In a landscape increasingly defined by extended investment horizons and complex portfolio dynamics, Matt Krna, a veteran of the venture capital industry, has launched Two Meter Capital, a pioneering firm dedicated to providing critical "scaffolding" for a maturing ecosystem. Through a novel approach termed "GP on demand" or "harvest management," Two Meter Capital aims to alleviate the mounting pressure on General Partners (GPs) by optimizing and finding liquidity in their longer-lived portfolios, thereby ensuring that entrepreneurs within these investments continue to receive dedicated championship and support. This strategic intervention addresses a significant, evolving challenge within venture capital, promising to enhance efficiency, foster innovation, and create new pathways for fund managers and founders alike. The National Venture Capital Association (NVCA), which featured Krna in its "Meet a VC" series, highlights the firm’s emergence as a timely response to the industry’s structural shifts.
A Career Forged in Venture’s Evolution: Matt Krna’s Journey
Matt Krna’s professional trajectory offers a microcosm of the venture capital industry’s own evolution over the past two decades. His journey began at Canaan Partners, where he immersed himself as an analyst, focusing on hardware and semiconductor deals—a sector emblematic of early 2000s tech innovation. This foundational experience provided him with an intimate understanding of nascent technologies and the rigorous due diligence required in venture investing. From Canaan, Krna transitioned to Investor Growth Capital, ascending to lead its US Internet investment practice. During this period, he also played a pivotal role in co-founding the firm’s digital health effort, demonstrating an early foresight into the convergence of technology and healthcare that would later become a major investment theme. This period, roughly spanning the late 2000s to early 2010s, coincided with the initial explosion of web-based services and the nascent stages of digital health adoption.
His career continued its upward trajectory when he was recruited to SoftBank, a global investment powerhouse known for its ambitious, large-scale technology investments. At SoftBank, Krna was instrumental in helping to raise a significant growth-stage fund. This tenure, which included the early to mid-2010s, saw him and his partners back high-profile companies such as Fitbit, a pioneer in wearable technology, and BigCommerce, an e-commerce platform that later went public. Reflecting on this period, Krna notes with satisfaction, "we actually did what we said we were going to do. It doesn’t always happen that way in the venture world," a testament to the disciplined execution and successful outcomes achieved. In 2015, building on this track record, Krna departed SoftBank to co-found Princeville Capital, a successor fund that continued to focus on growth-stage investments, particularly in the technology sector, extending his commitment to global tech innovation.
The onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in early 2020 served as a profound inflection point, not just for the global economy but for Krna’s professional focus. Like many industry leaders, he entered a period of intense reflection, moving into what he describes as "hibernation mode" and "noodling on where the venture market was going next." This contemplative phase, spanning several years from 2020 to 2023, was not merely a pause but a strategic incubation period. It was during this time that the conceptual framework for Two Meter Capital solidified, a vision that culminated in the firm formally hanging its shingle in 2024, ready to address the pressing needs of a transformed venture ecosystem. The pandemic accelerated many digital trends and highlighted the fragility of existing economic models, prompting a re-evaluation of long-term investment strategies and operational efficiencies within venture capital.
Addressing a Structural Challenge: The Extended Fund Lifecycle
The venture capital industry, once characterized by an almost apprenticeship-style model with broadly similar firm structures, has undergone a profound transformation, evolving into a much more sophisticated and stratified market. A central tenet of this maturation, as articulated by Matt Krna, is the significant extension of company lifecycles in the private market. "Companies used to take six years to go public," Krna observes. "Now they’re taking 15 on average." This dramatic shift has rendered the traditional 10-year fund life, often accompanied by two one-year extensions, increasingly obsolete. This 10-year standard, a legacy structure conceived roughly three decades ago, is fundamentally misaligned with the contemporary reality where "these portfolios just stay around for way longer."
Supporting data corroborates Krna’s observations. According to PitchBook-NVCA Venture Monitor reports, the median time to exit for venture-backed companies in the U.S. has indeed trended upwards significantly. While it fluctuated, data from the early 2000s often showed median exit times below seven years. By the 2010s, this began to stretch, and in recent years, particularly for successful companies pursuing IPOs, the timeframe can easily exceed a decade, sometimes reaching 12-15 years or more. For instance, the median time to IPO for venture-backed companies was approximately 5.4 years in 1999, which then surged to over 10 years by 2010 and has generally remained elevated since, occasionally spiking even higher. This prolonged private status is driven by several factors, including the availability of substantial private capital from diverse sources, the desire of founders to maintain control and avoid public market pressures, and the increasing regulatory scrutiny and compliance costs associated with public market listings. The rise of private equity growth funds and corporate venture capital has also provided additional avenues for late-stage funding, further delaying the need for a public exit.
This extended private tenure creates a critical operational challenge for traditional venture capital firms. While GPs are tasked with managing their active funds, allocating resources to new investments, and nurturing the most promising companies in their current portfolios, they simultaneously retain fiduciary responsibilities for older funds. These "tail-end" portfolios, often comprising dozens, if not hundreds, of companies from Fund VII, VIII, or IX, continue to demand attention, reporting, and strategic oversight long after the primary investment period has concluded. The administrative burden, coupled with the need to generate liquidity from these mature assets, can divert significant time, capital, and focus from new opportunities. For instance, a managing partner cited in the original report revealed his firm was spending an estimated $4 to $5 million annually in partner and associate time simply on board meetings and administrative tasks related to older funds—a substantial, often overlooked, drain on resources that directly impacts a firm’s bottom line and capacity for new deal-making.
Furthermore, the venture capital landscape has seen an undeniable trend towards capital consolidation. A smaller number of increasingly large firms are raising mega-funds, leading to a concentration of both investment capital and portfolio companies under fewer umbrellas. According to Preqin data, the average venture capital fund size has steadily increased over the past decade, with a significant portion of total capital flowing into larger, more established funds. This concentration exacerbates the challenge of managing sprawling, multi-vintage portfolios. The rise of specialized secondary market solutions, including continuation funds and GP-led secondaries, has emerged as a partial response to this issue, providing mechanisms for fund managers to gain liquidity for older assets. However, Krna’s Two Meter Capital offers a distinct, operational layer of support, focusing on active, hands-on portfolio management rather than solely transactional liquidity.
Two Meter Capital’s "Scaffolding" Solution: GP on Demand and Harvest Management
In response to these structural shifts, Two Meter Capital introduces a novel and specialized service that Krna aptly describes as "scaffolding" for the venture industry. The firm’s core offering, termed "GP on demand" or "harvest management," is designed to provide comprehensive, outsourced management and optimization for older, longer-lived venture portfolios. This strategic specialization allows traditional VC firms to re-center their focus on what Krna identifies as their primary competencies: "raising money, finding outlier companies, and continuing to back the winners." Two Meter Capital then steps in to manage "the rest" – the complex, time-consuming, and often less glamorous work associated with legacy portfolios, including strategic oversight, operational support, and active value creation.
This "scaffolding" is not merely administrative relief; it is a sophisticated, active management approach. Two Meter Capital’s team evaluates the remaining companies within these tail-end portfolios, making data-driven decisions on which companies to "lean back into" because they are finally hitting key performance indicators (KPIs), which to "pull back from" due to underperformance or misaligned trajectories, and which require active assistance in finding their next strategic step, whether that be a sale, merger, or further investment. This proactive engagement is crucial for unlocking latent value and generating liquidity, which in turn fuels the venture capital "flywheel" by returning capital to Limited Partners (LPs) and freeing up
