Executive Summary
Max Altman's confession reveals the venture industry's dirty secret: multi-stage funds have won the seed war, but this creates systematic alpha in 'orphaned' infrastructure plays. While Altman correctly identifies that 'Sequoia and Andreessen have locked up Series A,' he misses the second-order effect: this dominance creates pricing inefficiencies in companies that don't fit their platform thesis. Market Consensus: Seed is dead, multi-stage funds control everything. Variant Perception: Multi-stage dominance creates predictable orphaning of infrastructure plays that don't scale to their $8B+ fund requirements. Unity exemplifies this: generating $391M FCF, trading at 2-year lows despite being critical infrastructure for spatial computing, because it doesn't fit the 'AI application' narrative that drives mega-fund allocation. The real alpha isn't competing with Sequoia—it's buying what they systematically ignore.
Key Insights
what Max Altman said“I saw the email that the founder got. It was from Mike Vernal. And they basically said, hey, Sequoia is on the board of the six most valuable private tech companies in the world... And I'm like, dude, I'm not going to win this deal. Like, why the hell would they take my money against that?”
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