Hello there, and almost Happy New Year! ݁₊ ⊹ . ݁˖ . ݁
Throughout 2025, we’ve brought together a wide range of insightful interviews, conversations, and podcast episodes with leading industry players. As the holiday season arrives, many of you may finally have a moment to slow down and catch up on deeper, more thoughtful reading, listening, or watching, yes, watching, as 0100 Impact Talks ranked among the top 20% of most-watched video podcasts on Spotify in 2025. 🥰
With that in mind, we’ve put together a recap of a year that challenged many of us. Last week, we looked at the private equity landscape; now, it’s time to turn our attention to what venture capital investors have to say.
This year brought a noticeable shift in tone across venture. Scale was questioned, patience came back into focus, and long-term thinking mattered more than momentum. Discussions moved toward fund discipline, ownership, and repeatability, while topics like deep tech, defense, impact, and growth outside traditional hubs gained real weight.
Over the past year, we spoke with investors, LPs, family offices, corporates, and operators across stages and geographies. What stood out wasn’t how different their views were, but how aligned they felt. Whether talking about Europe’s capital gaps, the role of long-term investors, or the limits of hype-driven investing, the same ideas surfaced again and again.
Here are the insights that influenced venture capital in 2025.
Discipline Over Scale: Rethinking Fund Size, Strategy, and Returns
One of the strongest themes running through this year’s discussions was a clear rejection of the idea that fund size, in and of itself, drives performance.
As David Clark from VenCap International explained, the obsession with “small versus large” funds often misses the point entirely. What matters is whether a fund’s size is aligned with its strategy and the scale of outcomes it is realistically underwriting.
From an LP perspective, the question is not how much capital a manager raises, but whether they can consistently access top-tier founders and secure enough ownership in the rare companies that return the fund. Without that alignment, even modest performance assumptions quickly become unrealistic.
This logic is deeply tied to how returns are actually generated in venture capital. Both David and Matt Russell from VenCap reinforced that the power law remains intact: a very small number of companies drive the majority of value creation. Funds that grow too large without a corresponding increase in access or ownership risk dilute their exposure to those outliers.
Matt noted that most successful funds returning multiples of capital do so because they include at least one true fund-returning company. Discipline, in this context, means structuring portfolios so that those outcomes are possible—not relying on luck or volume to compensate for weaker positioning.
The same discipline now influences how LPs think about manager selection. Instead of chasing new stories or first-time managers, the focus has shifted to repeatability. David was clear that past results still matter most, especially proof that a team has backed exceptional companies more than once. In a slower market with fewer exits, LPs are asking tougher questions about what it actually takes for a fund to succeed and whether the manager has done it before.
That view was echoed by Karey Barker, who noted that some of the strongest managers deliberately keep their funds smaller, even when demand allows them to scale.
For her, disciplined fund size protects focus and performance, especially in a market where liquidity is tight, and mistakes are harder to hide. Across conversations, the message was consistent: discipline, not scale, has become one of the most important advantages in today’s venture landscape
Europe’s Capital Gap and the Role of Long-Term Investors
Across this year’s conversations, Europe’s growth-stage funding gap came up again and again. While the region is strong at the early stage, many companies still struggle to raise the kind of capital they need to scale.
As Merel Kraaijenbrink from dealflow.eu explained, this often forces founders to look outside Europe, especially to the U.S., once they reach Series B or later. The problem is not a lack of talent or ambition, but a lack of patient capital that is willing to stay invested over longer timeframes.
This gap is changing how investors think about who should fund European growth. Merel pointed to family offices and high-net-worth investors as an important part of the solution. When their capital is directed into growth-stage funds, rather than one-off deals, it can help companies scale without relocating. Their flexibility and long-term mindset make them well-suited to back European businesses that take longer to reach maturity.
A similar view came from Kelley Luyken from Aurum Impact, who talked about the role of long-term private investors in supporting sectors that traditional VC often underfunds.
Family offices are not tied to strict fund timelines, which allows them to invest patiently in areas like climate, deep tech, and hardware. For Luyken, this patience is not about lowering expectations, but about matching capital to the real needs of companies building complex, long-term solutions.
Deep Tech, Defense, and Investing Beyond the Hype Cycle
What was once seen as niche or even controversial is now viewed as essential, driven by geopolitics, security concerns, and the need for resilience. As Valentin Menedetter from Vektor Partners explained, defense and deep tech are no longer edge cases; they are becoming central to how countries and industries think about the future. More capital is flowing into the space, but that also increases the risk of hype.
