Origins hosts Nick Chirls, GP at Asylum Ventures and Beezer Clarkson,  LP at Sapphire Partners and co-founder of OpenLP, unpack their conversation with Theory Ventures’ Tomasz Tunguz,  discussing  how strategies that once set firms apart – like pre-seed or founder-centric  investing  – become industry standards over time. They dive deep on counter-positioning, adaptability, and the power of differentiation in today’s venture world. 

CHAPTERS:

(0:00) Welcome to Origins

(1:14) Is Tomasz an n=1?

(5:51) How Do Firms Stay Relevant?

(9:12) Do Founders Like Counter-Positioning?

(11:50) Who Is An Emerging Manager/Nick’s Next Career

Learn more about Sapphire Partners: sapphireventures.com/sapphire-partners

Learn more about OpenLP: openlp.vc

Learn more about Asylum Ventures: asylum.vc

Learn more about Theory Ventures: theory.ventures

Subscribe to the OpenLP newsletter for a monthly roundup of the latest venture insights, including the newest Origins episodes, delivered straight to your inbox.

Tomasz Tunguz, Founder of Theory Ventures, is widely recognized for his analytical approach to venture investing. Now, he’s building Theory with a philosophy rooted in research and data-driven decision-making.  Tomasz sits down with Nick Chirls, General Partner at Asylum Ventures and Beezer Clarkson,  LP at Sapphire Partners and co-founder of OpenLP, to discuss spinouts and succession in established firms and the value of running high-risk, high-reward experiments at  specialist firms like Theory. Tomasz also shares his belief that investors will need to  adapt to a future where asking the right questions of LLMs will be critical for success.

CHAPTERS:

(0:00) Welcome to Origins

(4:05) Why Are So Many People Leaving Top Firms?

(12:15) Getting the Probabilities On Your Side

(16:01) Building Highly Concentrated Portfolios

(17:33) Lessons Learned in Fund One

(21:37) Tomasz’s Brand v. Theory’s Brand

(27:15) Using Tech at the Core of Theory

(34:31) Asking the Right Questions in AI

(36:56) Predictions for 2026

Learn more about Sapphire Partners: sapphireventures.com/sapphire-partners

Learn more about OpenLP: openlp.vc

Learn more about Asylum Ventures: asylum.vc

Learn more about Top Tier Capital Partners: ttcp.com

Subscribe to the OpenLP newsletter for a monthly roundup of the latest venture insights, including the newest Origins episodes, delivered straight to your inbox.

Origins host Beezer Clarkson sits down with her colleague Nate Leung, fellow LP and Partner at Sapphire Partners, to riff on  her recent conversation with Nina Achadjian, Partner at Index Ventures. Together, Beezer and Nate walk through the steps Index took to become a franchise - the decisions they made and the mistakes they avoided, plus the firm’s ability to pick excellent companies early. They discuss the edge GPs gain by investing with a broader purpose, as well as the LP POV on the need for distributions and consolidation in 2025.

Learn more about Sapphire Partners: sapphireventures.com/sapphire-partners

Learn more about OpenLP: openlp.vc

Learn more about Asylum Ventures: asylum.vc

Learn more about Index Ventures: indexventures.com

Subscribe to the OpenLP newsletter for a monthly roundup of the latest venture insights, including the newest Origins episodes, delivered straight to your inbox.

CHAPTERS:

(0:00) Welcome to Origins2:04-Keeping the Main Thing the Main Thing to Build a Franchise3:43-Liquidity and IPOs

(4:45) 2025 - The Year of Reckoning

(7:13) Let There Be More Distributions9:34-Finding the Great Companies Early

Nina Achadjian is a Partner at Index Ventures, where she invests across seed, venture, and growth stages in AI, enterprise software, and vertical SaaS. She sits down with Beezer Clarkson, LP at Sapphire Partners, and the two discuss Nina’s predictions for M&A in 2025, the importance of product market fit and what Nina looks for in a new hire. Plus, the two dig into Index’s recent IPO with ServiceTitan, and how they managed a high-profile exit in the difficult IPO market of 2024.

Learn more about Sapphire Partners: sapphireventures.com/sapphire-partners

Learn more about OpenLP: openlp.vc

Learn more about Asylum Ventures: asylum.vc

Learn more about Top Tier Capital Partners: ttcp.com

Subscribe to the OpenLP newsletter for a monthly roundup of the latest venture insights, including the newest Origins episodes, delivered straight to your inbox.

