Slice Podcast

Another season highlighting an incredible group of operator/founder turned emerging managers, and a whole year (+ some change) of building Slice.We started the slice pod in September 2024 to create a space where emerging managers could speak plainly about their strategy, doubts, and the mechanics of building a firm. Real conversations about what it means to start a fund in this moment.This past year, we screened 180 funds sub-$50M (most sub-$20M), reviewed 98 data rooms, and made a dozen investments. What’s become clear: the best managers have clarity, consistency, and smaller fund sizes.The landscape bifurcated. YC’s SAFE made early capital frictionless. SoftBank’s $100B fund forced everyone bigger. The middle collapsed. What’s left: mega-funds at growth and a fragmented network writing true first checks.That’s where we believe the alpha lives. Sub-$10M caps where the Tier 1’s don’t deploy. Managers who move first because they’re not dragging $500M funds behind them.The managers who win are former operators and founders. They’ve lived the zero to one. They know what it takes to make your first hire, land your first customer, figure out product-market fit with six months of runway. They become the first call not because of brand, but because they actually help.Vivek (Supercharge): product founder whisperer and first checks for technical founders using frameworks he built while building Superhuman. Sarah (Sarah Smith Fund): best-in-class systems at scale as a solo GP. Turner (Banana Capital): building top-of-funnel everywhere. Jamie (Wave Function Ventures): writing first checks into hardware companies because he’s been there as not only an operator but as a founder...twice. Ben (SuperAngel Fund): with superangel speed. Helen (Articulate): after Facebook, Dropbox, Plaid, AngelList. Jonathan (Space Capital): concentrated frontier tech before American Dynamism had a name.Clarity means one sentence explains your unique edge. Not “strong network.” Specific advantage that’s true to you. Consistency means the math works. Fund size, check size, portfolio construction.. everything aligns. When it makes sense, it’s obvious. When it doesn’t, it’s painfully obvious.Most ambitious managers don’t maximize AUM. They say they’ll be the absolute best at writing the very first check into a specific category with their specific skillset. Then size the fund to do that well. Take Pietro (Firedrop): sub-$15M vehicles repeatedly, oversubscribed over a weekend. He easily could have gone bigger but didn’t.Fund size is fund strategy. Scale up and you’re churning LP base every vintage, losing compounding.Self-awareness is a fundamental piece to laying a strong foundation. Knowing who you are, what you’re really good at, what you say no to. Most people raise because they can, not because they should. After 100+ data rooms, you see how rare it is when what the manager pitches matches what they’ve been doing and where they’re headed.Next year we’re going in-person. New York, San Francisco, Austin, Los Angeles. Live recordings. Mini AGMs gathering the best emerging managers and the LPs who back them. THESE ARE NOT NETWORKING EVENTS, and all elephants on the table.A sincere thank you to our guests, to every manager who joined us this season:Sarah, Finn, Soso, Turner, Helen, Jamie, Jonathan, Vivek, Ben, Anay, Amit. For trusting us with your story. For sharing the hard parts, not just the wins. For showing up as builders.This pod wouldn’t exist without you, and it wouldn’t be worth making if it didn’t help the next wave of managers feel a little more seen, and a little less alone (!!)See you in season 4, which we’ve already started recording with a new host (I wonder who! ;)) HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM SLICE To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com

“Imagine you’re Nike and the best NBA players are like, I don’t really need shoes anymore. That’s exactly what’s happening with venture capital.” The best founders used to say “I have to raise money.” Now they’re saying “I don’t want to raise a dollar.” One engineer with AI tools can replace a team of 20. Companies can iterate to product-market fit in months instead of years.Which means the middle of venture, those $50-500M funds, is about to have a very bad decade. Too big to write seed checks. Too small to deploy the $100M+ needed for late-stage infrastructure plays.Amit, Alex, and Matt spent a decade building Clearbit from scratch to a 9-figure exit to HubSpot. Every major B2B company from Stripe to Airtable to Notion used their products early on. Naval Ravikant was one of their angel investors. When they started making their own angel investments, Naval encouraged them to start a fund. So they did.They’ve deployed across 100+ companies since launching Earl Grey in 2020. Early on it was classic spray-and-pray with $100K checks. It tracked well, but they’d soon feel the flaws of the strategy. Too broad. Not enough ownership. Not enough discipline on valuation.They’ve since tightened the strategy: bigger checks ($300K-$1M), ownership targets of 1.5-3%, typically the second-biggest check after the lead or helping recruit the lead. Higher concentration with more discipline. They took the data from their early portfolio and iterated like founders building a product.