Welcoming Leo de Luna, our Newest Partner
Friends and colleagues of TVP,
We are excited to announce that Leo de Luna has joined our team as a Partner initially focused on our growth fund, TVP Access.
Adding our first new Partner since our founding 11+ years ago represents a major decision for our firm. Fortunately we believe we’ve found the perfect fit with Leo. Leo is an experienced venture investor whom we have known for many years. Given the importance of the decision we took our time and met with numerous potential candidates to find the right fit. In fact, we first started chatting with Leo in early 2020 about joining TVP.
Leo’s previous venture experience includes founding, building and running the U.S. investment team of M12, the venture fund for Microsoft. His impressive multistage track record includes two unicorn realizations and one decacorn exit. Over his 23+ year venture career, Leo has a diverse set of experiences working across investment stages both in traditional and corporate VC environments as well as spending several years in the secondary market. All of his experience will be incredibly valuable to the founders we work with each and every day.
Leo is the fourth addition to the TVP team in 2022, and we couldn’t be more excited for 2023 and beyond with our full team now in place.
TVP Access
In 2018, we launched TVP Access to provide flexible and creative capital to later stage companies which we define as any company north of $20M in revenue. As capital flooded into the late-stage market and funds grew larger and larger, financings were being constructed to meet the requirements of funds (e.g., minimum investments size, ownership thresholds, board seat requirements, etc.), not based on the best structure for companies. We saw an opportunity to go the other way and support later stage companies by providing smaller, flexible capital. As these results from our first Access Fund show, that strategy is working.
TVP Access I is a top performing fund across Net IRR and Total Value to Paid-In capital (“TVPI”) metrics. We are particularly proud of being one of the very best funds in the U.S. for our 2.4x Distributions to Paid-In capital (“DPI”).
As legendary NEA co-founder Frank Bonsal Jr. once said, it’s all about putting the “moolah in the coolah.” Our deep experience led us to being very intentional about driving liquidity during the tech bull run while minimizing capital deployed at the market top. While most venture firms were deploying record amounts of capital into a record amount of investments our firm made only one new company investment from the beginning of 2020 until the second quarter of 2021 across both our early and growth funds. We expect to lean on our deep experience once again as we continue to build out our growth fund and support the best entrepreneurs.
With Leo joining the team, we plan to execute a similar strategy, but after a dramatic decline in public and late stage private equity valuations in 2022, we believe there is a massive market opportunity to invest in growth stage companies that have strong business fundamentals but require cap table clean-up and / or a valuation reset in the new world. For experienced investors, market dislocations equal opportunity. For founders we hope to be your sherpa and problem solver whether it be by simply providing balance sheet cushion, replacing an investor in a broken syndicate, helping to reprice a business that was funded at too high a valuation or a full recap to fix price and a bloated liquidation preference stack.
With the addition of Leo, all three Partners at TVP have been venture investors since the 90’s and have managed through just about every market cycle there is. We believe this uniquely positions us to support and help companies across all stages and industries as they navigate the market environment ahead — and ultimately drive outsized returns for our investors.
Please join us in welcoming Leo. You can reach him at leo@tribecavp.com, and, as always, please feel free to reach out to Brian and Chip anytime at brian@tribecavp.com and chip@tribecavp.com, respectively.
All the best,
Brian, Chip and Leo
