Origins - Inside Venture Capital, Hosted by a GP and an LP · OpenLP from Sapphire Partners

Franchise Funds: Becoming (and Remaining) One with Stephen Bluestein

·51 min·2 clips

Less than 1% of venture funds become franchise funds—here's what the data actually shows.

Beezer Clarkson is on her own. Nick Charles is away after welcoming his first child, so the episode has a two-LP feel right away. Stephen Blustein brings the outside chair Beezer wants here: an LP with direct investing experience across Bessemer, TCV, and Lightstreet before his new primary investments role at Adam Street Partners. The topic is franchise funds, but they do not treat the phrase like a trophy. They stay closer to the question LPs have to underwrite: when is a venture firm durable beyond its original founders? Stephen keeps it conditional. The answer depends on when the founders started, how old they were, and whether the next generation of investors has become real inside the firm. Fund numbers help, but only so much. He points to the five-to-seven range as the messy zone where succession, team change, and go-forward identity start to bite. Beezer pushes the math further. She ties that same range to graduation rates, visible track records, and the awkward fact that even making it to fund eight does not automatically make a firm a franchise. Performance is thorny, too. Beezer avoids the tidy answer that a franchise fund just needs multiple three-times-net outcomes in a row. Vintage years complicate the read. She names 2021 and 2022 as tough periods, which keeps the conversation honest about scoreboards. Durability is the thread. A franchise fund has to get through succession, show LPs a track record they can see, and decide where it wants to keep playing. Stephen and Beezer leave the ending open, with franchise status treated as something to keep watching in the market.

As heard by us

A practical LP-side look at how venture firms become durable franchises.

Origins treats the franchise fund question as a study of how venture firms age, and Stephen Blustein's path through Bessemer, TCV, Lightstreet, the Packard Foundation, and Adam Street Partners makes that LP angle feel concrete.

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Why you'd press play

See how venture firms earn franchise status, and how LPs decide when one is crossing that line.

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