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"The direct sponsor does all the leg work, doing the hard and tedious task of sorting wheat from chaff. Statistics I've seen suggest that something like 2 out of 3,000 deals that a funded sponsor looks at will be funded. I don't have numbers on fundless sponsors, but it has to be worse.  That's a lot of chaff.  A"

"One of the things I learned early in my work as a professional investor is that the world is literally awash in capital. There is so much money seeking return - from traditional mutual funds and university endowments, to family offices and family foundations, to Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds and developing-world oligarchs with global investment appetites - that there simply aren't enough places for it all to flow. Further, because these pools of capital are so large, managers need to deploy capital in large increments simply to make it feasible to manage and track their portfolios."

"Branding as the road to riches The new tech economy, then, is not necessarily about building new technology. It is about capturing a sector with good branding, pots of money to fund growth, and the network effects to spur growth and retention. Holmes argues that half of the value of a company such as Google lies in its brand, in people instinctively thinking of Google when they want to search for something. It is the same for Facebook and social; Amazon and online shopping; and perhaps one day Uber and transportation."

""We believe very positively on the opportunity of FinTech, particularly marketplace lending" This is a "long wave opportunity" to fund and build other platforms and ecosystems. Canaan is going to continue to invest heavily in the ecosystem."