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 🙏 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, 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! 🙏 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, 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 🙏 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slicefund.substack.com

Most VCs will tell you their network is their edge. Helen Min, founder and GP of Articulate, actually built hers before she knew what it was worth.Facebook. Dropbox. Quora. Plaid. AngelList, And for a long time, she didn’t realize what she had.“It took me a while to figure out,” Helen admits. The network wasn’t something she extracted value from or optimized for dealflow. It was just... there. Built authentically through years of operating, advising on branding and communication, helping founders tell their stories before it became her job to write checks.While at Plaid, Helen started angel investing almost by accident, helping founders she believed in, underwriting people over patterns. That portfolio grew, the conviction deepened, and suddenly she had proof of concept.AngelList served as Helen’s “venture capital education.” Not the sanitized MBA version, but one where you learn about how money flows. How incentives align (and misalign). How the mechanics of venture actually work when you’re inside the machinery instead of watching from outside.Helen was operationalizing what most VCs only intellectualize. She was there when rolling funds launched on Angellist, she saw how syndicates formed, how angel checks compounded into real portfolios. She understood the infrastructure of early-stage capital in a way that traditional venture paths don’t teach.From there in 2017, she co-founded Phenomenal Ventures with Meena Harris, and later joined True Ventures as a Venture Partner. Each step was Helen stress testing whether this thing she’d been doing informally could become a firm.As a solo GP, Helen now invests in founders whose journeys come from the depth of understanding that comes from years as an operator, watching CEOs navigate company building firsthand, seeing what actually matters versus what sounds good in a partner meeting.Articulate is a $10M pre-seed fund focused on enterprise software and FinTech. Not because these sectors are hot (though they are), but because Helen’s entire career prepared her to underwrite them.It’s a simple thesis: invest early in exceptional technical founders she meets before consensus forms, then support them through storytelling, marketing strategy, and team-building. all things she’s done her entire career as an operator.At Articulate, Helen’s focusing on understanding the motivations of founders beyond the pitch deck. Helping them build teams, refine messaging, and navigate moments when the story changes. The stuff that doesn’t scale, except Helen’s built a firm around making it scale.Her edge isn’t proprietary deal flow or some unique market insight. It’s that she genuinely understands what it takes to build a company because she’s done it multiple times at companies most VCs only dream of getting into.Helen’s journey from operator to angel to GP offers a blueprint, but it’s not replicable. You can’t manufacture a network like hers. You can’t shortcut the years at category-defining companies. You can’t fake the depth of relationships she built before she knew they’d become her investing edge.But you can focus on earned insight over pattern matching. You can build conviction independently instead of chasing co-investor logos. You can invest in people you genuinely understand and believe in, even when the signals aren’t obvious.That network she spent years building? It wasn’t magic because it was strategic. It was magic because it was real.Special thanks to Finn for introducing us to Helen 🙏 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slicefund.substack.com

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. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, 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 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slicefund.substack.com

The mystery of venture investing is that you never know where your highest returns will come from. There's no repeatable business model, no guaranteed formula for finding the next breakout company. Most VCs try to solve this with pattern matching or specialized theses, but these approaches focus on what's working now. Finn bets on what's coming next.Finn Murphy, Solo GP of Nebular, takes a different approach as a generalist investor. Instead of trying to predict outcomes, he goes deep on talent density.Finn looks for areas "not flooded with high-status attention but brimming with potential." While others pile into consensus opportunities, he's mapping where smart, innovative minds are quietly building. Whether it's healthcare administration tools, quantum computing applications, or even dinosaur fossils as an alternative asset class, his investment decisions follow talent migration patterns rather than hot sectors."I don't just invest in what's hot," Finn explains. "I dive into spaces where others may hesitate." This conviction-driven approach lets him move fluidly across verticals because he's following people, not trends.What makes this strategy work is how deep Finn goes. Rather than skimming surfaces across sectors, he systematically identifies where concentrated talent is spending time and then embeds himself there. I.e. engaging with academia, top founders, friends of founders. His intellectual curiosity, stemming from his mother's encouragement to "be the best in whatever you do" and supported by his engineering background and startup experience, drives him to explore ideas that might seem trivial to others but resonate deeply with the builders.Going deep on talent density means accepting that your winners might come from completely unexpected places. Finn's fund deployment spanning US and Europe, reflects this approach. He's not trying to diversify away risk through broad exposure, but concentrating risk by going deep on people and places others haven't noticed yet.This approach aligns with what his LPs actually want: diversity and non-consensus investment strategies. Finn has built a repeatable system for finding concentrated, correlated seed risk in spaces where the best minds are working but capital hasn't flooded in yet.As he puts it, he likes "learning about things and usually starts from a place of ignorance, mostly barely scraping much past there, just trying to stay slightly ahead of where the crowd is going."This humility combined with systematic talent hunting allows him to consistently stay ahead across different verticals. He's not trying to be an expert in everything. He's trying to be early to wherever the experts are going next.Special thanks to Talal for introducing us to Finn! 🙏 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slicefund.substack.com

