Why big venture capital is failing badly

Paul Sakuma/AP

Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg poses at Facebook headquarters in 2007. The company has since become a rare great investment for big-time venture capital.

The Kauffman Foundation has released a new paper about the state of its own considerable historic investment in venture capital funds. The title, "We Have Met the Enemy...and He Is Us," says it all about the key revelation: that as an investor, Kauffman has made a terrible, terrible mistake putting money into VC. The foundation, which is endowed to the tune of $1.85 billion, is blaming itself for the sorry state of its VC returns, which have fallen off significantly from their 1990s highs. And it's demanding changes in the way that investors approach VC:

The data we’ve reviewed in this paper demonstrate that VCs are good capitalists. They act in ways that are consistent with maximizing their economic profits. [Investors] seem to be less-good capitalists, because they repeatedly fail to negotiate key economic terms that have a significant impact on their investment returns.

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