David Tisch Said It Out Loud: High VC Ownership Is Overrated

David Tisch said the quiet part out loud. On 20VC with Harry Stebbings (October 31, 2026), the BoxGroup founder called high ownership and concentration what a lot of us privately think it is: BS.

I was going back and forth with David about it on X, and I agree with him. His philosophy is basically that the math will math. He doesn't need to walk you through a portfolio construction model. If you get in early, at the right time, into the right companies, the generational ones, the math makes itself work.

And he has the record to say it. BoxGroup now invests from a $275M seed fund and a $275M opportunity fund, with early checks in Cursor, Baseten and Clay, per the episode notes. That's not a fund that got lucky on concentration.

I've been price sensitive, and it cost me

You can't pass on valuation alone. Historically I've been price sensitive, and I definitely missed a few opportunities because of it. The good ones we did get, we got because we were early and they were non-consensus outliers.

Once something becomes consensus, that's where the bigger funds come in. Plenty of them pass early and invest later, and that's fine, because that's how their model works. They see so many companies that they don't need to take the early risk. They wait for the de-risked signals: revenue, traction, customers, who else is in the round.

It used to be 100x or zero. Now it's 1x or 100x.

The downside has changed. With a liquidation preference, a company that never becomes a giant can still get acquired for $1 billion or $2 billion, and that's peanuts for Google, Meta, Nvidia or Microsoft. They can take out your preference without thinking twice, and they all know each other. A billion here or there to keep the innovation coming is a good problem to have.

The acquisitions are real, too: Wiz, Cursor in SpaceX's $60B deal, and Nvidia's $12.9B Hugging Face buy (The Register). Some of it is circular, with the same money funding, buying and getting bought. But it's real technology underneath.

The 10% ownership pitch doesn't hold anymore

A lot of GPs, me included, have stood in front of LPs and said it: you need concentration, you need 10% ownership, the math has to work. It doesn't prove out the way it used to, because entry valuations are so high and the numbers at exit are so much bigger.

To David's point (the episode's agenda literally includes "why we have less dilution now than ever before"), companies are still raising huge rounds, but at much higher valuations, so each round dilutes less. My rough read from the deals I see is that a round now costs founders something closer to 5–12% than the old 10–20%.

That doesn't make the math easy. Companies stay private longer and raise more rounds, and there are option pools, RSUs and secondary sales stacked on top. Nobody fully models all of that. But the opportunities at the top are bigger than ever, even if private valuations are completely disconnected from the public markets. For the full picture on where ownership targets sit today, see how ownership targets have changed in the AI era.

The Fortune 490 is in a dead zone

The public side has its own problem, and it's why Marc Benioff is buying everything he can. Salesforce keeps acquiring because it has to keep growing.

Everyone outside the top 50, what I call the Fortune 490, is stuck between a rock and a hard place. They can't buy anybody and they can't build their own AI. Big tech is eating their lunch from one side and startups from the other. If you're not buying companies and acquiring the best talent, you're in a dead zone, and normal business operations won't get you out of it.