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Someone will try to sell you the number.

Five high-conviction bets. Or thirty. Or a hundred, sprayed across everything that moves. Every investor you meet has a number they swear by, delivered with the confidence of scripture.

They're all wrong. Not because their number is bad — because there is no magic number.

Portfolio construction isn't a formula you solve once and carve in stone. It's a choice you make on purpose, dictated by your thesis and how much variance you can actually stomach. Let me show you why the "right answer" is a range, not a point — and how to find yours.

Start with the proof that no single number is sacred: the extremes both work.

AngelList ran the numbers on thousands of deals. If you'd simply indexed into every credible seed deal, you'd have beaten more than 90% of investors. Their own research is blunt about why — early-stage returns up to the 90th percentile net out to roughly zero, and all the money comes from the outliers in the top decile. Index broadly enough and you can't miss the outlier, because you bought it by default. Fewer than 10% of investors beat that index over a decade, even the ones with real picking skill.

Now the opposite end. Thrive Capital indexes nothing. They make a small number of enormous, high-conviction bets — early funds at 5–6x net TVPI, and a 2022 vintage reportedly running an IRR north of 126%, carried by a handful of names: OpenAI, Databricks, Cursor, Ramp. Not fifty companies. A handful, carrying the whole fund.

Two opposite strategies. Same power law. Both top-decile.

If maximum diversification and maximum concentration both mint top funds, then "diversified or concentrated" was never a question with one right answer. The spectrum is wide, and there are winners all along it.

If the data won't hand you a number, what does? Two things, and neither is a spreadsheet.

The first is your thesis. How identifiable are your winners before they win? If you have genuine, narrow edge — a domain you know cold, signal nobody else has — you can afford to concentrate, because you're not guessing. If your edge is access to volume more than insight, you index wider and let the power law carry you.

The second is your comfort with variance. Concentration means higher highs and lower lows. A fund that has to return capital on a schedule, or a balance sheet that can't ride a long zero, behaves differently than one built to swing for the fences. There's no virtue in carrying more risk than your model — or your stomach — can hold.

Turn those two dials and your number falls out. It's an output, not a starting point.

For what it's worth, our fund sits around thirty.

Not because thirty is holy. Because thirty is where our thesis lives: enough names to catch the power-law outlier we can't perfectly predict, few enough that we can actually know each company, earn real ownership, and show up when they need us. That's the spread we're comfortable defending.

It's our answer. It is not the answer. A solo angel with deep fintech scars might be right to run ten. A data-driven platform built on volume might be right to run two hundred. Thirty is what our thesis earns us — yours will earn you something else.

Here's the thing that actually kills portfolios, and it isn't the number.

It's choosing the number by accident.

The angel who writes fifteen scattered checks usually didn't choose fifteen — fifteen just happened. A fintech a friend mentioned. An AI thing that sounded hot. A founder they liked. No thesis underneath, no edge driving it, no reserves to follow on. That portfolio doesn't fail because fifteen is the wrong number. It fails because nothing chose it.

Drift is the enemy. Not diversification, not concentration, and not the spread you land on in between.

A deliberate thirty beats an accidental thirty every time. And an accidental anything is just hoping the power law decides to adopt you.

One more, because investors skip it: reserves.

Whatever number you pick, the strategy only works if you can double down on the winner. The angel who can't follow on into their breakout, and the concentrated fund that's fully deployed when its best company raises again — both leave the real money on the table. Constraints make the best portfolios. Keep dry powder for the names that prove themselves.

There's no silver bullet. Anyone who hands you one number — five, thirty, a hundred — is selling you their thesis as if it were yours.

The right number is the one your thesis earns and your risk tolerance can hold. Ours is around thirty. Find the dial settings that match your edge and your stomach, pick a number on purpose, and be able to defend every name in it.

The mistake was never landing in the middle.

The mistake is landing anywhere by accident.