Mitchell Green worked variously in investment banking, as an analyst with Bessemer Venture Partners, and for a hedge fund backed by Tiger Management before striking out on his own in 2011. Going it alone was seemingly the right move. Green now manages money for more than 700 individuals who have committed $5 billion to his firm, Lead Edge Capital.
How has he persuaded so many people to jump on board, including prominent individuals such as former Xerox CEO Anne Mulcahy, former Charles Schwab CEO David Pottruck, and former PayPal CEO Dan Schulman? Nabbing stakes in Alibaba, Bumble, and Duo Security certainly helped. But Mitchell suggests the appeal also ties to an all-weather strategy – one that has him increasingly steering the bunch away from “overvalued” venture capital deals and into buyout-like “control deals” of companies that many VCs might look past, like a Sarasota, Florida outfit that makes cardiac-monitoring software, and a tax-planning software outfit in College Station, Texas.
Lead Edge, long an investor in major Chinese companies, is also continuing to invest money into ByteDance, where it unsurprisingly foresees a huge exit, even with the assumption that TikTok could go to “zero” if it’s ultimately banned in the U.S.
To get his newest take on the market, we talked to Green – a former nationally ranked alpine ski racer who mostly lives in Santa Barbara – from his hotel room in Las Vegas during a recent F1 racing event staged in the city. Excerpts from our chat follow, edited for length. You can also listen to our interview via TechCrunch’s StrictlyVC Download podcast.
When we last talked, you were really leaning into the Ant Group [the Alibaba affiliate that was expected to become the world’s largest IPO in the fall of 2020 before that offering was completely derailed by China’s securities regulator].
I think it was around the timeframe that General Atlantic [became] a big investor. Silver Lake invested. GIC invested. We put some money in that deal. Yeah, it was three days away from going public, and the Chinese government stopped it. Fast forward to today and look, it’s a giant business still, but it hasn’t gone public. We get the financials, and I can’t talk about that kind of stuff.
You can’t say if you’re buying or selling?
We’re not buying or selling Ant Financial. We made an investment in it, and we’re holding and we’ll see what happens.
Do you have any plans to invest in any other Chinese companies at this point?
The only other Chinese company we own is ByteDance.
We invest in a lot of [other] companies. Like, almost two thirds of the companies we invest in, we are the first institutional investor. Not so long ago, we invested in a company called Pacemate in that hotbed of technology: Sarasota, Florida. Only 9% of our companies are actually in the Bay Area. We were the first investors in it. It’s a business at scale, growing nicely, you know. We…
Read More: Lead Edge is increasingly steering its 700+ investors away from VC deals
