“Buying junk at a discount is still junk.” – Abe Finkelstein
Abe Finkelstein, Managing Partner at Vintage, has been leading fund, secondary, and growth stage investments focused on fintech, gaming, and SMB software, among others, leading growth stage and secondary investments for Vintage in companies like Monday.com, Minute Media, Payoneer, MoonActive and Honeybook.
Prior to joining Vintage in 2003, Abe was an equity analyst with Goldman Sachs, covering Israel-based technology companies in a wide variety of sectors, including software, telecom equipment, networking, semiconductors, and satellite communications. While at Goldman Sachs, Abe, and the Israel team were highly ranked by both Thomson Extel and Institutional Investor. Prior to Goldman Sachs, Abe was Vice-President at U.S. Bancorp Piper Jaffray, where he helped launch and led the firm’s Israel technology shares institutional sales effort. Before joining Piper, he was an Associate at Brown Brothers Harriman, covering the enterprise software and internet sectors. Abe began his career at Josephthal, Lyon, and Ross, joining one of the first research teams focused exclusively on Israel-based companies.
Abe graduated Magna Cum Laude from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania with a BS in Economics and a concentration in Finance.
Vintage Investment Partners is a global venture platform managing ~$4 billion across venture Fund of Funds, Secondary Funds, and Growth-Stage Funds focused on venture in the U.S., Europe, Israel, and Canada. Vintage is invested in many of the world’s leading venture funds and growth-stage tech startups striving to make a lasting impact on the world and has exposure directly and indirectly to over 6,000 technology companies.
You can find Abe on his socials here:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/abe-finkelstein/
Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. You can also watch the episode on YouTube here.
OUTLINE:
[00:00] Intro
[03:18] Abe’s first investment
[06:19] The definition of quality secondaries in 2003
[09:37] How did Abe know there would be capital to follow?
[15:45] Valuation methodology in the 2000s
[22:28] Minimum meaningful ownership for secondaries
[26:17] Why did founders take Vintage’s call in Fund I?
[30:41] The old-school way of tracking deal memos
[32:06] Our job is to play the optimist
[32:31] The headwinds of raising Vintage Fund I
[36:32] Moving Vintage’s physical books to the cloud
[39:06] How does Abe assign discounts to secondaries?
[42:23] Proactive outreach vs reactive deal flow
[46:18] What does Vintage do to stay top of mind?
[49:49] What’s changed in the secondaries market since 2000?
[55:32] Founder paranoia
[57:56] What does Abe want his legacy look like?
SELECT LINKS FROM THIS EPISODE:
- Vintage Investment Partners
- “How One of VC’s Biggest LPs Builds Relationships” with Abe Finkelstein
- Goldman Sachs
- Riverside
- Alan Feld
- Vintage Investment Partners’ blog
- Samir Kaji
- Samir Kaji’s tweet on annual curiosity revenue
SELECT QUOTES FROM THIS EPISODE:
“Buying junk at a discount is still junk.” – Abe Finkelstein
“Everything that’s going on in the market today, I actually feel people are overreacting to it because there are these ups and downs. Hopefully this current situation doesn’t get people too freaked out because these are the times you want to be investing in. People just don’t think that way. They see the blood on the streets and they run from it first, instead of going in.” – Abe Finkelstein