Slice Podcast

“I think most VCs, especially ones who haven’t founded companies and been successful, should stick with series A and beyond.”After co-founding three companies including Superhuman, where he helped architect the now-famous PMF methodology, Vivek Sodera has experienced the damage that well-meaning investors inflict on zero-to-one founders.“There is a night and day difference in interfacing with an investor who has started a company at the zero to one stage. When you have investors who haven’t built companies before, they categorically will give bad advice at that zero to one stage.”Vivek draws a sharp line most investors blur. There’s the zero-to-one art of company building before PMF. Then there’s the science of scaling post-PMF.“Once it becomes the science of company building and you’re post-PMF, anyone in venture will pattern match against their portfolio. As a founder, you don’t need to try to recreate employee compensation or enterprise sales ,that’s where most VCs can add value. But that inflection point between PMF and pre-PMF? When you have investors who haven’t built companies before, they categorically will give bad advice.”His second company, Airseed, never found product-market fit. After three years, he shut it down. That painful moment became his edge. Soon after, Rahul Vohra pitched him on rebuilding email. What they built at Superhuman wasn’t just a product, but a systematic approach to diagnosing PMF that they open-sourced. The methodology came from necessity. One investor at Superhuman (someone from Wall Street who’d never founded a company) sent all-caps emails multiple times a week: “WHAT ARE YOU DOING? OPEN UP. NONE OF MY PORTFOLIO COMPANIES ARE DOING THESE ONE-TO-ONE ONBOARDINGS.”Vivek took him to lunch with the data. “I am a big believer that founders are closest to the product and the customer. It takes a particular type of investor who can say, my job isn’t to control. My job is to influence.”Control versus influence is the distinction that matters at the zero-to-one stage. Pattern matching versus lived experience. It’s why Vivek built Supercharge the way he did.“What I’m doing with Supercharge is being this fractional founder to help founders with three biggest pain points: product-market fit, fundraising, and recruiting. Pretty much 99.99% of investors don’t have experience with PMF and don’t have experience building out a methodology and a framework where they can surgically analyze and diagnose what PMF means.”Supercharge Fund I is intentionally small: $15M backing 20 companies in enterprise AI, productivity, and dev tools. Fund II will be $20-25M max. “I’m not interested in playing the AUM game. I’m more interested in playing the carry game.”His value-add tapers off by design at series B, but as a first believer, he stays connected. “I have an angel investment that will most likely be the fund returner for my angel fund. She raised a $200 million series C on a $2 billion post. The founder still calls me. My value add has tapered off. But I’m still the cheerleader, I’m still the therapist, in perpetuity.”Vivek’s investing criteria has evolved sharply post-ChatGPT. “I now look for founders leveraging AI code gen products and tools, at least 90% of the code should be AI generated. Less than that is not as interesting to me. It signals the founder is not adapting to this new paradigm shift.”But what really gets him animated is the current discourse around revenue growth. The AI supercycle has created unprecedented noise, and founders are getting dangerous advice from the wrong investors.“You have founders on the GTM side who get to single-digit millions in revenue very quickly. Prosumer seats where the end user is using the product for a month. The founder multiplies that by 12 and says, ‘This is our ARR.’ What they’re not being honest about is the considerable amount of churn, the lack of retention.”And tier-one funds are making it worse. “They’re saying what’s interesting is not getting to $2 million in three months. What’s interesting is getting to $2 million in 10 days. It’s bad advice to founders. It’s shortsighted and crappy revenue. What’s more interesting is taking the time to figure out how to sell into the enterprise and unlocking that motion, where durability gets created.”He’s watching founders rage bait on Twitter about how fast they hit revenue milestones, but “we’re going to see a massive drop-off and implosion..”This is precisely why Vivek’s surgical approach to PMF matters more in 2025 than ever before. The market has never been noisier. The tools to fake traction have never been more accessible. The gap between real product-market fit and manufactured metrics has never been wider.Founders at the zero-to-one stage need someone who can tell the difference. Who can look past the vanity metrics and diagnose whether you’re actually building something durable or just riding a hype cycle that’ll crash in 18 months.What separates great emerging managers from good ones isn’t just what they’ve built, it’s whether they can translate that experience into reproducible frameworks. Vivek can diagnose product-market fit in the first 30 seconds of a pitch because he’s lived every permutation of finding it, losing it, and systematizing it.For founders building in enterprise AI, productivity, and developer tools at the zero-to-one stage, he’s not just an investor. He’s the fractional founder who’s been there, done that, and has the frameworks to prove it.Special thanks to Jonathan for the intro to Vivek 🙏 To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com

“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

Finn Murphy, founder and solo general partner of Nebular Ventures, dives into his unique approach to investing in talent-dense opportunities across emerging sectors like quantum computing and healthcare tools. He reveals how he tracks where innovative minds gather, opting to invest where others overlook potential. Finn shares his conviction-driven strategy of following talent rather than trends, emphasizing a genuine partnership with founders and exploring unconventional assets. His insights challenge traditional VC models by prioritizing people-first investing.

