Company Builder and Investor, Cleantech, AI & Internet. Data visualization projects: The annual GHG Emissions variwide diagram, TVPI Spectrum™ Generator.
A 3× on €1M and a 3× on €40M are the same number.
They are not the same event. One returned €2M; the other €80M.
Here is the charting problem hiding in a lot of fund reporting. 🧵
Fund multiples are a different visualization problem from public-market returns.
They deserve their own picture — one where the size of the bet, and whether it is real yet, are both visible.
Now split each bar into realized cash (dark) and unrealized mark (light).
Alpha's 12× is almost entirely paper. Beta's 1.6× is mostly banked cash. This is the venture power law shown honestly — the headline winner is a mark until it exits. No single-row chart can show it.
Mean tells you what the fund did.
Median tells you what the typical bet did.
Neither tells you what a venture portfolio is actually shaped like.
Here is what the shape looks like, year by year, in five frames.
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What the spectrum shows that the summary numbers cannot: the bar widths preserve capital weight. The heights preserve multiple. The colors separate realized from unrealized.
The shape IS the data. Mean and median are projections that throw that shape away.