Exclusive: Two decades in, DFJ Growth raises $1.2 billion for its fifth fund and doubles down on the long game

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13-05-2025

DFJ Growth was founded between two ends of the world.
In 2005, tech was starting to shake off the dotcom bubble burst, while global business as a whole was careening towards 2008 and the Great Financial Crisis. And somewhere in Silicon Valley, Barry Schuler and Randy Glein—along with venture capital pioneer John Fisher and industry veteran Mark Bailey—were thinking about the decades to come. Their thesis was this: To fill the gap between early-stage VC and the public markets, raise a 'growth' fund that helps companies stay private longer and mature before going public.
This is now, of course, the standard thesis for growth funds in VC as we currently understand them. But back in 2005, it was a slightly hare-brained idea. Though there was a mounting history of VCs investing in more established startups that had already achieved product-market fit, Schuler, Glein, Fisher, and Bailey believed that companies were going to stay private a lot longer than anyone had seen in the past—a funky idea at a time when Google had gone public just the year before, after raising only a Series A.
"When we went out to raise the first fund, it was really hard explaining what we were setting out to do,' said Schuler, who had been the CEO of AOL before becoming a VC. 'It would be: 'Tell me again, are you talking about growth equity? What are you talking about?''
'When we were telling our prospective investors for that first fund,' Glein added. ''We're going to find companies that will be worth $1 billion or more,' they'd start counting on their fingers: 'How many of those have there been in the last five years?''
This was eight years before Aileen Lee would coin the term 'unicorn.' Bill Goldsmith, founding and managing member of Nantucket Multi-Managers, has been an LP in DFJ Growth since 2006—across all five funds—and remembers just how curious an idea it was back then.
'If you look at a company like Microsoft—it went public in 1986—the vast, vast majority of the value creation in Microsoft has occurred after it went public,' said Goldsmith. 'And DFJ's thesis that was going to change was a very, very differentiated point of view at the time…It piqued my curiosity, and was a very prescient call I might add, since that's exactly what's happened since 2006.'
What was a curiosity became a tectonic shift, and Schuler and Glein are still working together 20 years later as cofounders and managing partners at DFJ Growth. The firm has raised its fifth fund at $1.2 billion, Fortune can exclusively report. The fund was originally set to be $800 million, the firm says, but expanded to meet demand. Though $1.2 billion is a massive step away from the firm's first fund in 2006, much remains the same. (DFJ Growth takes its name from the legendary early-stage venture firm Draper Fisher Jurvetson, from which it spun out at its founding. The firm retained the DFJ name in part to reflect its continued connection to founding partner Fisher.) For two decades, DFJ Growth has consistently raised on four-year cycles, give or take, much longer than the more common two-year cycles.
'Our first fund was $270 million, and it invested in 26 companies over four to five years,' said Glein. 'Each fund has gotten a little bit bigger than the last, but we're still only investing in 20 to 25 companies per fund over three-and a-half or four years. Some people might call that fairly concentrated.'
Currently, DFJ Growth's portfolio includes Anduril, Stripe, Scale AI, Cellares, and Formlabs, while the firm's exits span Coinbase, Twitter, Anaplan, Unity, and Ring. Jamie Siminoff, chief inventor and founder at Ring, remains grateful to DFJ Growth. As Ring hit a $500 million run rate and Amazon came calling, Glein and the firm believed that Ring had the momentum and much more room to grow. But Siminoff, 'a kid from New Jersey,' couldn't turn down a billion-dollar deal—and Glein immediately understood.
"I think DFJ would bankrupt themselves for the right thing,' said Siminoff, who recently returned to Amazon.
The firm also has invested in Elon Musk's companies for more than a decade, exiting Tesla after the 2010 IPO and right now backing SpaceX and xAI. (DFJ Growth declined to comment on Musk's political activities.) It's a range of wins, across all sorts of cycles—though DFJ Growth has sometimes sidestepped the hype.
'So, we spent most of 2021 making distributions,' said Glein. 'We thought it was the right thing to do. Markets were at all-time highs at that moment, with high multiples, much higher than today. It was hard for us to say 'it can get better than this.''
Of course, that was as good as it's gotten in recent memory. While others focused on funneling cash into sky-high unicorns thinking the numbers would keep going up—Glein and Schuler emphasized the 2021 IPOs of portfolio companies like Sumo Logic and Coinbase as opportunities to distribute to LPs over time, and leveraged secondaries where they could.
'We always look for top-of-market signals,' said Schuler. 'The term to watch out for is, 'this time it's different.' When you hear everyone saying that, you know the end is nigh. You know the party's going to stop soon, and you better have a chair to plop your butt in.'
This is why, said Schuler, contrary to popular belief, venture capital isn't necessarily a long game won with youth.
"I hate to say this, but you have an advantage with gray hair in VC,' he said. 'You've seen the cycles...Being almost an elder statesman now, and having lived through decades of tech boom and bust cycles, they're part of the way Silicon Valley works. It's how we advance.'
And that's part of why the DFJ Growth story underlines the reasons we shouldn't be freaking out right now. 'They're kind of unflappable,' said James Lu, cofounder and CEO of Helix, which DFJ Growth first backed in 2018. 'I think almost no matter what version of the world around me I tell them about, they'll say: 'We've seen that before, here's what you should do.''
It's helpful at a moment when so much feels unprecedented—AI valuations hit unspeakable highs, exits are dry, and tariffs threaten the entire global supply chain as we know it. Every time things go bad, there are the same basic principles guiding surviving and thriving, as Glein puts it: "Our philosophy, especially in times of macroeconomic uncertainty, is to 'control your own destiny.' So, to a founder on a board we're involved in: Let's get in a position where we're able to control our own destiny, based on the capital and the runway you have available."
Because if you take the long view, it's never actually the end of the world.
See you tomorrow,
Allie GarfinkleX: @agarfinksEmail: [e-mail] a deal for the Term Sheet newsletter here.
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This story was originally featured on Fortune.com