More on VC Failure - The Kauffman Foundation Report

A reader recently shared the Kauffman Foundation report, and it's quite an incredible piece of testimony against the VC industry...

The Kauffman Foundation is a $2 billion foundation and one of the 30 largest philanthropic foundations in the United States. Kauffman focuses on two goals: advancing entrepreneurship and improving the education of children and youth.

Over the past 20 years the foundation had invested in approximately 100 different VC funds, and therefore has a unique set of statistics on the performance of the VC industry. The results of Kauffman's analysis are staggering in their implications:

Since 1997, investors poured more cash into VCs than VCs had distributed to investors (!)

Only 20% of venture funds managed to beat the market by more than 3% annually

62% of funds failed to exceed average market returns (!!)

The average VC fund FAILS to return investor capital (!!!)

There is a lot more of interest in this report to anyone that has anything at all to do with start-ups, entrepreneurship, innovation and investment.

To access the full report, click here.

To view a video explaining the foundation's findings, click here and then click on the video link.

As could be expected this report received widespread coverage, here are some of the more prominent analyses and discussions:

Geekwire

cnet

CNN