Jeff Joseph

About the Author

Jeff Joseph

Jeff Joseph has been been a managing partner of Prescient Capital Partners since co-founding the firm in 1999 making direct angel and venture capital investments in early and mezzanine-stage healthcare, lifesciences, internet, technology, entertainment/media, retail and hospitality companies. They have participated in a number of highly visible and profitable liquidity events. Additionally, they provide strategic consulting services to help entrepreneurs and CEOs of start-up, emerging and established companies to access the resources that they require to grow their businesses.

A former Investment Advisor, Joseph has always been a proponent of non-traditional and forward-thinking investment opportunities, asset classes and alternative strategies such as venture capital, private equity, real estate, hedged and  managed futures trading strategies and other vehicles that seek asymmetric investment outcomes.

Up until 2007, he was the managing director of Alternative Strategies for Rydex Investments, and was responsible for investment product origination, development and investment management of the firm’s proprietary institutional alternative trading strategies. The alternative investment products that his team developed included the mutual fund industry’s first multi-strategy absolute return fund and the first managed futures fund offering daily liquidity. Their new product slate attracted billions in new assets. Prior to Rydex, Jeff held managing director positions at Hedgeworld Capital Markets in Rye, NY and Hedge Fund Research in Chicago, IL.

Jeff maintains a blog (www.venturepopulist.com) for family offices, angel investors, investment advisors and entrepreneurs that addresses a variety of topics relating to private venture investment and finance. He has been a monthly contributing columnist to Investment Advisor since 2002.

• Venture Populist: Founder's Skin-in-the-Game

  By Jeff Joseph  |  July 1, 2010

  Remember Jobs and Wozniak? Gates and Allen? Don't assume a founder's lack of committed capital to be a stumbling block to a venture's success. In short-sighted...

• The Venture Populist: It's Bunk

  By Jeff Joseph  |  June 1, 2010

  In the May issue of Investment Advisor, we noted that Senator Chris Dodd's financial services reform bill (being debated on the floor of the Senate...

• Venture Populist: The Venture Investor's Put Option

  By Jeff Joseph  |  April 1, 2010

  Private venture investors embrace the notion of swapping liquidity and safety of principal in the pursuit of positive asymmetrical outcomes and the higher risk premium...

• Venture Populist: The "First-Mover Advantage" Myth

  By Jeff Joseph  |  March 1, 2010

  The conventional wisdom of venture investing is populated with a myriad of musty and meaningless maxims that do little to develop due diligence deft. The...

• Venture Populist: Venture Hits and Exit Wounds

  By Jeff Joseph  |  February 1, 2010

  I have noticed that venture capitalists tend to talk more about their home runs than their strikeouts. Angel investors, on the other hand, prefer to...

• Venture Populist: In Search of Superior Returns

  By Jeff Joseph  |  December 1, 2009

  Contrary to conventional clich?, there is very little that is "binary" about venture investing outcomes. That is, when it comes to private investing, it is...

• The Private Venture Investment Process

  By Jeff Joseph  |  November 1, 2009

  One of the few commonalities among the thousands of VCs and angel investors is the consensus that the process of identifying an attractive private venture...

• Venture Populist: The Private Venture Test

  By Jeff Joseph  |  October 1, 2009

  I am no stranger to the independent RIA universe. In addition to being a former private wealth manager, my professional career has been largely devoted...

• Venture Populist: Variable Liquidity

  By Jeff Joseph  |  September 1, 2009

  In last month's column, I posited that private investments in venture and early-stage companies are ideally characterized by their potential for positive asymmetrical outcomes (PAO),...

• Venture Populist: Positive Asymmetrical Outcomes

  By Jeff Joseph  |  August 1, 2009

  Recent proclamations in this column and venturepopulist.com blog posts that "MPT failed" in the crisis of 2008 have elicited a distinctively binary response from wealth...