GoKawiilDeven Parekh has co-run the heavyweight investment firm Insight Partners for 26 years. Unlike many VCs who are loud on X and seem to live on podcasts, Parekh and Insight Partners tend to lay low.
In this sit-down with TechCrunch at its StrictlyVC event on Thursday night in New York, Parekh was refreshingly candid about some of the firm’s wins (it has led and co-led numerous rounds in Databricks, for example, and owns stakes in OpenAI and Anthropic); the deals it hasn’t won, including buzzy AI legal-tech company Legora; conflicts of interest in venture investing; and why Insight has stuck to a diversified strategy even as VCs have piled into the frontier AI labs.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
There’s a researcher who’s become the big story of the week — I just asked Keith Rabois about this earlier tonight [and he was dismissive of the researcher]. Do you think that concerns about AI risk amount to hysteria, or do you have real concerns?
Keith and I probably don’t agree on politics, but we agree on this. Sure, there’s a risk some non-state actor gets access to an open-source model and creates a biological weapon. But there’s an even higher probability we get a massive decrease in the time it takes to develop new drugs and cure diseases. I’ll take that bet.
I’m on the board of NYU Langone — what AI is already doing with patient data is amazing. We can look at 50 million patient records and tell someone walking in for something unrelated that they have a 25% chance of a heart attack. Net-net, I think this is highly positive.
There are risks, sure, just like there are risks with next-generation drone warfare. Every generation has new risks, and somehow, over time, the world still raises living standards. We’re going to need AI to scale healthcare — the population is aging and there aren’t enough medical professionals to go around.
Insight has $90 billion in assets under management but seems comparatively quiet compared to firms of similar size. Is that purposeful?
Every venture capitalist thinks they’re an expert on everything now — epidemiology during COVID, geopolitics during the Iran war. I’m not sure we’re all experts on everything. Our attitude has been: Let the portfolio do the talking. We’re investing in founders and companies. We have to communicate enough that people know who we are, but our performance should speak for itself — and that’s driven by the portfolio, not by us being loud.
You do early-stage, growth, buyouts, and presumably secondaries. What’s the split?
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