“Fund size is your fund strategy. When you go after $50M AUM, your sourcing funnel shuts off. You get mediocre deals.”Identify what’s broken. Ship a new version. Measure. Iterate. Most emerging managers raise their first fund, then immediately start optimizing for fund size and management fees. Amit’s optimizing for what actually generates returns.The portfolio tells the story. They were early into CrewAI, where Amit convinced the founder João Moura to start the company after Clearbit’s acquisition by HubSpot. They’re consistently in competitive rounds and consistently winning allocation. Not by pitching, by doing the work.“Don’t talk about it, just do it. Help them think through the company, the product itself, help them find their co-founder or founding team members. We’ve done all of that many times without asking for a thing back.”The strategy is brutally simple: go early before anyone’s paying attention, add value before asking for allocation, be honest about where you fit on the cap table. They invest in technical founders and second-time founders building in spaces where you need to understand the weeds, where surface-level pattern matching doesn’t work.“If we’re the only check or we’re the biggest check, there’s actually a problem. You’re not arranging your cap table right. For example, you should have some people who are really good for the brand, some who have time and effort to help you. Know what you’re getting from each investor.”The pattern across our conversation was that Amit isn’t following a playbook, he’s building one through constant iteration. The early portfolio taught him what doesn’t work. The current strategy is testing what does, and they’re gathering the data points that will inform where they take it next. To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com

“California electricity rates have doubled in less than 10 years. 93% of expected capacity added to the US grid this year is renewables because it is just cheaper and better. The market will always win.”Anay Shah and Ben Eidelson aren’t career climate investors. Anay spent nearly two decades building companies - beginning at the State Department where he worked across 15 emerging markets, to selling solar lanterns in rural India, then scaling Remitly from 10 to 400 people, and recently running a 250-person team at Tala. Ben sold two startups, one to Google and one to Stripe, before leaving to figure out climate. Neither had a climate investing pedigree when they started Stepchange in late 2023.What they found surprised them. The climate investing community is unusually collaborative. “There isn’t as much pointy elbows of securing the deal and pushing everyone out,” Anay explains. “If these founders are gonna succeed against the headwinds in the macro environment, we need the best talent on the cap table and all hands on deck.” Because everyone feels the existential threat, investors pull each other into rounds rather than compete.Their fund structure plays into this. Stepchange writes $100-400K checks at pre-seed and seed. They don’t lead, don’t price, don’t take board seats. “We’re a sub-$10M fund. As a result, we’re very collaborative and high-conviction investors.” They raised $7M+ total with 100+ LPs who are tech execs and energy CEOs that act as scouts. Bain Capital came in as anchor. The climate community welcomed them because the sector needs more capital, not less.The partnership works because they bring different operator backgrounds. Ben’s a two-time founder with deep product expertise, he wrote the definitive guide to software in climate tech that synthesized their thesis. Anay’s the scale-up operator who took companies from 10 people to pre-IPO, with a go-to-market and product-market fit focus. “He’s much more of a product person. I’m much more go-to-market,” Anay says.They met through angel investing in 2023. Started talking every two weeks, then weekly, then spending six hours a day on calls looking at companies. After five months remote, Anay flew to Seattle. They spent a full day walking the city. “We talked mostly about ourselves and our values and what motivated us and realized we shared some really fundamental ways that we look at the world.”Like most who have previous operator and founder experiences, Anay mentions the power of being able to switch out of evaluation mode into feedback mode for founders who pitch them. “The worst thing a VC can do is take the pitch, ask a bunch of questions, say ‘great, we’ll be in touch’ and never talk to you again. They just leave the founder in a lurch; they gain nothing from that experience.” They write detailed notes on passes. They iterate with founders they’re not investing in. They’ve asked technical questions about product stacks that lead investors haven’t asked. “How are we gonna invest in a product company if we don’t understand deeply how the product stack is built?”Stepchange’s thesis is specific: changes in the climate are affecting every part of our economy and 60% of greenhouse gas reductions can come through technologies that exist today. The problem is adoption and deployment. While other funds in the sector invest in hard-to-abate sectors like nuclear fusion and sustainable aviation fuel, they’re focused on software solutions that have large customer demand today.They target five sectors: transportation, the built environment, energy generation and grid, climate adaptation and resilience, and AI infrastructure. Notable investments include Nevoya, a zero-emissions trucking company; Hammerhead, power orchestration for data centers; Skyward, stopping lightning to prevent wildfires; and Futureproof, offering property insurance accounting for structural resiliency.