Can LPs claw back money? If the market doesn’t look good this year and all of the LPs need to reallocate cash to public markets.. then why would the VCs hang onto it?
It depends on the terms. I know of at least one 2000s banking startup that was on track to make cash flow positive but had their cash clawed back by desperate investors that needed to cover other things. I used to own their CVS server (sparcserver 10) that I used as a random openbsd box for years. Bought it for $100 at their fire sale. Still had all their code on the HDD.
Still have my nice office chair from when dot com imploded (company was literally named Software.com), and the facilities guy just said "take whatever you want". Remember devs wheeling everything out into the parking lot
I bought a bunch of equipment at a failed dotcom auction in 2001 (and still use the desks).
None of the computers were wiped, so we had a look around. My friend’s prediction was spot-on: “I bet you’ll find more porn than business plans on them…”
From what I understand, the way it usually works is that LPs don't give the VC funds all of the money upfront. They pay in a portion, and then the VCs have the ability to subsequently make "capital calls" up to the total commitment value.
If the market is really bad, you could see LPs start to default on these capital calls. There are consequences to doing this, so this isn't a likely scenario, but it could happen in a worst-case scenario.
