Beezer Clarkson

🧵Venture has rarely looked more bifurcated. The Q2 @PitchBook report shows AI accounts for >60% of all US venture deal value. Capital is concentrating around a handful of 🔥AI names while the rest of the market navigates a very different liquidity/fundraising reality. 🆕Pod👇

@paigefinnn Missed you too!!

so happy about the algorithm change! feels like my og twitter days of 2020, can finally see the homies on my feed again. missed u guys!

If you're thinking about portfolio construction, AI, liquidity or the genuine uncertainty around where venture goes from here, this episode is for you. 🙏 Huge TY Alec for sharing your wisdom

5/ Key Insights: 👉Why venture remains one of the best ways to gain exposure to innovation 👉How AI is changing what is (and isn't) investable 👉Why liquidity is ultimately a function of time, not just markets 👉The difference between pricing risk and resolving uncertainty

🧵Venture has rarely looked more bifurcated. The Q2 @PitchBook report shows AI accounts for >60% of all US venture deal value. Capital is concentrating around a handful of 🔥AI names while the rest of the market navigates a very different liquidity/fundraising reality. 🆕Pod👇

@mignano Yes! Tried fishing 🎣 the other day as impossible to manage a rod and reel and be in my phone 😂 plus got me out onto the ocean for a few hours

@danprimack 💙

I like my regular coffee shop, but prefer my vacation coffee shop. Think it’s all about the waiting area

@imkialikethecar @credistick @enricomellis Very hard to truly differentiate

@credistick @enricomellis true story: a few years ago, I was at a dinner with the Comms/marktg heads of a number of SV's VC firms that we all know and they said that a running joke among them is that you could swap firm logos between their websites and it wouldn't be different 😆

Why are so many VCs bad at marketing? With some noteable exceptions*, most VC firms see themselves as gatekeepers of capital and therefore underestimate the value of differentiation. @enricomellis has strong views on this problem, and why VCs should risk crossing the chasm of cringe. (*see @imlaurieowen's recent article, linked below.)

@nchirls ☕️

Accurate

@Rick_Zullo 💔

It’s been a year since my dad passed, after losing him at 71 Our relationship was complicated (multiple spouts with years not speaking to each other) and I often think about how different our relationship (and my life) could have been Love your sons and daughters best you can

@ashl3ysm1th @vermilionfund @DominicMadori @TechCrunch woohoo! Congrats @ashl3ysm1th @vermilionfund 💫✨🙌

Today @vermilionfund closed our $25M second fund. Still backing technical founders building for technical users in AI infra, security, and dev tools. 95% of my Fund I investors came back for Fund II. That's the number I'm most proud of. @DominicMadori from @TechCrunch wrote about our story techcrunch.com/2026/07/08/sol…

@pavelprata @murphcapital 🙏 for this research. curious...as this is something we track as well...on a relative basis, similar dynamics at play in 2021? or is the middle getting more squeezed now?

Do mega-funds still control LP fundraising? I decided to look at every fund that closed in H1 2026 in our own @murphcapital tracking dataset and answer a simple question: how much of the market is going to a handful of mega funds versus everyone else? So I pulled all 208 funds that closed between January and June 2026 ($77.5B total) and split them into three tiers: 1/ $1B+ funds: the 14 funds that closed above a billion dollars each 2/ Other experienced managers: 129 funds run by GPs on Fund II or later 3/ Other emerging managers: 65 funds run by first-time GPs Here are a few insights we found interesting: > The 14 largest funds control 65% of all capital raised in six months. 14 out of 208 funds, or 6.7% of the fund count, took nearly two thirds of the money. > @a16z alone closed $15B in January, more than the bottom 168 funds in our dataset combined. @ThriveCapital followed a month later with $10B. Two funds accumulated $25B – 1/3 of the entire market's H1 capital. > First-time managers raised $6.5B across 65 funds in six months. @a16z's single close was more than double that entire cohort combined. So the trend is still alive, just as it was a year ago: according to @PitchBook, top 30 funds raised 74% of all capital in Q1-Q2 2025. In our own tracking for H1 2026, that number is 76%. And there are a few reasons for that: 1/ We're in a period of convergence: mega-funds are stepping down to do more early-stage deals (read our latest research!), while historically early-stage funds are raising growth and opportunity vehicles of their own (e.g. @benchmark), turning themselves into a one-stop shop for LPs. 2/ Big funds are running roadshows across the world's largest liquidity pools (Asia, MENA, and beyond), effectively selling an "AI ETF" with the promise of a seat in every category-defining company's next round. 3/ The SpaceX IPO, probably the largest DPI event of the decade (@foundersfund might get 3,000x on this deal alone) even though most of it isn't distributed yet, plus the upcoming @OpenAI and @AnthropicAI IPOs, only reinforce the mega-fund narrative. Capital keeps recirculating into the same names to catch the next AI wave. My point: I don't think this trend reverses this year, if anything it keeps compounding. For fund managers raising right now, that means the ones stuck in the middle (like Fund IIIs with median benchmark performance), are the ones who'll have it hardest just to survive. Meanwhile GPs raising Fund I-II (without a visible track record) need to clearly articulate the one place where they can compete that neither fellow EMs nor mega-funds can touch.

@PeterJ_Walker +1! @credistick

Never been an LP in an FoF, would really consider it in this case

I've had a lot of convos w LPs over the past couple of yrs questioning venture amid the prolonged liquidity squeeze. Those who know me know my conviction has never changed, regardless of market cycle, and Miguel Luina, co-head of venture capital at @hamilton_lane ($1T AUA), just unpacked exactly why 👇👇 youtube.com/watch?v=6S0pIi…

"I'm not betting on one model. I'm betting on the context." @simonschmincke (GP, @creandum) just shared a full blueprint + everything he learned while building his personal AI brain: 300M+ tokens of life & work context powering 30–40% of his daily workflow. 🔑: Frontier models are increasingly interchangeable. The real challenge is retrieving the right memory, relationship, document, or interaction at exactly the right moment. Context engineering > prompt engineering 📷: 🔗: lnkd.in/gTU2sBrM

🙏🙏🙏 @credistick Perhaps also a sign of “medium sized” funds not being able to raise subsequent vintages as well ?

If venture capital were "barbelling", that would imply a squeeze of the middle driving allocation at the edges. There should be an increase of $ allocation to both very large funds, and to very small funds. Instead, there has been a remarkably steady downward trend for small funds. Medium-sized funds have wavered, dipping significantly in 2026*, and large funds have thrived. The growth of large funds is even more apparent if you looke strictly at the >$1B bucket. This is not "barbelling", it is the fee and liquidity ratchet driving VC into the arms of larger allocators.