Welcome back from the long weekend! While many of you were (hopefully) relaxing, we here at Term Sheet were unwinding the best way we know how: by publishing a deep dive into the controversy and questions surrounding closely-watched Tiger Global.
Last week we wrote about the mysterious memo circulating around Wall Street. But that’s not the only thorn in the firm’s side right now. As we detailed for Fortune, Julian Robertson’s nepo-baby funds are under attack from all sides. Some of that traces back to Tiger Global’s go-go days of 2021, an era that seems positively mesozoic when seen from today. As we wrote:
By 2021—two years after private equity specialist [Lee] Fixel had left the fund to start his own firm—Tiger had taken its need for speed up a notch. The pace at which the firm funded startups saw a tidal wave increase, and Tiger garnered a reputation—met with much criticism from other venture competitors—for writing checks within mere days at lofty valuations. Prior to the end of 2020, the most deals Tiger invested in on the private side in a single quarter was 30 (in the second quarter of 2019). Just three years later, the firm’s highest quarterly deal count soared to a whopping 133, in the first quarter of 2022, per PitchBook private-markets data provided to Fortune. In 2021, Tiger backed the equivalent of nearly one startup every day—including weekends.
“They kind of flipped a switch,” Kyle Stanford, a senior venture capital analyst at PitchBook, said of Tiger’s strategy in 2021. “They worked fast. They just kind of overcapitalized every company,” he says.
But the unicorn era—and all the inflated valuations, impossible targets and out-there projections—would soon come crashing to a halt as the Federal Reserve started furiously fighting inflation.
“Everything that they thought was going to happen, just kind of went away instantly, almost, in January” of this year, PitchBook analyst Stanford said. “To see them fall this fast is not surprising, they’ve obviously had trouble raising their next fund; they downsized it a couple times. And so 2021 just became this blip—that they saw something in the market and they were trying to capitalize [on] it. And they just kind of overextended themselves into VC.”
In our reporting we dug up investor letters, performance figures, and talked to LPs and analysts about how Tiger Global got into this hole—and whether they can get out. Ease into your Tuesday and read the whole story here.
See you tomorrow,
Anne Sraders and Jessica Mathews
Email: anne.sraders@fortune.com and jessica.mathews@fortune.com
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Joe Abrams curated the deals section of today’s newsletter.
