🦅 Blackbird blowback and Australia's VC inflection point
The country's biggest VC fund has copped criticism over gender diversity and its early stage bets in recent weeks. But is it fair?
Ten years after Blackbird Ventures launched its first fund, the modern Australian VC industry it helped birth has reached an inflection point.
Over the past fortnight a few media grenades have been thrown in the direction of the biggest VC fund in the country, which is widely respected by founders and investors but is now copping criticism over claims of aggressive early stage bets and gender diversity (the latter of which remains an industry wide issue).
But this bubbling tension reflects the reality that one decade in, the strategies of VC titans backed by Australian super funds have diverged from those of the smaller to medium-sized funds. Ultimately, this means the parameters of success (and risk appetite) in VC are splintering. And this is not a bad thing.
Blackbird has become synonymous with scale and ambition and its investment thesis is emblematic of this — it needs to make higher conviction bets and generate outsize returns to move the needle for its investors. It cannot afford to miss a unicorn. This isn't merely an investment preference; it's an existential imperative shaped by the fund's size and the expectations of its heavyweight investors, such as Hostplus and AustralianSuper.