CHAPTERS:

(0:00) Welcome to Origins

(1:49) The Trading Floors of London and New York4:54-The ServiceTitan IPO

(15:22) The Exit Window for SaaS Companies in 2025

(17:45) Predictions & AI

(25:10) More M&A vs. IPO

(30:34) Investment Lessons Learned at Index

(34:59) Hiring People Who Become Great Investors

(39:03) Hive & the Armenian Tech Ecosystem

Origins host Beezer Clarkson sits down with her colleague Laura Thompson, fellow LP and Partner at Sapphire Partners, to riff on her recent conversation with Thomas Kristensen, Partner at LGT Capital Partners. Together they discuss 2025’s sluggish exit market, and whether or not that’s a sign that venture is broken. They also discuss the importance of reinventing yourself to stay current with the market - even though LPs don’t love big changes - and if emerging managers can use founder product connectivity to their advantage. 

Learn more about Sapphire Partners: sapphireventures.com/sapphire-partners

Learn more about OpenLP: openlp.vc

Learn more about Asylum Ventures: asylum.vc

Learn more about Top Tier Capital Partners: ttcp.com

Learn more about LGT Capital Partners: lgtcp.com

Subscribe to the OpenLP newsletter for a monthly roundup of the latest venture insights, including the newest Origins episodes, delivered straight to your inbox.

CHAPTERS:

(0:00) Welcome to Origins

(1:20) Aren’t We Supposed to Be Investing In Companies That Want to Go Public?

(4:33) Difficulties of Maintaining a Franchise

(6:24) ”There’s Gonna Be Some Really Difficult Vintages”

(7:22) Being Paranoid to Be a Great Investor

(10:33) Reintegrating AI

Thomas Kristensen, Partner at LGT Capital Partners, has decades of experience backing the top players in venture, but as an LP, doesn’t love the term "franchise fund.” He sits down with Bezer Clarkson,  Partner at Sapphire Partners, to discuss why GPs can’t rest on their laurels, that being a franchise shouldn’t be every VC’s ultimate goal, and how LPs can dig deep to find firms with a great founder product– and avoid ones that may look like franchises but could have already peaked. The two also share their predictions for 2025 exits and why they think a lot of founders don’t want to be public company CEOs.

Learn more about Sapphire Partners: sapphireventures.com/sapphire-partners

Learn more about OpenLP: openlp.vc

Learn more about Asylum Ventures: asylum.vc

Learn more about LGT Capital Partners: lgtcp.com

For a monthly roundup of the latest venture insights, including the newest Origins episodes, subscribe to the OpenLP newsletter – delivered straight to your inbox: subscribe.openlp.vc

CHAPTERS:

(0:00) Welcome to Origins

(2:00) Are Franchise Funds Really Franchises?

(7:49) What Counts As Performance?

(12:03) How GPs Create (And Spend) Goodwill

(15:45) A Consistent Founder Product

(19:35) “There’s Plenty of Good Firms Out There That I Wouldn’t Necessarily Call Franchise Firms.”

(27:08) Franchise Funds and Succession

(35:43) Resting On Your Laurels

(39:17) “A More Critical Year In Venture Than We Want It to Be.” 

Beezer Clarkson, LP at Sapphire Partners, revisits her conversation from 2023 with David Clark, Investment Director at VenCap International plc. In this episode, she and co-host Nick Chirls, Partner at Asylum Ventures, dive into David’s nearly four decades of experience in investing in some of the most established VC funds across the US, Europe, China and India. David shares historical figures on where to find performance in venture and his findings from a recently uncovered 30 year trove of data from 400+ funds with 15,000+ underlying portfolio companies. In this data set, he found that 50% of VC investments don’t actually return capital. So how does an LP unlock performance and find the enduring managers?

Learn more about Sapphire Partners: sapphireventures.com/sapphire-partners

Learn more about OpenLP: openlp.vc

Learn more about Asylum Ventures: asylum.vc

Learn more about Top Tier Capital Partners: ttcp.com

Subscribe to the OpenLP newsletter for a monthly roundup of the latest venture insights, including the newest Origins episodes, delivered straight to your inbox.

CHAPTERS:

0:00-Welcome to Origins

2:46-30 Years of Data at VenCap

6:10-Almost Always Working With Established Managers

11:19-A Very High Breakage Rate Between Funds One & Two

16:01-Figuring Out Who the Next Great Ones Are

24:41-Having At Least One Company That Returns the Entire Fund

31:26-Building an LP Program

36:18-Building a Program Where DPI Matters

42:06-Looking Back On Predictions for 2024

50:49-Looking for GPs to Get Ahead of the Curve

Origins host Beezer Clarkson sits down with her colleague Laura Thompson, fellow LP and Partner at Sapphire Partners, to unpack her recent conversation with Jessica Archibald, a GP at Top Tier Capital. They discuss Jessica’s engineering-based analytical approach to answering the question “what makes a franchise?” and discuss some surprising things they learned - Jessica’s view that there’s only one real way to do succession, the importance of breaking good and bad news in a way that creates a performance culture, and whether or not they’re going to adopt Jessica’s policy of assigning letter grades to funds at Sapphire Partners.