“We’re looking at asset-light companies and products that have immediate commercial pull in the market. Technologies that don’t require government incentives,” Anay explains. They’re selling to CFOs, not CSOs (Chief Sustainability Officers). The products are cheaper and better and happen to decarbonize the economy.They’re targeting 30 investments at 1% ownership stakes, with a soft cap at $30M seed valuations. They’ve got 17 portfolio companies and nearly half have already been marked up. While typical funds have a 1-2% GP commit, Stepchange is more than 5x that – demonstrating their conviction in building a top decile fund in energy and infrastructure.The train has left the station. “We are in the early innings of a trillion-dollar energy transition,” Anay says. “Businesses being founded today are going to be the next decacorns building this future low-carbon world.”Thanks to Ethan Austin for the introduction to Anay 🙏 To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com

Ben’s first angel check was $10,000 into quip when they didn’t even have a name. He’d become their first investor.Ben treated every angel investment following like he was already running a fund, and wrote comprehensive deal memos for each investment. He sent regular updates to investors in his SPVs, even though they were small and informal. He documented every decision, every pattern he noticed, every mistake he made.By the time it came to raise SuperAngel.Fund I, he could show his LPs what he’d done so far, and that he’d continue doing what he’d been doing as an angel. There was congruency in the story he was telling with proof to show for it from his angel track record.Ben’s approach breaks down into three specific practices:1. Document Your Investment ProcessFor every investment Ben made as an angel, he created a formal deal memo, outlining the thesis, founder evaluation, market analysis, and the risks.2. Treat Small Investors Like Future LPsBen ran 13 SPVs between 2017 and when he launched his fund in 2021. Some managers treat SPVs as one-off transactions, but he treated the 15-20 people in each SPV as future LPs in SuperAngel.Fund. He’d share portfolio updates, making sure to be transparent about performance.3. Stay Organized From Day One“I started off very organized, the investments I was making, the performance, the markups.” This sounds basic, but most angels have no idea what their actual performance is. They can’t tell you their TVPI, MOIC, or even basic portfolio construction metrics.While Ben was building his track record, he was also building his brand. He started writing on the Super Angel Blog, and maintaining transparency in what founders he was meeting, how he thinks, conversations he was having, which goes against conventional wisdom in venture. Most managers believe you should protect your deal flow, keep your portfolio confidential, and share information only behind layers of NDAs and password-protected data rooms.Ben does the opposite.Portfolio companies are listed on his website. His investment style isn’t a black box to navigate for founders.The practical reality is that everyone has their own CRMs and their own systems for tracking funds they’re interested in. On the LP side, when you make LPs jump through hoops to access basic information about your fund, you’re not protecting intellectual property, you’re creating friction that loses deals. If you’re confident in your numbers, you should show it. In practice, this means sharing the full data room with download rights, being transparent about marks (up and down), and sharing all previous track records with notes to show the development of your style to tell the story of the fund you’re raising for. Transparency compounds, and Ben’s story is proof.SuperAngel.Fund invests as close to the first check as possible. Ben calls this “day zero” investing. The strategy requires throwing away traditional portfolio construction models.“I have incredible agility and flexibility. Sure I have a fund model that breaks down the projections, just like a founder might give you projections, but we all know projections. I mean, come on.”Ben can run $25 million funds for the next 30 years. He’s not trying to scale to $100 million, hire associates, or build a platform team.“The model works as a solo GP, from the management fee potential as well as the carried interest. It’s easier to return a $25 million fund than a hundred million dollar fund, and it’s also easier to deliver higher percentage returns when you have a smaller fund.”Ben’s chosen a different path: stay small, stay focused, and stay deeply connected to founders.“At the end of the day, what I love about investing is: you are what your numbers say you are. You could be personable and have the greatest smile but you need to put up numbers and performance to stay in this business.”Build your track record before you need it. Document obsessively. Be transparent. Let the work speak for itself.Special thanks to Matt Curtolo for the intro to Ben 🙏 To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com

Vivek Sodera, founder of Supercharge and a key player behind Superhuman, discusses the nuances of investor roles in early-stage startups. He argues that VCs without founder experience often provide poor advice to zero-to-one founders, emphasizing the critical difference between pre-PMF and post-PMF stages. Vivek also shares his insights on product-market fit and the challenges he faced with his failed startup, AirSeed. He advocates for hands-on investing and selective funding strategies, pushing for a founder-led approach in venture capital.

