Reid Dennis flew around the world, re-tracing Amelia Earhart’s last flight.
IVP general partner Steve Harrick animatedly tells me this sometime around 9 AM, as I study an old photo of Dennis, IVP’s founder. It’s the first in the stack of pictures that live on the conference room’s circular table, and it’s oddly striking: It’s Dennis at his desk sometime in the 1980s, surrounded by papers, Ticonderoga pencils, and (if you look really closely) a book titled “New Business Venturism.” Somesh Dash, a general partner at IVP since 2015, kindly indulges me when I ask about the map behind Dennis.
“He was a collector of some older Cartesian maps that showed San Francisco before the fire, and the state of California right around the Gold Rush,” Dash tells me.
The photo of Dennis, in all sorts of places throughout IVP’s San Francisco office, is both a reminder of how long IVP has been around—44 years, an eternity in VC—and the fact there was one person behind the firm in its early days. Why didn’t Dennis want to be the guy?
“When you put your name on the door, it may show that you’re ‘the guy,’ but it doesn’t really speak to longevity,” said Harrick. “What happens after you’re gone? He recognized this was a team game.”
IVP has raised $1.6 billion for its 18th fund, Fortune has exclusively learned. And the firm, founded in 1980, is among the oldest in Silicon Valley. It’s a notable distinction at a moment where there are a lot of questions about what longevity looks like in venture. As the headlines mount about firms closing their doors, IVP’s latest fund, to me, raised the question: What does it mean for a VC firm to construct itself for longevity? I’m sure that every new firm thinks it’s building itself to last, but the intent doesn’t make it real.
I set out to answer that question, in part, because IVP let me. Usually when you tell a firm, “I’d need substantial access to tell this story,” they either try to negotiate what that means or disappear altogether. IVP took it as a different kind of challenge, seemingly asking “how many doors can we open for this journalist?”
And so, on top of poring through all sorts of documents and interviewing founders, I recently spent the day at IVP, ultimately talking to more than a dozen people for this story, on the record, off the record, and everything in between. And that’s how I ended up in that San Francisco conference room at 9 AM, talking about the high-highs and the low-lows of investing.
Flying under the radar
It may seem obvious, but one of IVP’s rules amounts to this: Stick to the strategy, even in a downturn, and that’s how you stay alive. That applies to 2009, when IVP invested in Twitter, and the last few months and years, in which IVP’s invested in companies like Perplexity AI and Glean.
“We firmly believe right now that we’re in a down cycle in venture capital, and it doesn’t bother us one bit,” said Harrick, who’s been at IVP since 2001. “But yet there’s this frenzy going on in AI, we have to figure out how to pick the best companies and build them towards future liquidity.”
No one person owns IVP or is in charge. The firm doesn’t have a CEO or managing partner, and every fund has new owners, each time starting over—it’s a partnership, where nothing gets grandfathered in, sort of like how George Carlin used to go on tour, then generate new material, never wanting anything to get stale. Eric Liaw, a general partner since 2011, describes IVP as “not sharp-elbowed, with a culture of distributed trust.”
I make a point to avoid definitive statements about the culture of a company or a firm––I think you really can’t know unless you work there. That said, what I can tell you after spending a day at IVP is that I do believe Liaw. It’s a warm place (vibe-wise, not temperature-wise) and, in the internal meetings I sat in, I watched intently: Do more junior investors and associates seem at ease expressing their opinions? It certainly seemed like it and, often, it was the most senior person in the room who was listening most intently. In some sense, it feels like the firm is already thinking about its next generation.
It’s really easy to put off moving from generation to generation, Tom Loverro, general partner since 2019, told me.
“Generational transfer when you’re running a venture firm and thinking about your LPs is one of those things that’s just not a today problem—it’s a ten, 20-years out problem. So it’s really hard to get right up front.”