Sarah Smith, founder of the Sarah Smith Fund, discusses her journey from an educator to a prominent solo GP in venture capital. She emphasizes the importance of building scalable systems from day one. Sarah reveals her innovative approach to creating talent pipelines and enhancing investor experiences with AI tools. Her fellowship program at Stanford serves as a unique incubator for emerging talent, empowering students with hands-on venture experience. In a world of venture where many follow the same script, she encourages a diverse, multi-faceted approach to investing.

Another 12 episodes later, and season 2 of the slice podcast has come to a close.We started the slice pod with a simple intention: to create a space where emerging managers could speak plainly about their strategy, yes, but also their doubts, lessons, and the behind-the-scenes mechanics of building a firm. We wanted real conversations about what it means to start a fund in this moment.Somewhere between the stories of first checks and fundraises, between LP pitch decks and GP advisory calls, a pattern began to emerge. The managers who stick with you, the ones who seem most likely to outlast the hype cycle, aren’t just chasing alpha. They're designing institutions. ones that look different from the last generation. Smaller (most of the time In other words: they’re building with constraint. and they’re turning that constraint into a competitive edge.This season, you’ll notice a recurring theme: stay small to stay dangerous.As fabri put it:"Don’t go bigger. start small. stay small. play in the cracks, the nooks, the crannies, where the big funds simply can’t follow. it’s structurally impossible for them to compete. that’s where you win."It’s a reminder that small funds don’t have to become big funds. in fact, many shouldn’t.because the game changes. the edge dulls. the returns compress. one $200M outcome might return a $20M fund 10x. that same outcome barely registers in a $300M vehicle.An important piece that we’ve come to believe is that it’s not just about portfolio construction. It's about firm construction. Who you raise from matters. (the LPs are your customers!) Who you make money for matters. It shapes how you operate, how you’re perceived, what you’re allowed to do.Slice exists because we believe something structural is shifting in early-stage venture. the old playbook “raise big, spend fast, go wide” doesn’t work anymore. We’re in the post-ZIRP, AI-native era, and capital efficiency isn’t a badge of honor. It’s a survival skill.As rounds get smaller, check sizes compress, and founders delay dilution, the managers best positioned to win are the ones who can move fast, cut tight checks, and spot talent before it’s consensus.You don’t do that with a $150M seed fund. You do it with $15 - 20M, first-check fund, and a map of the edges where opportunity lives.That’s what this season taught us, and it reinforced our belief that LPs looking for outlier returns shouldn’t chase logos, but rather chase leverage. This leverage lives in the cracks among the emerging, overlooked, and underestimated.A sincere thank you to our guests, to every manager who joined us this season:Eric Slesinger, Cameron Porter, Nick Tippmann, Ethan Austin, Cam Crowder, Santosh Sankar, Ivan Montoya, Madeline Darcy, Chris Wake and Lili Rogowsky, Ben Orthlieb and Romain Serman, Dakota McKenzie, and Will Lehmann.thank you for trusting us with your story. for sharing the hard parts, not just the wins. for showing up not as a brand, but as a builder.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 (!!)We’ll be back soon with season 3. Until then, H.A.G.S!! To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com

Before launching Step Function, Will Lehmann spent years at Bain Capital Ventures, cutting his teeth on enterprise software deals. Now he’s charting his own course with a $12M fund that’s small by design, early on purpose, and built to back edge cases before they become power laws.Most managers who spin out of multistage platforms make the same mistake. They raise big because they can, then wonder why the quality of founders drops off. It’s a common pitfall where they’re suddenly exposed to the truth that those founders were there for the brand of the firm, not the individual GP. Will is betting on something more durable: being the right size to matter."$250k is meaningful to the founders, and small enough that you can be collaborative," Will explains. It's the sweet spot where you get "the support of a multistage investor but with the look and feel of a super angel."Step Function's focus is backing technical founders building infrastructure software. Developer tools, data infrastructure, AI infrastructure, security, monitoring, observability. Will sees two forces at work here that most miss.First, the density of power law outcomes. “I struggle to think of any other area of software where you so reliably get multiple multi-billion dollar outcomes every year.” The enterprise software data on exits backs that up: Snowflake ($3.4B), Confluent ($828M), Rubrik ($752M) on the public side. Plus huge acquisitions like Databricks’ billion-dollar-plus bet on Neon.Second, the practitioner's advantage. Infrastructure software attracts founders who are users first, builders second. They've lived the pain, understand the gaps, and have prescriptive points of view on what needs to exist. "That was me," Will reflects. "I have a very prescriptive point of view on what the product is and how to build it. That true authentic mission-driven founder…I just don't find it quite as common in other spaces."This matters more than most realize, and as he puts it “Incremental improvements at the infrastructure layer create step function changes at the application layer.” It's systems-level thinking that compounds across the entire software stack.Will acknowledges the comfort of being at a large fund. A dedicated IR team, teammates, institutional support. But he's betting that being small, nimble, and specialized gives him the best shot at delivering returns to LPs. In a world where venture is splitting between early and late, Step Function plants its flag firmly on the early side, where the big guys have left cracks of opportunity.The infrastructure software wave isn't slowing down. If anything, it's accelerating as AI reshapes how we build, deploy, and scale systems. Will's positioning Step Function right in the path of that transformation, backing the technical founders who will architect the next layer of the stack. We just hope that he stays small ;)Special thanks to Evan for the intro to Will 🙏 To hear more, visit slicefund.substack.com