David Tisch has always been a collector. His firm’s biggest prize is a $1 billion return on Cursor

David Tisch has always thought like a collector. Long before venture capital, it was sports cards. Then came the Bearbricks: roughly 600 of them in his New York office, a wall-sized habit that makes the room feel more like a private museum than a startup shop.

That same instinct runs BoxGroup, the early-stage firm Tisch started in 2008. The firm’s biggest win just arrived in a very non-displayable form: Cursor, the AI coding startup BoxGroup backed early, was acquired by Elon Musk’s SpaceX this month for $60 billion, the largest VC-backed acquisition on record.

The payoff is huge. BoxGroup first put in $750,000, according to a source familiar with the matter, then added two follow-on checks. The total return is expected to come out to around $1 billion. For a venture fund, that is not a nice exit. It is the sort of number people tell in war stories.

But Tisch’s own explanation is almost annoyingly simple. He says early investing is like buying a person at the beginning and watching what they become. That mattered in Cursor’s case because the company’s first idea, by Tisch’s account, was AI for CAD. BoxGroup still backed Michael Truell anyway.

And that is the real throughline here. Claire Smilow, now a partner, sourced the deal. Tisch backed both a young investor and a young founder. In a venture world that loves talking about giant outcomes, this one is really about how early conviction beats polished narratives, at least when you get lucky enough to be right.