Yesterday, I shared what I learned about how much of the company each Netflix cofounder owned (see here). I also learned from reading Netflix’s S-1 document that VC firm Technology Crossover Ventures (TCV) owned roughly 43% before the IPO and roughly 34% after it. I learned that TCV partner and cofounder Jay C. Hoag has been a Netflix board member since 1999 (see here). Jay and TCV invested before the IPO, so they’ve seen the company go from a promising start-up worth tens of millions to a global, publicly traded company worth over $400 billion.

I view investors who found investment firms as entrepreneurs, so I was curious to learn more about Jay and TCV. I’m early in my research, but I found Jay’s interview (listen here) from 2021 on the Invest Like the Best podcast. A few things I found interesting:

• Netflix stock traded down 15–20% after the 2002 IPO and stayed down for about six months.
• TCV was founded as a private and public (i.e., “crossover”) investor. This means that it invests in private technology companies (i.e., start-ups) and technology companies traded publicly on the stock exchanges.
• In 2011, TCV made a PIPE investment in Netflix after the stock had declined 70%. The stock traded down further after the PIPE investment, which was for $400 million, with T. Rowe Price participating, too. More details are here and here.  
• “By being a private investor, it made us better public market investors” and “By being a public market investor, it made us better private investors.”
• “The capital allocation exercise is to look across the technology landscape, take advantage of all the research and knowledge that we have, and look for the best investment . . . and not be bucketed by either private or public.”

Jay and TCV also invested in Zillow, Peloton, Facebook, Airbnb, Tripadvisor, Spotify, and many more wildly successful technology companies. I’m excited to learn more about Hoad and what led to his outsize success.