Edition #10: Thrive’s Path to $10B, 132 VC Predictions Mapped, Fund Benchmarks 2025
Hey folks,
This is Pavel and welcome to the 10th edition (February, 2026) of Murph Capital newsletter.
This is my monthly brain-dump of the most useful stuff I’ve come across as an operator in the GP/LP world.
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5 Best Tweets
“Main challenges for LPs in VC”
By Pavel Prata from R136 Ventures
“Top 1% VC exits are getting even bigger”
By David Clark from VenCap International plc
“Jared Leto is cooking the tech billionaires in angel returns”
By Matthew Kobach from Nothbeam
“How we turned 2,080 analyst hours into a $600 AI bil”
By Clark Tang from Altimeter Capital
“Earthling VC $5M Fund I pitchdeck uncovered”
By Arian Ghashghai from Earthling VC
5 Best Linkedin Posts
“Thrive Capital’s $10B milestone visualized”
By Pavel Prata from R136 Ventures
“Why ‘Top decile’ VC performance is often just fundraising theater”
By Dan Gray from Odin
“How much LP allocators really earn?”
By Pavel Prata from R136 Ventures
“Secondaries as the new spine of venture liquidity”
By Tomasz Tunguz from Theory Ventures
“Top 4 insights from Allocates’ annual state of the markets report”
By Samir Kaji from Allocate
5 Substack Stories
“How to pick emerging managers in 2026?”
By David Zhou from Superclusters / Pavel Prata from R136 Ventures
“2026 VC predictions market map”
By Pavel Prata from R136 Ventures
“VC-backed startups are low status”
By Michael Dempsey from Compound
“The hierarchy of Limited Partners”
By James Heath from Athenaeum Partners UK
5 Best Reports
“The Fund Benchmarks Report 2025”
By Abe Othman / Meredith Luera from AngelList
“State of Private Markets: 2025 in review”
By Ashley Neville / Kevin Dowd from Carta
By Contrary Research
“State of the Markets: H1 2026 SVB’s innovation economy outlook”
By Marc Cadieux / Mark Gallagher / Eli Oftedal / Josh Pherigo / Jake Ledbetter, CFA / Andrew Pardo from Sillicon Valley Bank
“State of Pre-Seed: 2025 in review”
By Hamza Shad from Carta
Iconic Funds Snapshot
A 2013 debut fund nailed a wildly outsized portfolio, turning early, data‑moat seed bets into a 10% unicorn hit rate and historic emerging‐manager performance.
Emerging Managers Interviews
Solo GP Jordan Wan, CFA turned GTM expertise into an oversubscribed $30M Fund II anchored by top institutions. I asked him…
27 New VC Funds
View all other funds by clicking the button below.
121 VC/LP Events
3 Best Podcasts
Benchmark's Peter Fenton, Eric Vishria, Chetan Puttagunta, and Ev Randle join Jack Altman to make the case for why staying small, equal, and craft-focused beats scaling into a large platform. They explain how capping fund size, eliminating residual carry, and keeping partner count deliberately low creates faster decisions, cleaner founder relationships, and better incentive alignment — no internal politics or junior service layers to navigate.
Deedy Das, Partner at Menlo Ventures and former founding team member at Glean, breaks down the $100M Anthology Fund — a joint Menlo–Anthropic vehicle where Menlo calls the shots and Anthropic brings models, credits, and product access. He’s backing teams that deeply embed Claude into real workflows, not startups bolting on a chatbot as an afterthought. His bet: 70–80% of today’s software built on top of foundation models will disappear, and the survivors will win through speed of iteration, proprietary data, and genuine depth inside how companies actually operate.
Dan Gray on how the VC market is splitting into haves and have-nots. LPs are re-underwriting early-stage funds with a sharper eye on DPI and time to liquidity, making them harder to convert if your strategy doesn't fit their portfolio construction. His advice to emerging managers: get honest about where you actually sit, build a tight story around a real sourcing edge, and only pitch LPs whose mandate genuinely allows for smaller funds. The ones still raising all have one thing in common: a clear, repeatable narrative.
Personal Notes
10th newsletter. This is our 10th Murph Capital issue – a small milestone for me personally. When I started Murph ten months ago, I expected a niche project read by a handful of managers. Instead, the feedback from both GPs and LPs pushed it into something much larger. We reached 1,000 subscribers in the first 8 months, and then 2,000 just 2 months later. The growth changed the responsibility – we’re no longer just writing, we’re building infrastructure around it.
Content tracks. Murph on Substack now operates across 4 formats: the flagship newsletter, in-house proprietary research & market maps, interviews with fund managers, and now guest essays. Our first guest post with David went live this month, and we already have a very strong lineup scheduled ahead. The goal isn’t more content – it’s a clearer signal layer around how venture actually works.
New website. Next week we’re releasing our new website. It will be an MVP by design – we decided to ship early instead of waiting for the full vision. Even the first version will include tools I personally wished existed while talking to GPs and allocators for years. Alongside the launch, I’ll publish a short note explaining why Murph is building media in the first place. Stay tuned!
Allocator-only newsletter. Next month we’ll launch a private LP letter. We’ll share short memos on selected funds from Murph’s pipeline — free, but selective. The goal isn’t deal flow distribution but signal quality, so access will be limited to active allocators. The signup section will appear on the website soon.
Life updates. February was basically a locked-in month trying to compress multiple launches into 28 days before spring. The only escape was a quick trip to Iowa (not mountains, more like optimistic hills) just enough to pretend ski season happened. The rest of the time: Chicago cold and shipping mode. We keep building.
Previous Editions
What would you like to see in the next episodes? I'd love to hear your ideas – just hit reply and let me know what would be most valuable to you.
This really resonates with me. Thanks for sharing.
This really resonates with me. Thanks for sharing.