These signals will tell you that your VC is not doing well

Successes are celebrated loudly, failures are digested quietly. That's normal. Accordingly, the topic at hand is only discussed quietly, if at all.

Could it be that some VCs are currently struggling? That some investors are having difficulty closing an announced fund ? That one or two raise but do not reach the target - and then have to give up on the next fund? Is this the reason why things have gone a bit quiet for some venture capitalists who are currently barely investing and are mainly managing their existing portfolio?

That's what people are whispering about these days.

If you want to put it bluntly, you can talk about “zombie VCs” – half-deadly hoping that they can sell what they have as soon as possible at the best possible price so that the limited partners (LPs) get the returns they have been longing for .

This is the real crux of the problem: Limited partners, i.e. large companies, entrepreneurial families and family offices , have entrusted their money to VCs so that they can invest in innovative and fast-growing companies and multiply it over several years. The goal is to turn one million in an early-stage VC fund into at least two, preferably three and in the best case even ten million. 10X - the (barely achieved) ideal of VC investment.

However, unless the LPs get several times their million back, they are not particularly willing to invest new millions in the next fund. Where is the proof of concept? They would rather invest the profits of the first fund in the next one. But where are these profits?