Once upon a time, there was a very clear definition of venture capital. It was used to fund many of the largest technology companies you know, like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, which received funding from venture capital firms by the names of Sequoia Capital, Accel Partners and Benchmark Capital. These firms put in millions of dollars in supergiant rounds for a percentage of equity and got up to 1,000 times returns with an IPO that occurred in less than 10 years. If these venture capitalists (commonly called VCs) got lucky, they would have one, two or three of these moonshot successes in their fund portfolio. This would then give them the return on investment they needed to fall in line with their investors’ expectations. That’s it. That is how VC evolved until today, when the startup explosion.
