In a postmortem, Indie.vc founder shares the reasons why the alternative VC financing experiment failed
Bryce Roberts : Tweets: @indievc , @operaqueenie , @sirjrg , @jhoronjeff , @krdonnelly , @mattallen , @gilxhernandez , @danielvlopes , @gbennett41 , @adamhjk , @cwhogg , @miles_k , @ceonyc , and @mikeolson Tweets: @indievc : What Ended Indie (an exploration of some headwinds we've faced getting Indie to cross over from experiment to an institutional-grade investment strategy) https://medium.com/... Aniyia / @operaqueenie : Lots of valuable insights from @bryce in this write up. My hot take: Institutional inertia is really real. There are still too many people out here controlling shit who are unimaginative, uninspiring, and just don't have the range. https://medium.com/... Jason Garcia / @sirjrg : The valuation aspect in this post is important. Because @indievc co's avoid follow-on investment, valuing the portfolio is limited. The superficial side of the VC treadmill won this round. However, actual cash returns are what matters. I'm waiting for round 2. https://twitter.com/... @jhoronjeff : “But what really drew [founders] to @indievc (besides the money, duh) was an alignment on values, an opportunity to play a role in a growing movement, and a desire to be a part of a community of founders that wanted to build and scale similarly.” 💯from this grateful founder 💪🏽 https://twitter.com/... Katelyn Donnelly / @krdonnelly : “you're playing a value hand in a growth game” but what if the game is about to change.... Since Sept 1, 2020: Small cap value +55% Nasdaq 100 +4% https://twitter.com/... Matt Allen / @mattallen : “To state it clearly and unequivocally, Indie has never, EVER, been about building a portfolio of plodding companies lead by unambitious or unfundable entrepreneurs.” 💯 this. @tractorventures is the same but we *are* a lender first, and earn our equity. Subtle but important! https://twitter.com/... Gil X. Hernandez / @gilxhernandez : Tough to control the narrative when no one will listen or open their minds. I appreciate Bryce mentioning how he doesn't consider Indie RBF and yet everyone continues to write about them like they are. https://twitter.com/... Daniel Lopes / @danielvlopes : “biggest headline of the week is Zapier's $140M of ARR after having only raised $1.5M in total funding is not lost on me. There are thousands more “Zapiers” out there dying of starvation OR suffering from the indigestion of overfunding” 👇 https://twitter.com/... Gregory Bennett / @gbennett41 : Incredibly brave and incredibly insightful. I hope the investors (and LPs) of the future remember the important story of @indievc and @bryce https://twitter.com/... Adam Jacob / @adamhjk : A great read. “What Ended Indie”. If you're in the startup world, one of the best things you can do is try and understand the dynamics between LPs and VCs. This post is a great, humble look inside. https://medium.com/... Chris Hogg / @cwhogg : This is a great post. Honest, emotional, reflective, upbeat. If you've never failed, you've never tried anything new - Albert Einstein. https://twitter.com/... @miles_k : A must read from @bryce on @indievc & the VC landscape: “Turns out when capital is abundant & everything is up & to the right, the way to manage ownership & optionality in the minds of many is simply raising more money at increasingly higher valuations” https://medium.com/... Charlie O'Donnell / @ceonyc : There seems to be no room for nuance in a discussion about funding, growth, and ambition. It is, apparently, a package deal. -@bryce https://medium.com/... @mikeolson : This is an excellent post-mortem on @indievc, by @bryce. Being different made it hard for founders and LPs to wrap their heads around redemptions, IRR and risk. Excellent experiment. Fantastic lab notes. I still believe in the hypothesis. https://medium.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Eleven days after O'Reilly AlphaTech Ventures shut Indie.vc down, founder Bryce Roberts has published 'What Ended Indie,' tracing why a six-year experiment in small-check, revenue-aligned financing never crossed over into an institutional-grade strategy. The earlier profile of the fund framed the thesis — $100K to $1M checks backing sustainable, bootstrapped companies and more diverse founders — while Indie.vc's own data pointed to portfolio health: roughly 10% company mortality versus about 44% for conventionally VC-backed firms.
The postmortem lands amid a broader reassessment of how venture allocates capital, from coverage of over-paying at absurd valuations to critiques of ideology-driven pivots. Aniyia Williams' response captures the core diagnosis: institutional inertia — the people controlling fund decisions favoring familiar structures over ones with different risk profiles.
First-order effects
- LPs evaluated Indie.vc on IRR against conventional funds rather than on its materially lower mortality rate, so a healthier-by-survival portfolio still read as underperformance and ended fundraising.
- Bootstrapped founders — especially those from groups underrepresented in traditional VC — lose one of the few sources writing disciplined $100K–$1M checks without demanding a hypergrowth trajectory.
Second-order effects
- Adjacent alternative-financing structures such as Indie RBF inherit the same hurdle: any modest-return, low-mortality model must now argue against an LP benchmark built for power-law outcomes.
- Rivals running conventional high-valuation strategies face no forced response — the shutdown removes a counter-narrative, reinforcing the allocation status quo that coverage like the state-of-the-industry review describes.
Third-order effects
- If institutional LPs continue to denominate success solely in IRR, experimental financing models will keep exiting via quiet wind-downs regardless of portfolio survival rates, narrowing the capital available to non-hypergrowth and more diverse founder bases.
- The pattern points toward a bifurcated market where alternative structures survive only at angel-scale or outside institutional pools, unless LP evaluation frameworks themselves change — an outcome the postmortem frames as inertia-driven rather than inevitable.
The trend: Institutional venture capital's IRR-first benchmark is squeezing out alternative financing structures whose portfolio health shows up in survival rates rather than headline returns.