Decades before David Tisch began investing in startups, he was wheeling and dealing sports cards as an 11-year-old kid in the suburbs of New York.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cI\u2019ve been a collector forever,\u201d the founder of venture capital firm BoxGroup said from his Meatpacking District office, surrounded by an assortment of whimsical collectibles. The crown jewel of Tisch\u2019s collection, however, isn\u2019t so easily displayed on a shelf: Tisch and BoxGroup were among the very first investors in AI coding startup Cursor<\/a>, which this month was acquired by Elon Musk\u2019s SpaceX for $60 billion,<\/a> the largest VC-backed acquisition of all-time.<\/p>\n The returns are staggering: BoxGroup first wrote a $750,000 check to Cursor CEO Michael Truell<\/a>, plus two follow-on checks, ultimately proffering a return that should shake out to around $1 billion, a source familiar with the matter told Fortune.<\/p>\n It\u2019s the kind of home run most VCs dream about their whole career and, for Tisch, there are all sorts of throughlines. For one, investing is a form of collecting\u2014from portfolio construction to placing your bets\u2014and Tisch, 45, sees a parallel between investing in startups and the sports cards of his childhood. \u201cEspecially in early-stage investing, you\u2019re buying something, someone, at the earliest stage, and then you get to see their careers play out.\u201d<\/p>\n For Tisch\u2014warm with a sardonic edge and, yes, a scion of one of business\u2019s most famous families<\/a>\u2014the Cursor acquisition also affirms the strategy he\u2019s been chasing all along: That the person you\u2019re backing matters most. And Cursor was sourced by then-principal Claire Smilow (now a partner). So, back in 2022, it was a bet by Tisch on both a young investor and a young founder who, at the time, seemed like he was off-point.<\/p>\n \u201cMichael\u2019s original idea was to do AI for CAD [computer-aided design],\u201d Tisch said. \u201cThe decision to get excited about investing in Cursor was never about AI for CAD. It was always about the people.\u201d<\/p>\n Over the last 15 years, venture capital\u2019s gotten bigger by the numbers, and louder by pretty much any metric. Firms and their VCs tussle for relevance, ownership, and board seats. Money is everywhere: A billion-dollar fund now is de rigueur. Tisch, meanwhile, has zagged: He doesn\u2019t talk to reporters much, doesn\u2019t have a podcast, backed off tweeting in 2015, doesn\u2019t take board seats, has no interest in raising a multi-billion fund<\/a>, and is viscerally uncomfortable with any startup narrative where an investor is the protagonist. It\u2019s a contrarian take that, in this environment, is out of vogue, at best. But Cursor\u2019s blockbuster buyout suggests, against the odds, that Tisch\u2019s vision of a restrained, people-first model for venture capital can work in a world dominated by trillion-dollar companies and multi-billion funds.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cDavid and BoxGroup are sort of the last stalwarts of highly collaborative investing,\u201d said Jack Altman, Benchmark partner who\u2019s known Tisch since 2020 (and yes, Sam Altman\u2019s brother). \u201cIt used to be that VCs could collaborate a lot more easily. Then, over time, as VCs got much bigger, it got more competitive\u2014there are only 100 points on the cap table. But Box has taken the view of \u2018we\u2019re going to invest in a ton of companies, we\u2019re going to do it super collaboratively, so we can always come along with other investors. That way, we can share and receive deal flow from everyone.\u2019 All the VCs who scaled up, they sort of gave up on that strategy. And Box is the hold out.\u201d<\/p>\n That restraint, that desire for collaboration, isn\u2019t just philosophy. It\u2019s core to BoxGroup, which arguably has its origins in Tisch\u2019s childhood fascination with the Internet, with early message boards and chasing baseball (and hockey, and basketball) cards online.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIn the sports card world, if I buy a rookie and the rookie fails, I never met him, I don\u2019t care. I\u2019m sad for me,\u201d said Tisch. \u201cWhereas in startups, you\u2019re investing in a person you build a relationship with, and you might watch them go through a life\u2011changing success\u2014or a life-changing failure.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI started with dial-up\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Tisch came of age attuned to the dawn of our digital world. And he wants you to know: He was here at the start.<\/p>\n \u201cI started with dial-up Internet, the actual sound,\u201d he emphasizes with comic timing. \u201cThere\u2019s kids who started at the end of the dial-up era, and there are kids who started at the beginning. I\u2019m the beginning.\u201d<\/p>\n Tisch is characterized by his disarming, self-deprecating humor, and he makes me think of that Italian word sprezzatura\u2014it describes someone with genuine skill that they\u2019ve learned to make appear deeply casual. The humor and casualness, one has to imagine, are both nature and nurture. As an Internet-loving kid in Scarsdale, he came from an illustrious family\u2014his grandfather, Laurence Tisch, was co-owner of the generational Loews<\/a> Corp. conglomerate, and the Tisch family (known for its high-profile philanthropic endeavors, and prominence in both business and politics) is said to be worth over $10 billion. The family\u2019s success in business didn\u2019t mean, however, that they \u201cgot\u201d Tisch\u2019s love of sports cards or the Internet.