This is one outlet's own report from Fortune — the article as it was filed.
BreakingAIPROPX ReportFortune · 2h ago
How David Tisch’s BoxGroup turned a $750K bet on Cursor into a $1 billion exit by breaking all the VC rules
Decades before David Tisch began investing in startups, he was wheeling and dealing sports cards as an 11-year-old kid in the suburbs of New York.
“I’ve been a collector forever,” the founder of venture capital firm BoxGroup said from his Meatpacking District office, surrounded by an assortment of whimsical collectibles. The crown jewel of Tisch’s collection, however, isn’t so easily displayed on a shelf: Tisch and BoxGroup were among the very first investors in AI coding startup Cursor , which this month was acquired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX for $60 billion, the largest VC-backed acquisition of all-time.
The returns are staggering: BoxGroup first wrote a $750,000 check to Cursor CEO Michael Truell , plus two follow-on checks, ultimately proffering a return that should shake out to around $1 billion, a source familiar with the matter told Fortune .
It’s the kind of home run most VCs dream about their whole career and, for Tisch, there are all sorts of throughlines. For one, investing is a form of collecting—from portfolio construction to placing your bets—and Tisch, 45, sees a parallel between investing in startups and the sports cards of his childhood. “Especially in early-stage investing, you’re buying something, someone, at the earliest stage, and then you get to see their careers play out.”
For Tisch—warm with a sardonic edge and, yes, a scion of one of business’s most famous families —the Cursor acquisition also affirms the strategy he’s been chasing all along: That the person you’re backing matters most. And Cursor was sourced by then-principal Claire Smilow (now a partner). So, back in 2022, it was a bet by Tisch on both a young investor and a young founder who, at the time, seemed like he was off-point.
“Michael’s original idea was to do AI for CAD [computer-aided design],” Tisch said. “The decision to get excited about investing in Cursor was never about AI for CAD. It was always about the people.”
Over the last 15 years, venture capital’s gotten bigger by the numbers, and louder by pretty much any metric. Firms and their VCs tussle for relevance, ownership, and board seats. Money is everywhere: A billion-dollar fund now is de rigueur. Tisch, meanwhile, has zagged: He doesn’t talk to reporters much, doesn’t have a podcast, backed off tweeting in 2015, doesn’t take board seats, has no interest in raising a multi-billion fund , and is viscerally uncomfortable with any startup narrative where an investor is the protagonist. It’s a contrarian take that, in this environment, is out of vogue, at best. But Cursor’s blockbuster buyout suggests, against the odds, that Tisch’s vision of a restrained, people-first model for venture capital can work in a world dominated by trillion-dollar companies and multi-billion funds.
“David and BoxGroup are sort of the last stalwarts of highly collaborative investing,” said Jack Altman, Benchmark partner who’s known Tisch since 2020 (and yes, Sam Altman’s brother). “It used to be that VCs could collaborate a lot more easily. Then, over time, as VCs got much bigger, it got more competitive—there are only 100 points on the cap table. But Box has taken the view of ‘we’re going to invest in a ton of companies, we’re going to do it super collaboratively, so we can always come along with other investors. That way, we can share and receive deal flow from everyone.’ All the VCs who scaled up, they sort of gave up on that strategy. And Box is the hold out.”
That restraint, that desire for collaboration, isn’t just philosophy. It’s core to BoxGroup, which arguably has its origins in Tisch’s childhood fascination with the Internet, with early message boards and chasing baseball (and hockey, and basketball) cards online.
“In the sports card world, if I buy a rookie and the rookie fails, I never met him, I don’t care. I’m sad for me,” said Tisch. “Whereas in startups, you’re investing in a person you build a relationship with, and you might watch them go through a life‑changing success—or a life-changing failure.”
“I started with dial-up”
Tisch came of age attuned to the dawn of our digital world. And he wants you to know: He was here at the start.
“I started with dial-up Internet, the actual sound ,” he emphasizes with comic timing. “There’s kids who started at the end of the dial-up era, and there are kids who started at the beginning. I’m the beginning.”
Tisch is characterized by his disarming, self-deprecating humor, and he makes me think of that Italian word sprezzatura —it describes someone with genuine skill that they’ve learned to make appear deeply casual. The humor and casualness, one has to imagine, are both nature and nurture. As an Internet-loving kid in Scarsdale, he came from an illustrious family—his grandfather, Laurence Tisch, was co-owner of the generational Loews Corp. conglomerate, and the Tisch family (known for its high-profile philanthropic endeavors, and prominence in both business and politics) is said to be worth over $10 billion. The family’s success in business didn’t mean, however, that they “got” Tisch’s love of sports cards or the Internet.
“My grandfather, who was instrumental in my life, thought it was the dumbest thing he’d ever heard of,” said Tisch of Laurence, who with his brother built a 20th century empire that spanned hotels, movie theaters, financial institutions, and the Bulova Watch Company. “He was a businessman and entrepreneur—though I didn’t know that word at the time. He thought cards were dumb, and made that very known. I loved cards, but he was adamantly [against it]. Looking back, he was wrong, and it was bad advice.”
Back then, there was no eBay, and deals got done with snail mail money orders. AOL and message boards were a funny, fraud-riddled place for a kid (Tisch vividly remembers online-buying a fraudulent rookie card of someday-baseball hall-of-famer Mike Piazza that never showed up). He was alway...
How David Tisch’s BoxGroupCursorDavid TischYearsBoxGroupVC’sDecadesNew York. Meatpacking DistrictTischElon MuskSpaceX
AIPROPX is an independent multi-source news index — we track, compare, and connect coverage from across the web into one place you won't find anywhere else.
