IVP

The hero video at ivp.com loads a whopping 4.2MB WebM file that immediately crashes my 2019 MacBook's fan into jet engine mode, which feels appropriate for a firm that's been around since Carter was president yet somehow can't figure out video compression. Their WordPress site (spotted those telltale /wp-content/ paths and Yoast SEO breadcrumbs faster than a Series A gets oversubscribed) runs on what appears to be a custom theme built by someone who learned CSS during the Bush administration. The navigation menu uses jQuery 3.6.0 to animate a dropdown that could've been pure CSS, but hey, at least they're not still on jQuery 1.x like half their portfolio companies probably are.

Digging into their source reveals a fascinating archaeological dig through web development eras - they're loading Google Tag Manager, Pardot, some mystery analytics.js bundle, and approximately seventeen different font files because apparently system fonts are for peasants. Their Lighthouse performance score probably hovers around 31, which coincidentally matches the percentage of their term sheets that actually close. I once knew a founder, Marcus, brilliant guy building dev tools for exactly this kind of technical debt. IVP ghosted him after three months of "we're really excited, just waiting on one more partner meeting" while their own site was serving unoptimized PNGs that would make a GeoCities webmaster weep.

The real tragedy lives in their portfolio grid, where each company logo triggers a separate API call to some Salesforce-adjacent CRM system, creating a waterfall of requests that would make their own portco CTOs submit resignation letters. Their CSS weighs in at 847KB uncompressed, featuring gems like `.portfolio-item-wrapper-inner-container-div` because semantic class naming is apparently harder than finding the next unicorn. Meanwhile their mobile experience breaks spectacularly on anything smaller than an iPad Pro, with portfolio cards overlapping like rejected term sheets at a Demo Day afterparty.

What saves this from complete disaster is that it actually works, which puts them ahead of 40% of VC websites that are just elaborate 404 pages pretending to be investment theses. Their team pages load without JavaScript errors, the contact forms presumably function (though they POST to some Pardot endpoint that probably stores leads in a database older than TikTok), and you can actually find information about their portfolio companies without solving a UX puzzle designed by sadists. Sure, their blog's RSS feed is broken and their search functionality appears to be powered by hopes and dreams, but at least they're not running everything through a custom React app that takes twelve seconds to render "We invest in B2B SaaS."

For a firm managing $18 billion, this website screams "we spent our entire digital budget on a rebrand and had $3,000 left for the developer," yet somehow it's exactly competent enough to not completely embarrass them at LP meetings. It's the technical equivalent of wearing Allbirds to a board meeting - not impressive, but functional enough that nobody questions your judgment. The real irony is watching a firm that preaches "technical excellence" and "scalable infrastructure" to their portfolio companies serve a website that would get rejected from Y Combinator for performance issues.