No Chance No Dance: An Entrepreneur Does Whatever It Takes

By Sanjiv Goyal featuring Ashu Garg

What you will learn:

• A secret confession from our guest venture capitalist Ashu Garg
• Investment advice from a futurist
• What to expect from venture capital trends
• Investment criteria to live by
• Innovation predictions for the next 50 years
• The mindset that distinguishes real entrepreneurs

A Futurist and Romantic At Heart

Ashu Garg solved a Rubik’s cube at age 11. I attempted to do the same thing, except my strategy involved taking it apart, That was my confession for this week’s Wednesday episode of Confessions of a Futurist with Sanjiv Goyal. Ashu confessed that he is a sucker for romcoms and cries at the movies. I guess that makes us even.

Ashu is a partner at Foundation Capital and since 2008 he has been fostering entrepreneurship as a venture capitalist. I asked him to tell us where he thinks the future of venture capital is heading and humor me with predictions for innovation trends for the next fifty years.

The Future of Venture Capital

Almost 300 billion dollars were invested in start-up companies in 2020. This year already venture capitalists have invested 35 billion minting 22 unicorns.

This begs the question: Is too much money is going into ventures and into start-ups? Ashu tells us that when you take a broad view of the economy, venture capital makes up less than 1% of all investment asset classes. It appears there is a lot of room to grow. By 2030, VC could be ten times greater than it is today.

This growth is being driven by the role technology is playing in the global economy. Technology, predominantly software, is being integrated into the majority of products and systems. As tech continues to take a greater share of the economy, so will the VC that is funding tech innovation.

Will venture play a role in other areas of innovation, like say the food space? According to Ashu, the venture model works when you can get very high-margin products with a high degree of defensibility for a sustained period of time. This means companies like Impossible Foods are more the exception than the rule.