“When we met Bryon Hargis, who came from SpaceX, it was instant. He was the person to attack hypersonics manufacturing.”Jonathan Lacoste doesn’t wait for traction. He finds founders before they start the company and writes the first check.Space VC launched in 2021, a year and a half before Andreessen announced their $500 million American Dynamism fund. By the time frontier tech became hot, Jonathan had already backed defense hypersonics, thermal energy, and space infrastructure.But the name misleads. Space VC isn’t a space fund, but a frontier tech fund investing in “space for earth” companies.“Space is just a physical location that can serve as an extension of our technology stack,” Jonathan explains. Not exploration. Not colonization. Infrastructure that makes life on Earth better. Starlink. GPS. Technology that happens to use space but exists to solve problems here.That thesis extends beyond space. Jonathan spends 90% of his time now on energy, grid infrastructure, and robotics. Carmen Industries (thermal energy), Castellan (defense hypersonics), True Anomaly (space security)...these are infrastructure plays at the intersection of digital and physical.Fund I: $3 million, $100-250K checks. Fund II: $23 million, $750K-$1.5M checks. Both funds: 15 companies each. The check size went up because his founders asked for it, and the concentration stayed the same because the math works better.“A single exceptional investment moves the needle more in a 15 company portfolio than a 30 company one,” Jonathan says. “The limiting factor isn’t deal flow. It’s conviction. can you find, win, and deeply support 15 companies worth backing?”He spends an inordinate amount of time thinking about markets and answering “what’s the fewest number of things I can get right about a trend or founder to generate meaningful returns?”“There are only going to be a handful of generational companies in the space and defense ecosystem.” He puts the number at 8-12 industry-wide. SpaceX and Anduril already occupy slots. His bet is that if you’re playing this sector, you need to be early and concentrated enough that the handful of winners actually matter.When you’re deeply embedded with 15 companies instead of 40, you know what’s working and what isn’t. You know the risks.“Venture has overemphasized and over-allocated towards software and AI over the last 20 years,” Jonathan says. Energy grids, robotics, defense manufacturing, construction tech, systematically underfunded despite mounting opportunities.The companies he backs use AI and software as the backbone, but the output is physical. Hardware matters. Physics matters. This is the rotation of capital moving from purely digital toward companies building in the physical world.Jonathan’s following the talent, not the headlines which comes back to the same instinct that led him to investing in frontier tech. Special thanks to Evan for the intro to Jonathan! 🙏 To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com

Jamie’s the solo GP of Wave Function Ventures, a freshly announced $15M Fund I writing $250K-$500K checks into pre-seed and seed across aerospace, defense, energy, manufacturing, and robotics. His bet is straightforward: B2B SaaS became hypercompetitive, AI is recreating products in weeks, and software moats don’t hold like they used to. Hardware is different. Once you’re in market, you’ve built something that takes real time and real money to replicate.At 24, fresh out of Stanford with dual degrees in aerospace engineering, Jamie headed straight to the Mojave Desert to Scaled Composites. Two years in, he made a call to split the tail on what became Stratolaunch, the world’s largest aircraft. His decision survived a $100M development program and flew a decade later. In 2016, Jamie watched it take off from the same runway where he’d first sketched it out.Then SpaceX. Five years on Falcon 9, designing the thermal shield that lets the rocket survive reentry and land vertically. World’s first for a hypersonic orbital rocket program. The foundation of SpaceX’s reusable launch business and the thing that makes their economics work.Near the end of SpaceX, Jamie started angel investing. His first check: Boom Supersonic. Blake Scholl flew out to meet Jamie, the first engineer Blake was going to meet. Jamie wrote the check because Blake was knocking down barriers he had no business knocking down as a software outsider.Then Jamie became a founder himself (twice!) His first company was space deployables, and the second was Talyn Air, an electric vertical take-off and landing company that went through YC Winter 2020. Talyn’s approach was pure SpaceX thinking applied to aviation: use a two-stage system where a vertical lift vehicle launches a fixed-wing cruiser, then another lift vehicle catches it on landing. The VTOL system is the problem with electric aircraft because it’s heavy, energy-intensive, and kills range. Talyn separated the systems. Eight government contracts, including US Air Force, and was eventually acquired by Ampaire in 2023.This is what founders get when they take Jamie’s money. Someone who’s lived the capital intensity, the regulatory friction, the government contracts, the build-break-rebuild cycles that separate hardware winners from everyone else. When he sits down with founders, he’s not asking surface-level questions, but workshopping engineering models in Excel like weight, cost, performance, sensitivities. If tariffs double on inputs, do unit economics still work?He’s the founder’s first call when they’re still figuring it out, helping shape the story, flagging risks. That’s the posture that matters at pre-seed. Not showing up when everyone else has validated the idea.His rubric is simple: founding team matters, but unlike software, you can’t stumble around finding product-market fit in deep tech. The problem set needs to be nailed. PhDs are a red flag because the training optimizes for thoroughness over speed. The founder has to be technical. Non-negotiable. If they’re out with customers and need to ping their team for answers, iteration speed dies.Jamie’s not chasing hype. He’s positioning for the decade ahead, where the biggest wins come from the world of building physical things that matter.