Venture capital is not an asset class, says Sequoia's Roelof Botha

At TechCrunch Disrupt 2025, Sequoia managing partner Roelof Botha argued that the venture industry isn’t an asset class, and that throwing more money into Silicon Valley doesn’t lead to better companies.

“Investing in venture is a return-free risk,” Botha said during an interview on TechCrunch’s Disrupt’s main stage on Monday. “Anybody who’s studied the capital asset pricing model understands the joke of that. The reason I came up with this is, if you look at the history of venture capital, it’s an asset that’s uncorrelated with other asset classes.”

“And so the thinking for many allocators was you should allocate a certain percentage of your portfolio to this and more money should flow to venture capital, but the truth is that there are only so many companies that matter,” Botha continu