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Comment by w1ntermute | Hacker News Reader

> As a rule of thumbs, VCs take 2% of the fund's totally funding every year as "management fee", to pay for salaries, office rentals, marketing etc.

a16z spends much more than most VC firms on providing all kinds of services (such as recruiting) to their portfolio companies, and hires a ton of people for that purpose. It's not clear whether those expenses come out of the management fee or not.

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They're clearly not the only ones to do that. For instance Social Capital provides all portfolio startups with a comprehensive data analytics platform and a team of data scientists. For recruiting, almost all large VC funds have one or more dedicated talent sourcing people - Index, Accel, etc. Bottom line: I don't see any specific reason to justify a 3% management fee, except the cofounders' unique insights and contacts in the Valley and their personal relations with LPs

That's interesting to know. My guess is that, other than the management fee, there are two potential sources of money that can pay for those additional services:

1. A portion of the profit that a16z made from previous exits.

2. This is a less likely option - asking portfolio companies to pay for those services. I know VCs that bill their portfolio companies for certain professional services.

Which services? Charging for services is common in private equity, but I was not aware that VCs also did so. Are these top-tier VC funds?

Design, legal, engineering, etc.

A16Z has a lot of in house partners that focus on things other than just investments.

Edit: Just want to say that the top funds do not charge for these services. Some funds do - they invest and then you pay them back a bunch of money for services.

Business development, market assessmebt, technical development etc.

None of these firms that charge their portfolio companies are the typical valley top-tier funds, but I do not think it means that charging portfolio companies for professional services is a bad thing.

This is part of the model of Playground.global, Andy Rubin's hardware-oriented VC firm, although you pay with extra equity at the common price.

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