From $750,000 to a billion: The SpaceX exit and the man behind it
David Tisch, heir to a New York wealth dynasty and a sports card collector at heart, refused to follow the rules of the big funds. Now, as the company he invested in was acquired for $60 billion in the largest venture deal in history, his low-profile approach is beating the Silicon Valley giants.
Long before David Tisch became one of the most intriguing names in the venture capital world, he was an 11-year-old sports card trader from New York. His office in the Meatpacking District is packed with hundreds of collectibles, from Japanese teddy bears to Grateful Dead memorabilia, but the highlight of his collecting career cannot fit on any shelf. The fund he owns, BoxGroup, was among the first to believe in Cursor — an artificial intelligence startup for coding. The history (and hysteria) began when Elon Musk's SpaceX acquired the company for $60 billion, in a deal defined as the largest ever acquisition of a venture-backed company.
The numbers behind this round sound almost imaginary: it all started with an initial check of just $750,000 that Tisch wrote to the company's CEO, Michael Truell, alongside two small follow-on investments. Ultimately, this bet is expected to yield the fund a massive return of about $1 billion — a sum higher than all the investor money the fund has ever raised in all its years of existence. For the 45-year-old Tisch, this is definitive proof of the approach he absorbed since childhood: investing is simply a form of collecting. Like with sports cards, you buy someone at the beginning of their journey and get to see their career develop.
The success story of Cursor highlights how different Tisch's strategy is from the rest of the industry. In 2022, when venture capitalist Claire Smilo (now a partner at the fund) introduced the young entrepreneur, his original idea was actually about artificial intelligence for computer-aided design (CAD). The idea itself did not excite Tisch, but he chose to bet on the people — on the entrepreneur and his young investor. In an era where venture capital funds fight for every percentage point on cap tables, raise multi-billion dollar funds, host podcasts, and demand board seats, Tisch chooses to act in the exact opposite way. He almost never gives interviews, stopped tweeting nearly a decade ago, refuses to sit on boards, and prefers a modest, collaborative model that allows him to invest in hundreds of companies simultaneously.
The roots of this philosophy lie somewhere back in the dial-up internet days of the 90s. Tisch, heir to one of the wealthiest and most well-known families in the USA, whose assets are estimated at over $10 billion, grew up alongside a grandfather who was a legendary businessman but despised his sports card hobby. After studying law and working in real estate, he was laid off due to the 2008 financial crisis and decided to reinvent himself. He was fascinated by accelerators, became the manager of Techstars in New York, and eventually founded BoxGroup. Despite the initial financial advantage his family provided, he built a large-scale portfolio of 120 to 150 companies per fund — four times the industry average — while showing exceptional openness toward other investors.
This working method has led the fund to a series of phenomenal successes over the years, including giant companies like Warby Parker, Plaid, and the AI company Clay, whose value is currently estimated at $5 billion. In a world where everyone tries to claim the startup's success story for themselves, Tisch prefers to stay in the background and define himself as an internet investor who is simply looking for the next person who hasn't started a company yet. As he summarizes with a smile, his favorite stage is always just the beginning, while the middle and the end are someone else's problem.