Both Valentin and Francesco Perticarari from Silicon Roundabout Ventures warned that this is not a space for trend-driven investing. These companies often sit where software, hardware, and infrastructure meet, which makes them harder to understand and slower to build.
Valentin mentioned that without real technical knowledge, it is easy to back buzzwords instead of real innovation. The strongest opportunities, he noted, are often complex and unglamorous, but deeply defensible. From an early-stage angle, Francesco made a similar point.
Deep tech does not follow fast venture timelines, and progress can feel slow. But that difficulty is exactly what creates long-term value. Rather than chasing what is popular, he argued that investors should focus on technologies solving real, structural problems, even if they sit outside the hype cycle and take years to mature.
Impact Without the Buzzwords: Designing for the Long Term
Impact investing came up often this year, but not as a buzzword. Instead, it was talked about as something that has to be built into a fund from the very beginning.
Alina Klarner shared that Impact Shakers was designed from day one around founder wellbeing, inclusion, and long-term thinking. Rather than adding impact later, the fund was set up to support founders over time, believing that strong, healthy teams lead to better, more lasting companies.
That same long-term mindset was clear in healthcare. Todd Perman from SEED Healthcare explained that real impact in science-led companies takes time. Investing early means results are not immediate, but it allows investors to support founders when it matters most. In healthcare, especially, meaningful progress often comes slowly, and rushing the process can work against real outcomes.
Growth Equity Beyond Silicon Valley: Exploring the “Elsewhere” Thesis with Shu Nyatta of Bicycle Capital
One of the most distinctive ideas this year came from Shu Nyatta from Bicycle Capital, who shared the “elsewhere” thesis, a concept initially drafted by Endeavor.
While new technologies are often invented in a small number of hubs like Silicon Valley, he argued that applying those ideas at scale can happen almost anywhere. What matters most is not where a company is based, but whether it is founder-led, growing fast, and solving real problems.
At Bicycle Capital, this thinking shows up in how the firm invests in undercapitalized markets such as Latin America. By backing strong companies that are already growing quickly, the fund treats growth itself as a form of downside protection.
These companies may not look flashy, but their speed and resilience help them perform even in tougher market conditions, especially where competition for capital is lower.
Corporations as Builders: How to Make Venture Work Inside Industry with Bosch and BMWi Ventures
This year, corporate venture looked very different when seen through the eyes of operators inside large industrial companies.
Axel Deniz shared how Bosch approaches venture building as a practical way to move deep tech from the lab into the real world. The focus is not on chasing trends, but on long-term industrial relevance, strong engineering, and real integration into existing operations.
When corporates bring more than just capital, such as talent, infrastructure, and long-term commitment, they can help reduce risk and support technologies that take time to mature.
That same clarity showed up in the corporate VC approach of Inga G. Grieger at BMW i Ventures. Rather than investing broadly, the team focuses on areas closely linked to the future of mobility and industry, where venture-backed innovation clearly fits BMW’s long-term strategy. The emphasis is on alignment from the start: clear goals, patient timelines, and respect for startup independence.
The Rise of The DACH Region
A recurring theme this year was the growing strength of the DACH region as a place to build and scale serious technology companies. Daniela Raffel shared how Dawn Capital sees the region as a natural fit for its focus on European B2B software at the Series A and B stage.
Raffel highlighted that DACH’s strength comes from the overlap between engineering excellence and real-world industry problems. Many of the most interesting companies are not building simple UX-driven products, but tackling hard,&D-heavy challenges where software meets industry. Hubs like Munich show how technical know-how, entrepreneurial ambition, and proximity to customers can come together to create strong early-stage momentum across the region.
Stay Tuned With 0100 in 2026!
Venture capital continues to evolve, and the conversations around it are becoming more thoughtful and more grounded. From fund discipline and long-term capital to deep tech, impact, and where innovation really happens, we’ll keep unpacking these shifts through honest conversations with GPs, LPs, family offices, founders, and operators who are living this market every day.
If you want to stay close to these discussions and get our latest interviews, podcasts, and deep dives as they’re released, make sure to subscribe to 0100 Weekly Brief. We have many more in-depth venture capital conversations coming in 2026, and we’d love to have you with us.
Solid synthesis of where capital allocation shifted this year. The discipline-over-scale argument rings tru, especially when you look at how many bloated funds struggled to deploy effectively. What struck me is the point about DACH's overlap between engineering and real-world industry problems, that's the kind of technical-commercial fit that usually generates durable moats rather than just hype-driven valuations.