—Special thanks to Matt for introducing us to Jamie 🙏 To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com

Helen Min, founder and GP of Articulate, shares her unique journey from operator at major tech companies to venture capital. She discusses how her extensive network, built over years in the industry, became a powerful asset, shaping her investment philosophy. Helen emphasizes the importance of evaluating founders based on their unique stories and insights rather than conventional patterns. She also explores the focus of Articulate's fund on fintech and enterprise AI, and the hands-on support she provides to founders, proving that capital alone isn't enough.

Turner Novak’s multi-channel strategy isn’t about building his personal brand. It’s about creating distribution he can lend to his portfolio companies.Most VCs treat media as a side project or ego exercise. Turner built Banana Capital differently. The memes on X/Twitter, the podcast (The Peel), the newsletter (The Split), they’re all top-of-funnel infrastructure designed to support founders.“You’re building up distribution that you can lend to portfolio companies. There’s a lot of VCs who build their own personal brand and I think that’s actually falling short of what you could do.”This isn’t abstract. When a portfolio company needs to hire, Turner’s already built the talent pipeline. When they need customer traction, he’s got the reach. When they’re fundraising their next round, he’s spent years making them look good in public. The distribution compounds for them, not just for him. “I tell founders... I’ve made myself look like an idiot on the internet for five years.” It’s not a joke, it’s infrastructure he’s built that his companies can leverage without having to build it themselves.He recognized early that not everyone lives on X/Twitter. “Every person uses Reddit and YouTube or YouTube and X/Twitter or Reddit and LinkedIn or they’re in a bunch of group chats. Everyone probably has one to three different things.” So he meets founders where they are. The memes travel throughout Slack channels at companies and firms. The podcast reaches founders during their commutes. The newsletter hits their inboxes directly. One insight, repurposed across every channel, compounding reach.Turner’s thesis is simple: founders don’t have time to become media companies. But if their investor already is one, they inherit that leverage from day one. “Very few people understand me in my entirety,” he admits. “I think that’s part of why I started making memes initially was ‘cause I was like, oh, I bet this just hits like an entirely different audience and expands.” Each channel unlocks a different slice of founders. The Twitter crowd. The podcast listeners. The people who never use social, but see his memes forwarded in group chats. He’s intentionally building overlap and redundancy so no founder slips through the cracks.What makes this work isn’t just the distribution itself, but Turner’s relentless context switching. Before noon, he’s pitched LPs, met with founders, coordinated with fund admin, and recorded podcast episodes. “The average shelf life of an online content creator is about seven years. I’m in about eight, doing it pretty consistently. I don’t feel burnt out, because I do things I’m interested in.”This is the emerging manager grind most people don’t see.At big-brand firms, GPs specialize. You’re either sourcing, doing diligence, closing deals, or raising LP capital. As an emerging GP, you’re doing all of it simultaneously. Turner’s bouncing between writing memes, hosting podcast interviews with founders, answering LP questions about fund performance, and reviewing term sheets. The same survival instinct that got him here keeps him moving. Growing up watching his mom survive on a Canadian visa in the U.S., running a custom wedding gown business while getting paid under the table in cash and gift cards, doing whatever it took to make money taught him one thing: “You just learn to survive and do whatever it takes.”Most people know Turner for the memes. The Twitter account with its self-aware humor, poking fun at VCs as a class, never targeting individuals. But there are layers most miss. He got his start in an investment club during college for free pizza. Worked in a factory assembling shelves for JCPenney to pay for college. Spent years getting rejected from VC jobs because he didn’t have Stanford on his resume or Uber on his LinkedIn. Built a “fantasy VC portfolio” on Twitter just to prove he could think like an investor. Took an 80% pay cut to intern at Afore Capital. Sold his house and