Insight Partners’ Devin Parekh on why the firm is diversifying while everyone else bets the farm on OpenAI and Anthropic

Insight Partners 的 Devin Parekh：为何当所有人都在 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 上孤注一掷时，该公司却选择了多元化？

Devin Parekh has co-run the heavyweight investment firm Insight Partners for 26 years. Unlike many VCs who are loud on X and seem to live on podcasts, Parekh and Insight Partners tend to lay low. In this sit-down with TechCrunch at its StrictlyVC event on Thursday night in New York, Parekh was refreshingly candid about some of the firm’s wins (it has led and co-led numerous rounds in Databricks, for example, and owns stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic); the deals it hasn’t won, including buzzy AI legal-tech company Legora; conflicts of interest in venture investing; and why Insight has stuck to a diversified strategy even as VCs have piled into the frontier AI labs. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

Devin Parekh 共同管理重量级投资公司 Insight Partners 已有 26 年之久。与许多在 X（原 Twitter）上高谈阔论、似乎生活在播客里的风投人士不同，Parekh 和 Insight Partners 倾向于保持低调。在周四晚于纽约举行的 TechCrunch StrictlyVC 活动上，Parekh 接受了我们的专访。他坦诚地分享了公司的一些成功案例（例如，它领投或共同领投了 Databricks 的多轮融资，并持有 OpenAI 和 Anthropic 的股份）；谈到了错失的交易，包括备受瞩目的 AI 法律科技公司 Legora；探讨了风险投资中的利益冲突；以及为何在其他风投纷纷涌入前沿 AI 实验室时，Insight 仍坚持多元化策略。为简洁明了起见，本文对采访内容进行了编辑。

There’s a researcher who’s become the big story of the week — do you think that concerns about AI risk amount to hysteria, or do you have real concerns?

本周有一位研究人员成为了焦点人物——你认为对 AI 风险的担忧是歇斯底里，还是你确实有真正的顾虑？

Sure, there’s a risk some non-state actor gets access to an open-source model and creates a biological weapon. But there’s an even higher probability we get a massive decrease in the time it takes to develop new drugs and cure diseases. I’ll take that bet. I’m on the board of NYU Langone — what AI is already doing with patient data is amazing. We can look at 50 million patient records and tell someone walking in for something unrelated that they have a 25% chance of a heart attack. Net-net, I think this is highly positive. There are risks, sure, just like there are risks with next-generation drone warfare. Every generation has new risks, and somehow, over time, the world still raises living standards. We’re going to need AI to scale healthcare — the population is aging and there aren’t enough medical professionals to go around.

当然，确实存在非国家行为体获取开源模型并制造生物武器的风险。但我们更有可能看到开发新药和治愈疾病所需的时间大幅缩短。我愿意押注后者。我是 NYU Langone 的董事会成员——AI 在处理患者数据方面所做的事情令人惊叹。我们可以查看 5000 万份病历，并告诉一位因其他原因就诊的患者，他们有 25% 的心脏病发作风险。总的来说，我认为这是非常积极的。当然存在风险，就像下一代无人机战争也存在风险一样。每一代人都有新的风险，但随着时间的推移，世界的生活水平总是在提高。我们需要 AI 来扩展医疗服务——人口正在老龄化，而医疗专业人员供不应求。

Insight has $90 billion in assets under management but seems comparatively quiet compared to firms of similar size. Is that purposeful?

Insight 管理着 900 亿美元的资产，但与同等规模的公司相比似乎相对安静。这是刻意为之吗？

Every venture capitalist thinks they’re an expert on everything now — epidemiology during COVID, geopolitics during the Iran war. I’m not sure we’re all experts on everything. Our attitude has been: Let the portfolio do the talking. We’re investing in founders and companies. We have to communicate enough that people know who we are, but our performance should speak for itself — and that’s driven by the portfolio, not by us being loud.

现在的每一位风险投资人都认为自己是万事通——新冠期间是流行病学专家，伊朗战争期间是地缘政治专家。我不确定我们是否真的什么都懂。我们的态度是：让投资组合来说话。我们投资的是创始人和公司。我们必须进行足够的沟通，让人们知道我们是谁，但我们的业绩应该说明一切——而这取决于投资组合的表现，而不是我们的大声喧哗。

You do early-stage, growth, buyouts, and presumably secondaries. What’s the split?

你们从事早期投资、成长期投资、收购，想必还有二级市场交易。比例如何分配？

It’s temporal, not fixed — we invest globally, so there’s no set geographic or strategy allocation. Look at our last seven funds and you’d see different percentages of early-stage, growth, and buyout in each. Buyouts aren’t great right now — rates are high, debt markets aren’t receptive to software, exit multiples have come down. We haven’t done a major buyout since 2024. On the venture side, valuations are rising at a pace we saw before, in 2021 — and that didn’t end well. Normally, a follow-on round means more data, so you pay a higher price for lower risk. Right now, rounds move so fast there’s almost no incremental data, so you’re paying more without reducing risk. The logical response is to go earlier. With a scale fund, you can make smaller bets — write a $20–25 million check instead of $500 million — and double down on the winners. That’s where our returns have disproportionately come from. With Wiz, we wrote a Series A and kept writing checks, so our gain was much larger than if we’d stopped at the first check. And if Wiz hadn’t worked out, it would have barely dented a fund our size.

