Your VC Is Under More Pressure Than You AreIssue 63 : Why your investor stopped asking you to grow and started asking you to be listable.
I keep hearing a version of the same story from founders this year. Last year, the board meeting was about growth , new markets, the next cohort, how fast can you double. This year, same investor, same table, a different question: what does your path to an exit look like? The follow-on cheque you assumed was coming has gone quiet. Someone mentions a secondary. You walk out of the room wondering what you did wrong. Probably nothing. The pressure you’re feeling didn’t start with you. It started two floors up with the people your VC answers to.
The one piece of plumbingHere’s the mechanism, and then I’ll put the jargon away. A fund reports two kinds of “returns.” One is paper value , what the portfolio is theoretically worth if you mark it to the last round. The other is cash money actually wired back to the people who gave the fund its capital. For years, paper value was enough. A markup on your Series B let your investor raise their next fund on a good-looking number. That era is closing. The people behind the funds have started asking the only question that was ever going to matter: not what is it worth on paper, but how much of my money have you actually returned? You don’t need the acronym for it. You need the behaviour change it sets off because that change is now sitting in your boardroom. This isn’t a story about India running dryAnd here’s the strange part: it’s the opposite. India’s VC and growth market hit roughly $16 billion in 2025 - its second straight year of growth, at a time when capital was getting harder to raise almost everywhere else. The big cheques came back; deals above $250 million doubled year over year. Funds themselves raised more, not less. So the money is here. What changed is where it can get out.
Read that chart slowly, because it’s the whole argument. The exit that works now is the public market. The IPO has gone from one option among several to the option. Strategic sales help at the margin; the quiet secondary market that used to move money around has thinned. If a fund wants to put real cash back in its investors’ hands, it increasingly needs a company that can list.
What I read from thisThis next part I can’t prove with a chart only observe. So take it as a read, not a ruling. If the only reliable way to return cash is to list, then everything your investor is suddenly doing starts to make sense:
None of that is a verdict on you. It’s an investor who needs a listable company more than they need a fast one and is quietly reshaping you into the former. The split screenAnd yet the part that confuses everyone money is still flowing freely at the very start. First cheques are easy. Pre-seed and seed are crowded. It’s the middle, the growth round, where the air gets thin. That’s not a contradiction. It’s concentration.
Capital didn’t leave the building. It walked to the end of the room where the outcomes are cleaner. Investors will happily write a small early cheque on pure optionality, and a large late cheque on a company that looks like it can go public. What’s getting starved is the unglamorous middle the Series B that needs a lot of money and can’t yet promise a public-market ending. What I’d be watchingI’m not going to tell you what to do, you know your own cap table better than I do. But depending on where you sit, here’s the signal I’d keep my eye on: If you’re a founderWatch whether your existing investors are cutting follow-on cheques into anyone not just you. That tells you whether their reserves are open or closed. And assume your next round has to stand entirely on its own legs. If you’re a VC Watch your own cash-returned clock, not your markups. The next fund gets raised on money actually sent back, and the calendar on that is less forgiving than it used to be. If you’re an operator weighing an offer Your ESOP is worth what a cash exit pays, not what the last round valued the company at. Ask what the realistic exit looks like before you fall in love with the strike price. Shubham Bopche - Editor Venture Unlocked is free today. But if you enjoyed this post, you can tell Venture Unlocked that their writing is valuable by pledging a future subscription. You won't be charged unless they enable payments.
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