“The companies that end up being massively valuable are overvalued, quote unquote, at every round. And so if you take a view that you're going to turn down things that are overvalued at the very moment in time they're being valued, you will systematically miss the power law companies on average.”
How I Invest with David Weisburd · Startups & Venture · October 2026
Harris explains why his firm, Bain Capital Ventures, had good returns but too few huge winners. He says risk-management habits from Bain Capital's private equity and credit businesses crept in, and the firm balked at market prices when they got high. He names Databricks, Stripe and Ramp as companies that always looked expensive.
Transcript
…surely return multiples of its fund. So plenty of examples where in the future, once they're liquid, we can talk about them. There's not so much what are the returns, particularly in light of the fact that in recent years there have been fund returners just not yet liquid. But the why behind it.
I imagine this is a pretty big issue. You guys must have discussed it internally. Why do you believe this has happened at Bain Capital?
…an outlandish proposition, to be sure. And this is actually the sort of thing we like. But where we struggled historically is sort of paying market price when market price got really high. And I think that that's a fundamental problem, actually, in a power law industry, because price is a signal of a sort. It can obviously be wrong, but the fact is like Databricks and Stripe and Ramp, I mean, the companies that end up being massively valuable are overvalued, quote unquote, at every round. And so if you take a view that you're going to turn down things that are overvalued at the very moment in time they're being valued, you will systematically miss the power law companies on average.
How would you describe that so many of the winners are quote unquote overvalued?
We're talking about semantics here. I mean, in retrospect, they were undervalued, right? But on a multiple basis. They have extraordinary founders. They have extraordinary ambition. Those elements that led to them being these hyperscaled winners were present at the time. And thoughtful investors…
episode is presented by Juniper Square, the operations partner for private markets. Early Bird from Europe did a study on this. They figured out that this price persistence continues to persist. In other words, like every round is overvalued versus the comps. So another way is that the…
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