM THE EPISODE:

• Theory Ventures has launched a $450 million second fund and focuses on making concentrated investments after extensive research in specific sectors.
• The venture capital industry has grown from $8 billion to $300 billion over the last 12 years but is expected to settle back to around $150-180 billion.
• Blockchain technology is viewed as a contrarian investment in 2024, but there's potential for practical enterprise applications beyond cryptocurrency.
• Databricks has seen massive growth, with its data warehousing revenue increasing from $100 million to $400 million in just one year.
• The modern data infrastructure stack includes companies like Fivetran for moving data and DBT for transforming data once it's in a database.
• The most valuable part of the data infrastructure business is compute workload processing, not data storage.
• Tom’s take on NVIDIA's future value