<\/p>\n \u201cMy grandfather, who was instrumental in my life, thought it was the dumbest thing he\u2019d ever heard of,\u201d said Tisch of Laurence, who with his brother built a 20th century empire that spanned hotels, movie theaters, financial institutions, and the Bulova Watch Company. \u201cHe was a businessman and entrepreneur\u2014though I didn\u2019t know that word at the time. He thought cards were dumb, and made that very known. I loved cards, but he was adamantly [against it]. Looking back, he was wrong, and it was bad advice.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Back then, there was no eBay, and deals got done with snail mail money orders. AOL and message boards were a funny, fraud-riddled place for a kid (Tisch vividly remembers online-buying a fraudulent rookie card of someday-baseball hall-of-famer Mike Piazza that never showed up). He was always drawn to where the offline and online worlds met\u2014the town of Larchmont once hired a 14-year-old Tisch to help build an online town directory\u2014and he was always tracking real-time technological change.<\/p>\n \u201cI grew up in an analog world, but watched digital happen,\u201d Tisch said. \u201cIn college, freshman year, 23 of us were in a fraternity class. Two people, not me, had a cell phone. By junior year, all 23 of us had cell phones. In an 18-month period, cell phones went from random and rare to 100% adoption.\u201d<\/p>\n He may have been paying attention to the internet, but he chose a traditional path to start his career. Tisch went to law school, eventually landing (with some restlessness) in real estate finance at Vornado Realty Trust and then at information services company KGB. Then came the Great Financial Crisis.<\/p>\n \u201cI got fired, I\u2019m sitting in my house, depressed,\u201d said Tisch. \u201cAnd I became intellectually obsessed with accelerators. We\u2019d spent two years trying to launch something within [KGB], and nobody knew what to do. Then, I\u2019d read about Y Combinator and Techstars, which had started in Boulder, expanded to Boston, and announced Seattle. And I\u2019m like: What about New York? Is this going to happen in New York?\u201d<\/p>\n So, at an event, Tisch chased Techstars<\/a> founder David Cohen and, in relatively short order, he was managing director and a cofounder of Techstars NYC. It was a wild time\u2014tech in New York was finding its legs<\/a>, the rollicking IPO of Facebook was near, and Bloomberg even stood up a short-lived reality TV series about Techstars NYC, complete with cameras following Tisch. Around this time, Kareem Amin, now CEO and cofounder of $5 billion company Clay, was working on his first startup and met Tisch through Techstars.<\/p>\n \u201cHe\u2019s quite charismatic, was then and is now,\u201d said Amin. \u201cHe\u2019s a larger-than-life character. One thing I think he really does is give permission. That\u2019s something you really need in entrepreneurship\u2014and he will just do things and say \u2018here\u2019s what I think.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n Tisch made his first investment before Techstars, writing an angel check with family money into early social media platform Boxee in 2008.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cI needed an entity to put on the cap table,\u201d said Tisch. \u201cSo, I created an LLC called Box for Boxee. I thought it was the single investment I was ever going to make.\u201d<\/p>\n Boxee, of course, was the beginning of BoxGroup. At Techstars, Tisch did his own deals, meeting <\/strong>hundreds of young entrepreneurs and learning to recognize the ones that had potential.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cAt Techstars, you got to see the beginnings of a dream, the beginnings for these raw founders with ambition who wanted to create something from nothing,\u201d said Tisch. \u201cAnd what we do today is the exact same thing: we\u2019re meeting people at the very beginning of their journey. Sometimes they\u2019ve built something, sometimes they have customers, sometimes they have revenue. But a lot of the time, it\u2019s just the people.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cAlways the beginning\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n Tisch spent years figuring out if BoxGroup could work, first taking the leap from Techstars to do deals with family money. He\u2019s very aware that made those early days possible.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201c[Family background] gives you opportunities, and that\u2019s factually going to involve opportunities that other people don\u2019t have,\u201d said Tisch. \u201cTo not acknowledge or appreciate that is aloof and bizarre. At the same time, that privilege also doesn\u2019t automatically allow you to do something on your own.\u201d<\/p>\n BoxGroup\u2019s first three family-backed funds kicked back returns and winners, including ID.me, Warby Parker, Plaid, and Zipline. Finally, in 2019, BoxGroup raised its first institutional fund (and its fourth fund overall) of $82.5 million with a follow-on fund of another $82.5 million.<\/p>\n The firm\u2019s strategy cut against the traditional VC approach from the start. \u201cOur early-stage portfolio, for each one of our funds, is 120 to 150 companies,\u201d said Tisch. \u201cThe traditional venture fund\u2019s about 30 companies, so we\u2019re taking a different approach to how we build portfolios.\u201d<\/p>\n Now, in the mid-2020s, venture seems to be all about big numbers and board seats, fighting tooth-and-nail to defend ownership in hot startups. But BoxGroup\u2019s skipping all that.