How Mike Speiser and Sutter Hill are changing the rules for venture investing

But Speiser has shunned the portfolio approach most VCs use. He told CNBC that his strategy is to spend 80% of his time and resources on a single project and the other 20% on the rest.

Once a company is up and running, Sutter Hill’s other portfolio companies try the product and offer their thoughts on how to improve it. “We’ve now built five companies on Snowflake. Lacework was the first,” Speiser said.

In turn, Snowflake was an early customer of Lacework, and several of Sutter Hill’s other 25 portfolio companies use Lacework. 

Sutter Hill regularly leads early rounds of funding for its start-ups, because it’s not making a whole lot of other bets.

It did gain some distinction after backing Nvidia: When the graphics card maker went public in 1999, Sutter Hill owned about 10% of the stock.