And then, as we walk on the Embarcadero, I ask Loverro a tougher question: Why has IVP flown so far under the radar? Surely the name can’t help (it stands for Institutional Venture Partners and there are exceedingly practical reasons for that). But Loverro says that the structure that has allowed IVP to endure has also perhaps kept it out of headlines.
“I think most of the headlines are written, rightfully so, about founders of the venture community or early stage firms,” he said. “I also think you have some big personalities that have emerged over the years and many have been early stage—and more recently, later stage.”
I can’t imagine who you might be talking about, I joke. Loverro smiles wryly.
“Just by personality, none of the general partners are on a podcast or anything like that.”
When reporting this story, I asked around about IVP a lot, and the two phrases I heard the most were “old guard” and “good investor.” This tracks with what IVP Head of Investor Relations Kelly O’Kane, who manages about 125 core LP relationships, told me about how she sells IVP as “the foundational core of a venture program.”
But IVP’s also been quietly expanding, recently opening an office in London in August led by Liaw and re-joining partner Alex Lim. (Interestingly, fellow growth stage investor Coatue shuttered its London office recently.) And the firm has invested in enormously successful companies at the cutting edge pretty consistently, from then-Snapchat to Netflix to CrowdStrike.
Founders and LPs
As I was speaking to CrowdStrike CEO George Kurtz for this story, he did something that essentially no one ever does when talking to a journalist—he voluntarily, without me asking, disclosed that he’s an IVP LP.
“That’s the real test, right?” Kurtz mused.
That wasn’t the only time this happened as I was talking to IVP-backed founders, who invariably named specifically the partner they worked with. Ilkka Paananen, founder and CEO of Supercell, is also an LP and told me a rousing story about Liaw ordering bear in a Helsinki restaurant the first time the two met. “Your investors can determine your destiny,” Bipul Sinha, founder and CEO of Rubrik, told me.
Jyoti Bansal, founder and CEO of Harness, has worked with IVP a genuinely wild three times and also volunteered his LP status.
“I always like to build companies for the long-term, and that’s how they’re looking to invest,” Bansal said. “They’re not looking for a short-term return or a quick profit or to sell the company quickly. They really are pretty invested in building long-term, great companies.”
Bansal is in a lot of ways a seminal example of an IVP founder.
“We try never to lose track of really good people, because it does come back to execution at the end of the day,” said Dash, who’s been a general partner since 2015. It’s a sentiment I heard more than once throughout the day, talking about growth stage founders with the same personal quality that I usually hear from seed stage investors.
“I think we very often talk about how, we don’t do deals, we make investments,” said Cack Wilhelm, general partner since 2022.
I ask general partner Wilhelm what she wants IVP to be moving forward. A beat.
“The best of the best… You strip everything away and all that matters is we make 10 good investments a year. That’s really all that matters.”
It’s rare someone says that to me, and I find myself believing they really mean it in a day-in-day-out way. But I believe Wilhelm, formerly a professional runner, really means it. She’s ready for IVP to step forward a bit more.
“We’ve kind of been in the background a little bit, but why shouldn’t we get credit for what we’ve done? We’re trying to do that a little more.”
The past can cast a long shadow, while the present is constantly disappearing in a vortex of meetings, emails, deals won and lost. But IVP is clearly in a moment of transition, moving towards a (slightly) more public-facing future. Am I doing them any favors by using the vintage photo of Dennis for this article? Probably not, but it’s the last time I’ll use it. I’m assured that at IVP’s upcoming offsite, they’ll finally corral all seven partners into one place and take a picture. I’ll use that one next time.
So, Reid Dennis flew around the world, re-tracing Amelia Earhart’s last flight.
And his legacy is especially salient now. Last week, Dennis passed away at the age of 98.
And IVP is here for the long haul, but that was baked into the cake by Dennis in the first place. After all, do you know what sounds like the longest haul? Flying a 1955 twin-engine plane about 26,347 nautical miles. So, if IVP is “old guard,” so be it. They’ve kept their plane in the air for (going on) five decades.