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cOur win motion is making it easier to get to a yes on both sides,\u201d said Greg Rosen, partner at BoxGroup. \u201cWe don\u2019t peg to ownership, because all that matters is being in the right company. There have been examples where we\u2019ve written 50k checks.\u201d<\/p>\n Cursor, perhaps, is slam-dunk proof that being first and right is most of the battle. And how the deal happened is telling: Claire Smilow, who had taken a break from BoxGroup to go to Harvard Business School, met then-MIT sophomore Michael Truell in 2019. She\u2019d interviewed him for the student VC firm Dorm Room Fund, and thought he was \u201cinsanely special.\u201d When she returned to BoxGroup in 2022, Smilow insisted the firm back Truell before anyone else. Even though Truell was then chasing an esoteric idea around AI for CAD, Tisch and the partners at BoxGroup listened.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cIt takes a really special collaborative culture to be able to say, \u2018We trust you, and we\u2019re going to make this decision together,\u2019\u201d said Smilow. \u201cIf people had said, \u2018I don\u2019t buy that idea, are you sure he\u2019s good enough?\u2019\u2014if I\u2019d had to defend him in a room of really critical senior investors who had all worked there for ten years\u2014it\u2019s possible I could have caved.\u201d<\/p>\n While Cursor\u2019s original parent company Anysphere raised an $8 million seed round in October 2023, BoxGroup made its initial $750,000 investment in Truell in June 2022, in a deal that was among more than 100 investments in BoxGroup\u2019s fifth $127.5 million fund. Though it\u2019s a moving target, pending SpaceX\u2019s performance in the public markets over the next few months, BoxGroup\u2019s return is likely to amount to more than all the LP capital the firm\u2019s ever raised.\u00a0<\/p>\n BoxGroup has other winners in the pipeline, like Ramp, Baseten, Plaid, Rogo, Factory, Mach Industries, and Clay. Clay, the AI sales and data startup, is now valued at $5 billion. The company got off to a rocky start, but Tisch\u2019s bet was on Kareem Amin, who he\u2019d known from their days at Techstars. As Amin tells it now, Tisch was among the first to see Clay hit its hockey-stick-moment, and sign on for the ride.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cWhat David did better than everybody else: when you\u2019re in a hot company and something\u2019s happening, the biggest fights are usually about pro rata,\u201d said Amin, referencing an investors\u2019 right to invest more money to retain their ownership. <\/strong>\u201cDavid was like, \u2018Hey, I want to make it as easy as possible for you, go get that great lead and you tell us what our pro rata is.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n How someone invests says something about who they are. So, this investing approach is BoxGroup, but it\u2019s also Tisch, said Mindy Isenstein, an a16z Perennial partner who\u2019s known Tisch since they were teenagers: \u201cDavid\u2019s acutely aware of who he is and where he fits.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n Indeed, in Tisch\u2019s own words, his purpose is clear.\u00a0<\/p>\n \u201cMy job today is to take money from investors and give them back a lot of money,\u201d Tisch said. \u201cThere\u2019s that purely capitalistic expectation of what you sign up for as an investor. So, when you ask me about how venture\u2019s changed, I don\u2019t think about that. I think about finding the next person that hasn\u2019t started a company yet, who will create something that matters.\u201d<\/p>\n It\u2019s appropriate, perhaps, that Tisch and I had this conversation in his office surrounded by his collections, from colorful Grateful Dead memorabilia to a wall of bears. (Bearbricks, to be specific\u2014a fanciful, bear-like Japanese collectible that\u2019s vinyl and comes in infinite colorways, from camo to watermelon. Tisch estimates he has about 600.) Tisch, like all of us, is in many ways the person he always was.<\/p>\n \u201cI still think I\u2019m an internet investor,\u201d Tisch said. \u201cI like that word better than VC.\u201d<\/p>\n He, in fact, doesn\u2019t like the term VC at all. It has connotations of self-importance, he said, and he bristles at the label. Investing, for Tisch, is especially an exercise in timing. The beginning, after all, is why we start.<\/p>\n \u201cI\u2019ve always loved the beginning and only the beginning,\u201d Tisch smiles. \u201cThe middle and the end are someone else\u2019s problem.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Decades before David Tisch began investing in startups, he was wheeling and dealing sports cards as an 11-year-old…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":1171090,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[3094],"tags":[51,3134,3395,128398,1603,16,15,3141],"class_list":["post-1171089","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-entrepreneurship","tag-business","tag-entrepreneurship","tag-founders","tag-programming","tag-spacex","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-venture-capital"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171089","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1171089"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1171089\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1171090"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1171089"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1171089"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1171089"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}