This week brought some interesting news: Indie.vc is halting their investing activities for now. In this Medium post, founder Bryce Roberts shares that a lack of support from the institutional LP market has forced him to shift his focus back to a strategy that enjoys broader support: “..without the institutional support to scale the Indie Economy we envision, it’s time to take our learnings and refocus on other strategies within the portfolio to deploy our capital.”

Several of you reached out this past week (and several of my friends in VC did as well) to ask what I thought about this, and whether it was a signal of something we ought to be thinking about or reacting to. I don’t think I’m any better suited to have a perspective on this than you all, frankly, but since I keep getting asked, I’ll share a couple of my thoughts. 

First, most institutional LPs today do not broadly support the thesis that there are portfolio strategies out there that can produce returns while focusing on the companies who won’t be unicorns. The institutional allocators out there simply have not made that jump yet, and I think it will be a while. The Capital Access Lab is an opening gambit in the effort to get those institutional LPs exposure to - and eventual comfort with - this market, but it remains in its early days and there’s a lot of work to do and there are a lot of lessons to learn.

Second, most of the strategies attacking the non-unicorn market are, after all, experiments. There are very few tried-and-true approaches to financing growth in this market. It makes sense to me that it will take multiple attempts to find the right mix of strategies. What Indie learned will no doubt inform the next iteration and the next attempt by the next innovator in the market. 

One question I keep getting is: is this bad for the market, i.e., is it bad for those of us building ways to fund these companies? I think the answer is… not at all. Indie backing away from this strategy doesn’t change the market, nor does it make less real the need for alternative capital. Indie helped shine a light on the problem in a unique way, and I think likely inspired a lot of entrepreneurs and investors to think differently. At the end of the day, this movement has momentum, and that has not changed.

So keep building, friends, and keep making a difference.