这是随时间变化的，不是固定的——我们进行全球投资，因此没有设定的地理或策略分配。看看我们最近的七只基金，你会发现每只基金在早期、成长期和收购方面的比例都不同。目前收购业务并不理想——利率很高，债务市场对软件行业不买账，退出倍数也下降了。自 2024 年以来，我们没有进行过重大的收购。在风投方面，估值上升的速度与 2021 年我们所见的一样——而那次的结果并不好。通常情况下，后续融资意味着更多的数据，因此你支付更高的价格以换取更低的风险。但现在，融资轮次进行得太快，几乎没有增量数据，所以你付出了更多，却并没有降低风险。合乎逻辑的应对方式是投得更早。通过规模化基金，你可以进行较小的押注——开出 2000 万至 2500 万美元的支票，而不是 5 亿美元——然后在赢家身上加码。我们的回报很大程度上就来自于此。以 Wiz 为例，我们参与了 A 轮融资并持续跟投，因此我们的收益远高于仅在第一轮投资的情况。即使 Wiz 没有成功，对我们这种规模的基金来说，损失也微乎其微。

As a global investor, what percentage of your deals are regional versus concentrated somewhere like the Bay Area?

作为全球投资者，你们的交易中有多少比例是区域性的，有多少集中在像湾区这样的地方？

Talent has gone flat globally. We competed for Legora — my partner Jeff Horing flew to [Stockholm] to pitch the company, because that’s where the founder was. We lost that one to General Catalyst. That said, AI infrastructure talent is genuinely concentrated in San Francisco — my 23-year-old son, also a VC, is moving there because he says you can’t invest in AI without being there. But talent density varies by vertical: Ramp is financial services, and that talent is concentrated in New York. So vertical AI investing can be more geographically diverse than pure AI infrastructure.

人才在全球范围内已经趋于平坦。我们曾竞争过 Legora——我的合伙人 Jeff Horing 飞往 [斯德哥尔摩] 去推销我们的公司，因为创始人就在那里。但我们输给了 General Catalyst。话虽如此，AI 基础设施人才确实集中在旧金山——我 23 岁的儿子也是一名风投，他正搬到那里，因为他说如果不身处其中，就无法投资 AI。但人才密度因垂直领域而异：Ramp 是金融服务公司，而这类人才集中在纽约。因此，垂直领域的 AI 投资在地理分布上可以比纯 AI 基础设施投资更加多元化。

Why did you lose Legora to General Catalyst?

为什么你们在 Legora 的竞争中输给了 General Catalyst？

I don’t know the specific reason, but I think they sold their value proposition better than we sold ours that time. There are plenty of examples where it went the other way. It’s a big world; we don’t need to win every deal.

我不知道具体原因，但我认为那次他们比我们更好地推销了自己的价值主张。有很多反过来的例子。世界很大，我们不需要赢得每一笔交易。

You’re invested in rival companies — OpenAI and Anthropic. That was once taboo in VC. Did that cause any anguish inside the firm? Did you worry about what founders would take away from this?

你们投资了竞争对手——OpenAI 和 Anthropic。这在风投界曾经是禁忌。这在公司内部引起过不安吗？你是否担心创始人会对此有何看法？

The internal debate was more about whether we should have gotten into earlier rounds. It’s very stage-dependent. Khosla did OpenAI’s Series A, and there’s no way they could have then invested in Anthropic, and if we’d done Anthropic’s Series A, we likely couldn’t have done OpenAI either. Once you’re at a later stage, off the board, not driving governance, you’re just buying a great stock. We saw OpenAI as the dominant consumer play and Anthropic as having a clear enterprise strategy; that’s shifting in real time. As these companies needed to raise $30–$100 billion, they stopped being able to dictate exclusivity. That said, at the Series A/B stage, we do have information-sharing restrictions and we don’t invest in directly competing companies, though some founders are sensitive even to 2% revenue overlap.

内部的争论更多在于我们是否应该更早进入。这非常依赖于投资阶段。Khosla 参与了 OpenAI 的 A 轮融资，他们不可能再投资 Anthropic；如果我们参与了 Anthropic 的 A 轮，我们可能也无法投资 OpenAI。一旦到了后期阶段，不在董事会，不参与治理，你其实就是在买入一只优质股票。我们认为 OpenAI 是占据主导地位的消费者应用，而 Anthropic 有明确的企业战略；这种情况正在实时变化。随着这些公司需要筹集 300 亿到 1000 亿美元，它们已无法再要求排他性。话虽如此，在 A/B 轮阶段，我们确实有信息共享限制，也不会投资直接竞争的公司，尽管有些创始人即使对 2% 的收入重叠也非常敏感。

Are you getting more aggressive on physical AI?

你们在物理 AI 领域是否变得更加激进？

Physical intelligence companies are still largely science projects. It’s not that they won’t become real businesses, but you’re making a bet on when robotics adoption happens, layered on top of a bet on whether it happens at all. We’re watching, but we’re not there yet. My son thinks it’s the hottest space around and that I’m crazy to ignore it, which is exactly what I’d expect from a 23-year-old.

物理智能公司目前在很大程度上仍是科学项目。并不是说它们不会成为真正的企业，但你不仅是在押注机器人技术何时普及，还要押注它是否会普及。我们正在观察，但还没有入场。我儿子认为这是目前最热门的领域，觉得我忽视它是疯了，这正是我对一个 23 岁年轻人所期待的反应。