Sometimes the Best Startup Bet Is Buying the Public Giant
Venture investor Matt Miller says backing a private chip company instead of Nvidia taught him to look beyond startups.
Scaling-Europe · Matt Miller: Founding Partner of Evantic Capital in his FIRST interview since leaving Sequoia!When Matt Miller, the founding partner of Evantic Capital and a former investor at Sequoia, was asked to name the miss that keeps him up at night, he did not name one. He named two.
He said he had learned that "sometimes the best investment is the public company not the private company."
His example was the market for AI processors, the specialized chips that train and run artificial intelligence systems. After the team behind TPU, a type of AI processor, visited Sequoia to explain the technology, Miller said he grew excited about the category. Sequoia backed Graphcore, a private chip maker with what Miller called a wonderful team and wonderful people. In hindsight, he said, the better investment would have been simpler: buy shares of Nvidia, the public chip maker whose processors came to dominate AI computing.
His other regret was Datadog, the software company that helps businesses monitor their computer systems. Miller said he got to know Olivier Pomel of Datadog very early, shortly after Shardul Shah of Index Ventures invested. Sequoia could not act, he said, because of a conflict with another Sequoia backed company that was being acquired. That blocked the firm for a couple of rounds, he said, and Sequoia never became an investor.
Miller said there are many things he has missed in his career and mistakes he has made that he has learned from. In the chip market, he said, what he learned was narrow and practical. Sometimes, he believes, the public company is the better investment than the private one, and he offered that as what that miss taught him.
Questions people ask
How big did Nvidia become after Miller passed on buying its shares?
Nvidia crossed $1 trillion in market value in May 2023, passed $2 trillion in February 2024 and $3 trillion in June 2024, and in July 2025 became the first company to close above $4 trillion. Its revenue for the fiscal year that ended in January 2025 was about $130.5 billion, up 114% from the prior year. The surge came as cloud providers, AI labs, and enterprises raced to buy its processors for AI computing.
Why don't venture capitalists just buy public stocks all the time?
Venture funds raise money on the promise of finding private startups before the broader stock market can buy them. Most of their clients can already buy public stocks on their own, so they pay venture firms for access to something different. A private startup also offers the chance of a tenfold return before it ever reaches the public market.
What happened to Graphcore, the startup Miller backed instead?
Graphcore is a British company that designs chips meant to accelerate AI work. It raised substantial venture funding and was seen as a European challenger to Nvidia, but it struggled to win customers at scale. SoftBank acquired the company in 2024, in a deal widely reported as valuing it well below its earlier private valuation.