Hartz's A* Closes $450M Fund to Back 30 Companies Nobody Wants

Kevin Hartz's A* has closed its third fund with $450 million, which means the Eventbrite founder is now operating a financial spray bottle with institutional capital. The firm will deploy this capital across "at least 30 startups," a formulation so carefully hedged it deserves its own legal opinion. With an average check size between $3 million and $5 million, A* has essentially decided that the secret to returns in 2025 is mathematical mediocrity—betting on enough companies that one of them might accidentally generate a 10x return to justify the fund's existence.

A* describes itself as a generalist investor backing companies across "AI applications, fintech, healthcare, and security." This is portfolio construction via Wikipedia category browsing. The firm isn't backing a thesis; it's backing categories. In an era where specialized mega-funds are accumulating market share through concentrated conviction, A* is doing the opposite—treating fund management like a mutual fund prospectus circa 2003. Hartz and his team have apparently concluded that the way to win in venture capital is to abandon the veneer of focus and simply become a very expensive lottery ticket dispenser.

This is Hartz's third fund, which means this pattern has now been validated twice before by limited partners who presumably believed that generalist thesis-free investing would eventually produce outsized returns. The math, however, doesn't improve with repetition. If you're writing $3–5 million checks into 30 companies, you're accepting that 20 of them will fail, 8 will return your capital, and you're praying that one or two will achieve venture-scale outcomes. The fund needs at least one 15–20x exit just to clear 3x gross multiple for LPs after fees. That's not a strategy; that's wishful thinking with a PowerPoint deck.

The press release language surrounding A*'s fund is the usual incantation: "generalist approach," "across categories," "aim to back at least 30 startups." Translation: we have no particular edge, we are committed to a statistical approach to value destruction, and we've hedged our minimum commitment with the word "at least" in case we only write 28 checks and want to call it a success.

History suggests this ends predictably. Generalist funds of this size, writing $3–5 million checks into unfocused sectors, typically produce returns that barely justify their existence fees. The winners will exist, sure—one company will go public, another will sell for $500 million—but they'll be buried beneath a graveyard of mediocre positions, pivots, and acqui-hires that slowly bleed capital over ten years.

This fund's existence says everything about the current state of VC: $450 million is now such easy capital to raise that a founder can convince institutions to back a strategy that is essentially "we will hope very hard and write many checks." Concentration wins. Focus wins. Hartz's A* is betting that diffusion is a feature, not a liability.

It isn't. But for Hartz's GP commitment, this is a pleasant way to underperform for the next decade anyway.