Month: October 2025

• Roelof Botha said there’s too much venture capital and not enough profitable companies to invest in.
• He said the venture capital industry struggles to achieve expected returns.
• “Investing in venture is a return-free risk,” he said.

Even a veteran Silicon Valley investor can’t make the numbers behind venture capital add up.

Sequoia Capital partner and former PayPal exec, Roelof Botha, appeared on two podcasts over the past week to share a contrarian take on the VC industry — one shaped by more than two decades of investing.

“I think there’s a huge problem with the venture industry. There’s too much money,” Botha said on a recent episode of the “All-In” podcast. “In my opinion, investing in venture is a return-free risk.”

Botha said that venture capital firms invest over $150 billion in companies each year. Yet, even under what he called “reasonable assumptions for return,” the math still doesn’t seem right to him.

He pointed to Figma, which had one of the hottest IPOs of the year, debuting at a near $20 billion valuation. “You’d need 40 Figmas a year for the industry to make the returns work,” he said.

He reiterated his point this week on the “Uncapped with Jack Altman” podcast. “I don’t think venture is an asset class,” he said. “It doesn’t support the numbers.”

He said that, over the last 20 to 30 years, there have only been an average of 20 companies a year that have ended up making exits of $1 billion or more.

Investors — and startup founders — may be too often pursuing quantity over quality, he said.

“There’s a lot more talent than really interesting ideas, or interesting companies to build,” he said. “I think we’re spreading a lot of that talent thin right now.”

Venture capital has had a mostly rough year so far, driven by uncertainty in the economy and markets. Exciting IPOs are few and far between compared to the salad days of 2021.

Figma was one bright spot, as was a handful of major deals, mostly related to AI, that gave some investors a shot at beating the odds.

In March, Google announced that it was buying security startup Wiz for $32 billion in cash, for instance. OpenAI raised another $40 billion round. Anthropic had two funding rounds for a total of $4.5 billion.

Sequoia Capital did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider.

• Representation by Alex Spiro, a lawyer whose clients have included Elon Musk and Kim Kardashian, isn’t cheap.
• Earlier this year, his hourly rate was $3,000. Four years before, it was under $1,600.
• Hourly billing has been big law firms’ bread and butter for decades, despite rising pressure to use alternatives.

The lawyer Alex Spiro can often be seen alongside the world’s top executives, athletes, and entertainers. There he is at the defense table with Alec Baldwin; that’s him with Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sanchez at an Usher concert; and here he is shooting hoops with Joakim Noah, the former Chicago Bulls all-star.

Spiro’s advice doesn’t come cheap. His hourly rate has hit the $3,000 threshold, as first reported by Reuters.

It has risen quickly: As recently as spring 2021, Spiro charged $1,595 an hour. Two years later, it was $2,180 an hour. Those are the rates that Brock Pierce, the child actor-turned-crypto investor, said he was charged for Spiro’s advice by his law firm Quinn Emanuel, which is trying to stick Pierce with a $1 million legal bill that he says isn’t his responsibility.

That means each year, on average, Spiro’s hourly rate rose more than 16%, outpacing inflation (up an average of 4% across the past five years) and rate increases for other lawyers at top law firms. Over the past three years, the largest US law firms have increased their billing rates by 9% or 10% a year, according to Wells Fargo’s legal specialty group.

Spiro’s hourly rate puts him in a very small club. Reuters reported that his Quinn colleague, William Burck, also charges a rate of $3,000, and two lawyers at the firm Susman Godfrey have also been reported to charge that rate. Some law firms have top deals partners who might also bill at such a rate, though none have been publicly identified, and if you know of any, you should call me.

Large corporate law firms get most of their revenue from billable hours, largely from partners like Spiro who reel in work and then push it down to other lawyers who might charge from $600 to $2,000 an hour. While some clients have pressed for alternatives, some 94% of law-firm partners said in a recent survey that hourly billing was their firm’s primary source of revenue.

“The simple reason why lawyers like Alex Spiro can charge so much is that the work they do is valuable,” said Jonathan Choi, a law professor at Washington University in St. Louis who has written about the persistence of the billable hour. When billions of dollars or a decades-long prison sentence is on the line, “litigants think it’s worth it to have the best lawyer they can.”

Spiro declined to comment.

Currently, his cases include a mix of civil and criminal matters. He recently filed two defamation suits, one on behalf of Kim Kardashian and another for a glass company suing a short seller.

This summer, he helped an international financier reduce felony charges related to an alleged Puerto Rican bribery scheme to a misdemeanor. He was recently quoted in The Hill as a “personal attorney” for US Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, and he has represented Elon Musk and Jay-Z in multiple cases.

He’s also been involved with businesses in a nonlegal capacity. Last month, he was named the chair of CleanCore Solutions, a company with 15 employees that abruptly pivoted in September from selling aqueous ozone cleaning products to selling $175 million in new shares to invest in Dogecoin. He was also described as a business partner of Tom Brady in an announcement by massage robot company Aerscape, which recently named the former Patriots quarterback as its chief innovation officer.

All the money he’s making could buy a lot of ice cream.