gener8tor’s Fund Performance
Transparency starts at home.
gener8tor’s mission requires it: to be the best partner for a community to invest into its own we need to show that those investments are sustainable AND reflect the community.
Social impact investing across 9 years works, and we should talk about it.
To better serve our mission we are publishing our fund performance data. We hope readers will walk away believing you can do well by doing right investing across race, place and gender.
To frame the context, gener8tor was amongst the first and still only one of a few ranked accelerators (much less venture funds) that publishes our portfolio demographic statistics. We first did this in 2016 and continue to publish them at gener8tor.com/statistics. We encourage other investors (angel groups, accelerators, VCs, CVCs and family offices) to do the same.
We believe the world’s worst due diligence processes are the ones that have produced disgusting disparities with portfolios filled with one gender and one race and one place. We refuse to accept that status quo.
So without further ado here’s our fund financial performance data across all of our fully-invested funds. All numbers are on a net basis (net of management fees, operating expenses and carried interest).
Valuation policy:
- All stock marked to most recent share price agnostic to share class.
- Companies out of business marked down to zero.
- When the most recent round is a convertible security, we mark up our shares to 75% of the convertible security’s cap to account for future dilution.
Admittedly this data is still incomplete in that it reflects the score of a game only partially played. But we believe that as our younger investments mature we anticipate these numbers will only improve.
And let’s be clear: we have invested across race, place and gender with funds that consistently perform in the top quartile of their vintages and often are at or near best-in-class metrics. If we can do this from a built-from-scratch accelerator in the Midwest, don’t take excuses from professionals managing more money with presumably better access to pedigree and resources.
To put a finer point on how shocking the status quo is, and how proud we are of our founders and team, here are a few slides that compare the industry historical performance on the left against our funds on the right:
What gives us the greatest pride is that our funds are profitable in and of themselves while also serving as a lever for community growth. For every $1 invested in our funds (usually exclusively and initially) our graduates have raised $40 of follow-on capital. Our graduates have also created thousands of full-time jobs and generated hundreds of millions of revenue.
People often ask us what our company does. We’d like to flip that dynamic: Why is it surprising to find a company that contracts with investors and communities to catalyze investment into emerging leaders? And isn’t the highest degree of conviction in someone a shared investment in their future and ours?
