Wall Street, never one to leave an asset class unwrapped or unexplored, is busily packaging private-market and late-stage startup exposure into ETFs and interval funds. The logic is impeccable: take the most illiquid, idiosyncratic and gloriously unpredictable corner of finance and make it tradeable before lunch. One can only admire the ambition…

We are not against progress. Quite the opposite: it is our day job. But as venture grows and assets under management swell, the funds managing them start to resemble the institutions that feed them. In the first half of 2026, 48% of US VC raised went to just three firms. These funds acquire risk committees, structured processes and governance frameworks thick enough to stop a door. All very sensible. Rarely has this ever produced a founder.

The result is polarisation. Capital concentrates, and conviction narrows with it. The same sectors and themes keep coming round, in the same pitch decks with the same TAM slide. The revolutionary, slightly alarming idea struggles to clear an investment committee designed to minimise embarrassment rather than maximise outcomes. The quirky entrepreneur risks becoming an endangered species: the one who cannot sit still in a board meeting and is probably right.

Progress has always depended on someone taking a non-consensus bet on a big problem. Extraordinary returns are born from extraordinary conviction, and conviction does not come in a tradeable wrapper. That is why Concentric remains stubbornly focused on backing people with disruptive ideas that challenge the status quo, preferably before anyone has thought to index them.

The proximity between the founder and the venture fund really matters, for all parties. Venture capital exists to find the entrepreneurs with global disruptive ideas, fund them and keep them alive long enough to be proved right. This is where the real alpha will hide.

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