Fundstrat strategist Tom Lee says venture capitalists he has known for the past decade regret not taking the simpler route of buying and holding Bitcoin.
Speaking at TOKEN2049, Lee said investors he recently met in Taiwan told him their startup portfolios had delivered acceptable returns, but had still fallen short of what they could have made by owning Bitcoin.
Bitcoin traded below $1,000 10 years ago and is now worth around $80,000, representing an increase of roughly 80 times.
Lee said he had expected the venture investors he first met while researching Bitcoin a decade ago to have significantly outperformed the cryptocurrency through their early-stage investments. Instead, they told him the opposite.
“They said that their venture returns have been okay, but they wish they just bought Bitcoin,” Lee said.
The comments challenge a central assumption in crypto venture investing: that backing private companies and early-stage tokens offers substantially greater returns than holding the leading digital asset directly.
Lee’s point was that Bitcoin’s long-term performance has proved difficult for many active investment strategies to match. Its roughly 80-fold rise over the past decade has created an unusually demanding benchmark for investors seeking higher returns through more complex approaches.
Lee backs major blockchain networks
Lee said his preference for established crypto assets was not limited to Bitcoin. He remained bullish on Ethereum and Solana, arguing that major Layer 1 blockchains could capture a significant share of the value created during the current market cycle.
“You want to have the maximum exposure to bitcoin, ethereum, and even solana in this cycle,” Lee said. “I think the L1s are going to capture a lot of the value.”
His argument therefore focuses on the largest base-layer networks, rather than narrower venture investments aimed at identifying less established winners.
For years, crypto venture capital has been viewed as the higher-risk, higher-return way to gain exposure to the sector. Lee’s account suggests that some experienced early-stage investors are now reassessing whether the additional complexity and risk have produced sufficient rewards.
Ethereum and Solana have different characteristics and risk profiles from Bitcoin, but Lee’s wider thesis is that lasting value may continue to build at the Layer 1 level.
That shifts the investment question away from finding the next obscure success story and towards whether the biggest networks remain the strongest place to allocate capital.
Bitcoin’s performance has made that a particularly important comparison. Even where venture portfolios have produced positive returns, Lee’s comments indicate that some investors now measure them against the gains that could have been achieved through a straightforward long-term holding of Bitcoin.