rental property for runway. Launched his fund during peak COVID chaos in March 2020 when no one was parting with capital.The content doesn’t feel manufactured because it isn’t. Class clown energy meets genuine curiosity. “I don’t take myself super seriously, but I’m serious about the stuff that I do.” He’s the type of guy to stay up until 1am dissecting Snapchat’s annual earnings in spreadsheets while his wife asks him to come to bed, because he genuinely wants to understand why everyone thinks the company is going bankrupt when the numbers tell a different story. Then he translates those insights into formats the general audience actually consumes. A thread, a meme, a podcast episode breaking down why the product redesign everyone hated was actually genius for the business model.His signature tone came to be as he watched meme accounts post the “lowest IQ possible thing” and get hundreds of thousands of views while his 10-hour deep dives got 16. The math was obvious, but instead of abandoning substance for virality, he figured out how to package substance in formats that travel. That’s the difference.What Turner might not fully recognize is how his digital footprint has positioned him at the center of Silicon Valley’s information flow. Whatever platform you use, he’s there. Not by accident, but by deliberate design. He understood before most that geography matters less when your network is the internet itself. His network isn’t in San Francisco or New York, it’s people on the internet. In a world where the best founders are increasingly distributed, where the most interesting companies are getting built outside traditional hubs, being omnipresent online is a structural advantage traditional funds can’t replicate.Yeah, this approach won’t work for everyone, and that’s the point. Turner built something uniquely his because he had to. No Stanford degree. No traditional path. No other option but to figure it out. Just relentless iteration on what actually moved the needle. “I literally didn’t know what I was doing. I just tried to figure this out as I go.”At Slice, we’re excited to see more emerging managers create their own unique methods of winning instead of copying the traditional playbook. Turner’s journey proves there’s alpha in building something authentically yours, something that plays to your strengths, not someone else’s template.Go support his podcast The Peel and keep up with him across his channels, or he’ll find you wherever you are. Thanks to Walter for this introduction. To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com

We’re drawn to managers who architect entirely new ways of winning. Soso Sazesh and his partners at 43 Fund have built something we haven’t seen before: an “anti-consensus fund” where three partners split everything equally and make investment decisions independently.Most funds agonize over investment committee decisions and consensus-building. 43 has eliminated the committee concept entirely. Soso, Dustin, and Anabel each invest their portion of the fund and can write checks without the others’ approval. The result is three distinct investment styles focused on the same goal of writing founders their first check. The result is diversification across deal flow and founder support.What makes this timing perfect is the broader unbundling happening across early-stage infrastructure. Accelerators are no longer the golden ticket they once were. The best founders have moved on, raising their first checks through networks of angels and small funds that provide highly personalized feedback and hands-on help instead of the one-size-fits-all cohort experience.What accelerators offered like early capital, community, and mentorship is still needed, but it’s been redistributed across operator-led syndicates, rolling funds, and micro-funds like 43. The infrastructure exists now for true first-check investing, and the alpha has moved earlier as a result.43 positions itself as the alternative to accelerators, not the stepping stone to them. While Y Combinator batches founders into cohorts, 43 provides individualized support on the founder’s timeline. Capital and hand-on guidance from their network-of-networks before products exist, before traction develops, sometimes before teams are even formed.Their insight is straightforward: founders don’t need cohorts and demo days. They need capital quickly from day zero and tailored support to help reach product/market fit.43 deliberately avoids setting aside capital for follow-ons to keep the focus on what they do best: hustling to invest in promising founders before anyone else.Every potential investment for the three partners starts with three questions: Why you? Why now? How? But the real value is in the extended evaluation process. 43 spends significant time understanding founders before investing, which translates to better support after the check clears.As seed valuations push past $30M and traditional early-stage funds compete with multi-stage platforms, the real alpha has moved to first-check investing. 43’s structure - three independent decision-makers with deep founder relationships and no committee friction - positions them perfectly for this shift.The accelerator era taught us what founders need early on. Funds like 43 show us how to deliver it better.Special thank you to Walter for introducing us to Soso To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com