Learn more about Sapphire Partners: sapphireventures.com/sapphire-partners

Learn more about OpenLP: openlp.vc

Learn more about Asylum Ventures: asylum.vc

Learn more about Top Tier Capital Partners: ttcp.com

Read Laura Thompson’s blog on why venture reserves aren’t always a good thing:

sapphireventures.com/blog/dirty-secret-venture-reserves-are-not-always-a-good-thing/

Read Laura Thompson’s blog on fund recycling:

sapphireventures.com/blog/fund-recycling-moves-the-needle-for-both-lps-and-gps-heres-how/

Read Laura Thompson’s blog on QSBS:

sapphireventures.com/blog/how-lps-gps-and-founders-can-leverage-qsbs-to-make-more-money/

Subscribe to the OpenLP newsletter for a monthly roundup of the latest venture insights, including the newest Origins episodes, delivered straight to your inbox.

CHAPTERS:

(0:00) - Intro

(1:08) - Jessica Takes It In a Different Direction

(3:41) - Communicating with your LP base (So There Aren’t Surprises)

(7:15) - Franchise Funds Are Intentional

(9:44) - Getting to 1x DPI in Nine Years

(15:55) - 2x is the new 3x

(19:43) - Giving Funds Letter Grades

Jessica Archibald is a GP and member of the Investment Committee at Top Tier Capital Partners, where she is co lead of the funds team and participates extensively in the capital formation efforts of the firm. She and Beezer Clarkson, LP at Sapphire Partners, sit down for the next episode in this miniseries on franchise funds - what it takes to build one, and how some firms lose their franchise status. Jessica digs into Top Tier’s numbers to discuss the importance of getting reliable DPI in a set timeframe, why it’s often better to bet on consistent 3x or even 1x returns, and the importance of succession in building a franchise fund.

Learn more about Sapphire Partners: sapphireventures.com/sapphire-partners

Learn more about OpenLP: openlp.vc

Learn more about Asylum Ventures: asylum.vc

Learn more about Top Tier Capital Partners: ttcp.com

Subscribe to the OpenLP newsletter for a monthly roundup of the latest venture insights, including the newest Origins episodes, delivered straight to your inbox.

CHAPTERS:

0:00 Welcome to Origins

2:10 Jessica’s Time with Top Tier

4:08 Fund Graduation Rates

8:43 Who is a Franchise Fund Today?

13:21 ”Is There a DPI Number Somebody Has to Hit to Be Considered Extraordinary?”

17:10 Can You Become a Franchise Fund By Doing Secondaries?

25:08 The Range of Strategies in Franchise Funds

31:32 Maintaining Franchise Status

35:33 What Do Founders Want?

39:42 ”Are You a Franchise Fund If You Haven’t Had Some Level of Succession?”

48:02 End of Year Guidance For New Venture Funds

Origins host Beezer Clarkson sits down with her colleague Laura Thompson, fellow LP and Partner at Sapphire Partners, to discuss her recent conversation with Stephen Bluestein, Partner of Primary Investments at Adams Street and formerly Packard Foundation, about what it takes to make (and potentially later break) a franchise fund in venture. Together, Beezer and Laura debrief their top takeaways, including: do the hallmarks of a franchise differ between GPs and LPs (or even amongst different LPs); how does a franchise produce a lights-out 5x or 10x fund at their fund size; is a consistent 2x net good enough; parallels of sports franchises; and, does the right to win with the best founders mean you will then deliver the best returns?

Learn more about Sapphire Partners: sapphireventures.com/sapphire-partners

Learn more about OpenLP: openlp.vc

Learn more about Asylum Ventures: asylum.vc

Learn more about Adams Street Partners: adamsstreetpartners.com

Read Laura Thompson’s blog on why venture reserves aren’t always a good thing:

sapphireventures.com/blog/dirty-secret-venture-reserves-are-not-always-a-good-thing/

Read Laura Thompson’s blog on fund recycling:

sapphireventures.com/blog/fund-recycling-moves-the-needle-for-both-lps-and-gps-heres-how/

Read Laura Thompson’s blog on QSBS:

sapphireventures.com/blog/how-lps-gps-and-founders-can-leverage-qsbs-to-make-more-money/

Subscribe to the OpenLP newsletter for a monthly roundup of the latest venture insights, including the newest Origins episodes, delivered straight to your inbox.