Ask HN: When a VC loses money, how does that affect the rest of its portfolio?

Sequoia reportedly lost $213m on the FTX debacle (though has billions in gains from elsewhere to offset these losses). I'm wondering, will Sequoia increase pressure on the remainder of its portfolio to turn a profit? Will they increase scrutiny of each business? More generally, how do VCs react to losses?

I'm working for a VC backed startup, so I'm wondering how these sorts of situations may indirectly affect me.

The VC fund doesn't "need" to "make up for it" in the risk sense, but the limited partners can and do put pressure on the VC when a portfolio company takes a big hit. Whether that trickles down to the other portfolio companies is a separate question.

The point of being able to start a startup in the US is to protect founders from the kind of bad behavior you’re (indirectly) worried about.

Russia comes to mind as a place where you really don’t want to lose investors $200M.

In the US, there’s no way for investors to pressure founders, beyond the dynamics of a startup. Investor pressure is a known quantity. YC spends a lot of time preparing founders for it, and pg has several essays on it.

Sequoia will be just fine. But even if they weren’t, they can’t react in a way that indirectly affects you.

Put another way, if your founders allowed themselves to be in a situation where a single investor controlled the fate of your company, they were already in a bad bet.

Side question I've been wondering: what was Sequoia, a well-respected VC, doing investing in companies that do nothing but enable people to trade speculative assets with no track record? I'm not so worried about Fundrise or Robinhood because those assets are at least useful or Masterworks because art has a track record. Maybe it's because prospective LPs had the same crypto fomo as retail speculators, but don't GPs also have skin in the game?