Ed Grefenstette and Sean Warrington – Venture Market Update (EP.488)

Capital Allocators – Inside the Institutional Investment Industry

Ted Seides – Allocator and Asset Management Expert

Business, Investing

4.7 • 841 Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2026

⏱️ 68 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Today's show dives into the state of the venture capital from the LP perspective.

Sean Warrington is a Partner on the Private Investments team at Gresham Partners, a $13 billion multifamily office, and Ed Grefenstette is the CEO and CIO of The Dietrich Foundation, a $1.6 billion foundation with an unusually large allocation to private markets and venture capital. Ed was a past guest on the show and that conversation is replayed in the feed.

Our conversation covers the changing landscape of venture capital, including pricing distortions, power law winners, liquidity issues, GP behavior, and scaled platforms. Throughout the insightful conversation, Ed and Sean share LP strategies to capture opportunities and navigate risks across stages, sectors –mostly AI – and geographies.

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Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (⁠https://thepodcastconsultant.com ⁠)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Is venture broken? Is this worth the effort? There are a lot of new entrants, new LPs who came
0:07.0	into venture in, unfortunately, 20 and 21. These are going to be tough vintages. They're in front
0:13.4	of their investment committees now saying maybe we shouldn't have tried this. Some of those tourists
0:18.1	are going to go to the sidelines for a while. That would be very healthy
0:21.2	for the ecosystem. The good news for those of us who are sticking around and staying committed
0:25.7	to it, I know Sean feels this way as well, we now have good data over the last six years of the
0:31.5	behavior of some of the GPs. So when we're doing our underwriting, it's hard to distinguish
0:36.1	luck from skill when everything is up and to the right.
0:38.3	But now you can look back and say, okay, what did you do in 20 and 21 and 22?
0:43.7	How sensitive were you to these really high valuations?
0:47.5	How disciplined were you in deploying the capital?
0:50.4	Now you have things to look at and how they manage their portfolio over the last couple of years.
0:56.2	And you talk to the founders themselves, how supportive was this GP?
0:59.7	You haven't been able to re-had a down round here, how did they react?
1:02.7	All this is an important data now that helps us make better decisions about who we want to back going forward.
1:09.1	I'm always looking for a silver lining.
1:10.9	That's one of them.
1:11.8	You now have more robust data due to your underwriting.
1:21.0	I'm Ted Cydies, and this is Capital Allocators.
1:27.0	Today's show dives into the state of venture capital from the LP perspective.
1:32.8	My guests are Sean Warrington and Ed Greshonstadt.
1:36.6	Sean is a partner on the private investments team at Gresham Partners, a $13 billion
	...

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