Seed Investors Making Money
In a press release Thomas Reuters put out entitled partially US PRIVATE EQUITY SHORT-TERM PERFORMANCE TURNS SHARPLY POSITIVE, they provide statistics on private equity investment performance. They track quarterly statistics of over 2,044 US venture capital and private equity partnerships totaling over $980 billion in capitalization. They provide 1 Yr , 3 Yr, 5 Yr, 10 Yr, and 20 Yr statistics on Early/Seed VC, Balanced VC and Later Stage VC. As a startup guy I like to see positive Early/Seed numbers. For the last year the growth was 4% for Early/Seed, even higher for the other VCs however over 20 years the highest performance is the Early/Seed VCs at 23.2% return. But why do you care?

Why You Care
You care because if these early stage funders are making money then they will invest more and attract more early stagers and seed investors, or so the theory goes. But I think it’s a pretty good theory that if 20 years of results shows the highest rate of return for VCs is early/seed stage investments then more capital will be available to pure startups in proportion to other stage companies. So keep doing what you’re doing if you are an entrepreneur because the money is out there and may be available if you need it and want it.