The Best Venture Firm You’ve Never Heard Of
Hummingbird Ventures has built an astonishing track record – all while staying out of the limelight. Its secret to success? A meticulous approach to identifying outlier founders.
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Actionable insights
If you only have a few minutes to spare, here’s what investors, operators, and founders should know about Hummingbird Ventures.
Quiet excellence. Hummingbird is not a brand name firm, even in its native Europe. Despite its low profile, it has produced exceptional returns since its start in 2010. Its first three vintages have all produced returns greater than 10x on a net basis. Critically, these are not just paper gains – Hummingbird has also distributed real capital.
All that matters. Ask managing partners Barend Van den Brande and Firat Ileri for the strategy behind their success, and they will quickly point to one variable: the founder. While other factors matter, Hummingbird’s team believes that the right entrepreneur is 80% of the equation.
Difficulty and divergence. Lots of venture shops consider founders important in their rationale. No one assesses them quite like Hummingbird. The firm adheres to a meticulous psychological approach that looks for unusual signals. For example, Hummingbird looks for neurodivergent founders who have endured real trauma.
(Don’t fear) The Reaper. Hummingbird believes that every “legendary” company goes through two to three near-death moments. That has come from its experience backing startups like Peak Games and Gram Games. This belief has led Hummingbird to double down on startups when other investors have packed up their pencils. According to leadership, this has been a key driver of returns.
Contrarian by nature. Ileri and Van den Brande see considerable flaws in the venture ecosystem. Their contrarian takes include a disdain for platform teams, skepticism for verticalized, sector-specific funds, and general disbelief in the idea of VCs “adding value.”
The bumblebees were kept in the freezer.
When the boy searched for ice cream, he would find them. It wasn’t easy to tell what they were at first: their bodies piled on top of one another, paper wings stiffened, and half-yellow coats furred by the cold. He was old enough to understand why they made no more sound but not why his grandfather had put them there to begin with. What motivated a person to close a bag of bumblebees to the euthanizing cold of a freezer? What did his grandfather hope to achieve?
It was Barend Van Den Brande’s first confrontation with how strangely, how discomfitingly intellect could manifest. He would come to make a career out of such encounters. In 2010, Van den Brande founded Hummingbird Ventures, registering the investment firm in his native Belgium. He did so with little fanfare and absent of interest from Silicon Valley’s brand name firms. Anyone bored enough to note Hummingbird’s establishment would hardly have given it more than a moment’s thought: an unheralded manager had started a small venture capital firm in a small country. Belgium, then as today, was best known for its blonde ales and wafels, not its vibrant tech sector.
From his home base in Antwerp, however, Van den Brande set about building his venture firm. He did so without many conventional advantages. He did not have a proven track record, nor had he apprenticed at a storied fund. Though he had worked as a financial analyst in Boston for a spell, he had few connections to the power brokers of Sand Hill Road, let alone the endowment managers sitting beyond the green-felt lawns and pale stone of the Ivy League. And, as he would have told you himself, he was a bit odd. Van den Brande lacked the easy charm that could beguile entrepreneurs into parting with their equity or seduce limited partners into penning a check.
What he did have was formidable intelligence, jolting directness, ferocious curiosity, and a total allergy to bullshit. These final two traits would prove the making of Van den Brande and his firm.
In the thirteen years since its founding, Van den Brande has built Hummingbird into one of the best-performing venture funds of the past decade. It has delivered three vintages with over 10x net returns. It’s done so without hitting the buzziest startups of the past cycle, instead capitalizing on a roster of relatively under-the-radar giants, including Peak Games, Gram Games, Kraken, BillionToOne, and FPL Technologies. It’s the kind of sustained excellence liable to make marquee fund managers up the dosage of their daily nootropics out of concern.
Hummingbird has achieved this success while staying out of the limelight. True, it has built a strong reputation in Europe. But ask the average tech founder for the continent’s power players, and Index, Accel, Atomico, Balderton, and Northzone are more likely to be mentioned. Make the same query about the United States, and the names of several other avians, mammals, trees, and fruits would be mentioned before anyone turned to the humble Hummingbird. Though known by their entrepreneurs and listed on the occasional cap table, they are virtually anonymous to even sophisticated American audiences.
Van den Brande and his team have driven such returns by ignoring much of the asset class’s conventional wisdom – and forging an extremely opinionated investing framework. Many venture capitalists emphasize the importance of the entrepreneur to their underwriting; none mean it quite as much as Hummingbird. For Van den Brande’s firm, the founder is not merely important; they are the only thing that matters. Forget about flocking to a hot new market or playing nice with Sequoia or Benchmark. If you want to deliver consistently superior returns, Hummingbird believes you need to find the most exceptional entrepreneurs on earth – not merely the top 1%, but the top 0.1%.
Finding such outliers is not easy. It also might not look like you’d expect it to. Hummingbird isn’t searching for the slick Stanford MBA, affable Google APM, or winsome McKinsey associate. It cares little for credentials or the experienced pitchman’s smooth patter. Instead, Van den Brande’s seven-strong roster of investors is pursuing a very specific kind of entrepreneur – someone with unreasonable ambitions, astonishing clock speed, and a frightening hunger that portends a deep, personal unease. Such people do not always make adept students or easy colleagues. But they’re liable to have a handful of bumblebees buried in the freezer. And to have a good reason for it, too, if you care enough to ask.
Hummingbird’s chief virtue is its ability to ask questions that give these anomalous founders the comfort to open their metaphorical ice boxes and reveal the strange, raw edges of their personality inside.
To understand how this firm works, we have spent more than four months researching Hummingbird, investigating its returns, and speaking with nearly twenty sources, including its founders, team members, entrepreneurs, external parties, and other fund managers. Many shared their stories on record for the first time.
The investor
Throughout his career as a venture capitalist, Barend Van den Brande has likely heard upward of 10,000 pitches. Ten thousand times, a founder has sat before him and told a story. They have spoken of their background. They have narrated the problem before them. And they have unfurled their solution.