Hmm, it’s hard to say how venture capital did in 2012. PEhub has a great post with a lot of good charts on venture capital performance in 2012, ytd, and it looks just ok. The title of the post is great though – ”VC ’12 Year-Ender: We Suck Less!”
From the post: the dotcom bust is finally washed out of the 10 year numbers: “Cambridge Associates US VC Index for a ten year period (ending June 2012) shows a return of 5.28%. That’s worse than Barclays bond index at 5.79% and S&P 500 at 5.33%. But every cloud has a silver lining. VC returns are up from a lousy 1.25% a year ago. Or -4.2% in 2010.”
So I guess the key take away is that venture capital is not performing up to its risk adjusted level. But it is getting better than it was, so we may see some decent gains.
And I guess that means that LP’s are chasing the returns again, if this chart means what I think it means:
