3 Views on a16z’s latest reported early-stage effort

a16z, a venture capital firm known for its large fund sizes and for shaking up the VC game when it piled into the industry back in 2009, is cooking up a new strategy to potentially bolster its deal flow, according to a recent report. It’s creating a fund-of-funds to invest in smaller venture capital pools, giving it visibility on the next generation of breakout tech companies.

a16z did not respond to requests for comment on this story.

The trend of large funds — traditionally more focused on later-stage deal-making, as it’s hard to deploy big funds into smaller, earlier deals — trying to find a way to get involved in earlier-stage companies is not new. And it is not hard to see the logic behind the a16z effort, provided that it pans out as expected: If it is hard for huge funds to go early, and therefore small, why not simply fund the folks investing early, and then leverage those relationships?

The new a16z effort sparked up a little conversation inside of TechCrunch+, so we decided to take to our traditional “talk about it out loud” model of sharing different perspectives on the matter from inside our newsroom.