we had @TurnerNovak back on the pod to unpeel the @ThePeelPod, and how he's built it into distribution infrastructure for banana capital
portfolio founders get a long-form record of how they think, placed alongside public-company CEOs and established investors
candidates use it as diligence before joining. founders use it in outreach. each conversation keeps working long after it is published.
sean and @hrcsuraj ( @humanrce ) built @starshiphsa inside one of the most regulated corners of healthcare.
where every product change ran through banks, operators, or washington.
they sold to @Optum (@UHC ) in 2022. now they invest alongside founders early, while the rules are still being written.
jakob (@jakobdiepen) moved to el segundo before any other solo GP had set up shop. he quickly became the front door to the young talent solving america's hardest problems.
he now holds keys to the most exclusive demo days .. hard to get into for both investors and founders.
the layer underneath this season was the managers who won deals by arranging their whole world so the right founder couldn't not call them, before that founder was even looking for $$$.....
brand is the most misunderstood word in the business, and it's not the logo or the colors on your deck but what people say about you when you're not in the room. if you're a different thing to everyone, you're nothing to anyone.
building is the cheapest it's ever been, and the leverage that used to take ten people is a stack of agents now, everyone is networked in, and none of it separates anyone anymore. everyone runs with their army of agents, and what's left is being irreplaceably good at one narrow thing. perhaps that's @GadiBorovich and @danielha finding the most talented young engineers across latam who have the ability but never had the rails. @HelenaGagern and @schaumburgd running the pac heights victorian as a landing spot for european founders in sf. @ItzSuds holding next year's breakout before anyone knows its name. if a manager has to ask how they stand out, they've probably already lost it. standing out isn't a marketing problem but a focus decision.
the last piece is one we've never talked about publicly, which is how you ever give money back to your lps. companies stay private forever now, so dpi is the conversation everyone is having. we think that conversation belongs to the funds between $50m and $500m that got caught mid cycle with great markups and no liquidity. it was never about the emerging managers with sub-$20m funds.
four seasons in, it only keeps getting sharper that the smallest funds win by compounding into the one thing they're irreplaceably good at, sized small enough to finish the job and return the money.
thank you to ryan, molly, arkady, somrat, ramzi, drew, matt, gadi, daniel, helena, teddy, suds, and carmen. and to the folks who attended our events in los angeles and new york. this one was fabri's last, and season five picks up this fall with a familiar and fresh new face :)
the formula came out of a pretty specific moment. end of 2020, carmen was living in two worlds, writing €50k pre-seed angel checks into european companies, getting into anything she wanted, building cap tables with friends and also writing €25m institutional checks, competing for 15-18% ownership at every turn. one world felt like collaboration. the other felt like combat. And combat meant less access. she asked herself how a fund works without optimizing for ownership stake, wrote the equation down where fund return equals fund size divided by ownership stake at exit, realized stake matters but is relative to fund size, and went out to build a fund around it.
@calfonsorico spent a decade inside europe’s most established funds. first Felix Capital, where she joined before the office existed, then Blossom, where she watched series As go from €4m rounds to €30m and the path to founder become the most coveted thing in the room. she walked away and built Cocoa, a now €23m fund II writing €250-500k angel checks at pre-seed and seed across european founders. no board seats. doesn’t lead.
our conversation gets into where the whole thing started.. carmen was a first check into johnny boufarhat’s pre-launch events platform, built the entire early cap table through her own network, and watched hopin go from nothing to $140m ARR and nearly $8b valuation in 24 months. she never sold. made nothing. yet, her optimism sees it as one of the best things that ever happened to her because it showed her the power of small to access the best companies and build trust with founders. we talk about “killer with a heart” as an investment thesis, and what it actually looks like in practice… the founder who slept at a hamburg steel mill to work from 1am to 5am, as electricity prices surged and all steel mills in Europe shut down; , the founder who saw the future of inference coming and bet everything on it . we also get into the sf welcome committee she’s quietly built for european founders making the migration west, and why she thinks the great pre-seed migration has already started.
since we recorded, cocoa’s story with “killers with a heart” got a new chapter. cocoa invested in AI hardware company @fractile_ai in 2024, and carmen just forward deployed herself into the company to lead execution.. in her words “the unimaginable became inevitable. cocoa keeps going, with carmen backing killers with a heart, now from inside the AI buildout.”
There's a moment in venture when the gravity flips, the investor stops chasing deals and the deals start chasing the investor. Suds is already there. VCs send him their best founders not purely out of goodwill, but because they can't unsee the pattern that every week there's a hot Series A, and every week it seems to be one of his. It's likely that Suds has already found next year's breakout, and before it has a name.
@ItzSuds is the founder and GP of SF1, writing the first check into hyper-technical founders. He's placed the groundwork as a former founder, angel investor of eighty companies, where 65 of his first 80 angel checks were first money in, all before he turned 25. A South Carolina kid with eight thousand Twitter followers a year ago, is now the name VCs drop when they want to sound early.
We get into the SF1 flywheel, where founders he backed at the first round introduce him to the friends raising next, so he's in at the early price on the round he'll later help run. And we get into the parts of venture he won't perform.
SF1 Fund I companies have raised > $450M in follow-on capital from top tier funds in 13 months. The performance is the one part of this he never bothered to learn.
@HelenaGagern and @schaumburgd are building for that moment with @theembassysf, a $15M fund + private victorian in pac heights, designed as infrastructure for high-agency european founders as they land, before anything is fully formed, and when the trajectory is still malleable
The bottleneck isn't code generation anymore.
What @GadiBorovich and @danielha are building with @antigravitycap is finding the constraint everyone else is looking past.
We invited an LP advisor on the pod.
@CurtoloMatt has sat on every side of private markets at Hamilton Lane, Hirtle Callaghan, MetLife, and Allocate. Now he works one-on-one with emerging LPs and GPs on the thing most LPs won't say out loud.