"70% of funds raised between 2021 and 2023 will not return capital."
Is Leone's 70% claim supported by current TVPI and DPI trajectories?
Current data is consistent with a severe vintage but the 70% number is on the pessimistic tail of available models. A 45–60% range is more defensible given typical J-curve recovery and remaining fund life.
Cambridge Associates Q4 2025: median 2021 TVPI = 0.84x with 6 years remaining.
— Cambridge Associates
Late-vintage outliers (Founders Fund VIII, Index Growth) skew long-tail recovery.
— Pitchbook
It's the worst vintage of my career — but '70% won't return' assumes no AI-driven exit window.
Directionally correct, numerically aggressive. The vintage will be the worst since 1999; the exact loss ratio depends almost entirely on the 2027–2029 exit window.
Confidence reflects strength of evidence weighted by source quality.
For the Geeks · sources & method▾
Structured expert elicitation (IDEA protocol)
4 independent domain experts, Delphi-style two rounds, aggregated via geometric mean of probabilities.
n = 4 experts · 2 rounds
- Federal Reserve FRED ↗Macro series: rates, M2, employment, GDP deflator.
- 20VC episode transcript (verbatim)Diarised + speaker-attributed via WhisperX + pyannote 3.1.
Last agent run · 2026-06-08