At Slice, we're drawn to emerging managers who don't just follow the playbook, but rewrite it.Sarah Smith is the founder and GP of the $16m Sarah Smith Fund who embodies this ethos. As a solo GP with an unrelenting commitment to being the best in class, she's built systems from day one, knowing from her operator background that you need systems that scale from day 1.What sets her apart isn't just her focus or tenacity (though she has both in spades). It's how she's cracked the code on three critical areas that most emerging managers have yet to crack the code on: building genuine talent pipelines, creating magnetic LP experiences, and leveraging AI systems to punch above her weight class.Our thesis on Sarah is the “network of networks”. Through her experience and involvement at GSB, she’s created a fellowship program that's equal parts talent incubator and lifelong network builder with tentacles throughout silicon valley and beyond."I want students to appreciate that there are many ways to do venture," Sarah explains. This mentality stems from her teaching background, about finding the best in each individual and supporting them to find their own style. She’s expanding the ecosystem incrementally by curating diverse minds.Her program is intensive: three weeks, visits with 25 different firms across diverse verticals and strategies, direct access to professionals across the spectrum. Unlike most fellowships, they’re given $50k each to have the chance to source, diligence, and invest in a startup to start their track record. It's the difference between reading about swimming and jumping into the deep end and getting that lived experienceSarah has built a talent flywheel that will compound and give back. Former fellows become dealflow sources, co-investors, references for stanford founders, and eventually, LPs themselves.The thoughtful way of teaching doesn’t end with the fellowships, and continues to spread to her LPs through her world class AGM, which punches way above the weight of most AGMs, especially of a solo GP."I wanted to highlight how I'm going about building the fund for scale," she says. But scale here doesn't mean bigger, it means better, more intentional, more impactful.The format is tight: half day in person, high caliber content, showcase of top founders. No death march of metrics, no wasted time. Sarah understands that her LPs' time is precious, so every minute delivers value."Over half of my fund came in, in that last four weeks after the AGM." When your existing LPs become your best salespeople, you know you're doing something right.This mirrors what we've seen across our conversations that the best emerging managers don't just manage capital but understand the product is relationships, and that investing in the right ones will compound early and benefit them in the long run.While the venture world debates AI to replace the role it will take within firms, Sarah has quietly made it her secret weapon for fund operations."I think we can do 10 times more for our founders in a tenth of the time,". Bold statement, but she backs it up with systematic implementation.Her AI framework isn't about replacing human judgment, but supporting it. One of the models that she’s integrated is a 100pt system to screen founders. Every investor has the things that they look for and don’t. This screener lets Sarah make the final decision, but extracts the information that she needs to make her decision easier, and to know what area to spend time with on the founder so she can go deep, earlier, and quicker. Her systems also help her prioritize which meetings align with her strategy, maintain portfolio health management, and identify patterns that might take humans weeks to spot.We’re observing that the best solo GPs aren't trying to do everything manually. They're building systems that let them focus on what only they can do like building relationships, making investment decisions, and supporting founders, so they can repeat the same fund size and strategy for future funds.Sarah's approach embodies a core belief we hold at Slice: growth doesn't necessarily mean scale, but rather quality and impact. In a world where bigger often feels like better, Sarah has chosen intentionality over expansion.Her fellowship program creates lasting value beyond capital. Her AGMs build genuine community, and her custom AI implementation enhances her abilities rather than replacing human connection. Each piece reinforces the others, creating a flywheel that most larger funds would struggle to replicate.This is what we mean when we talk about emerging managers with a chip on their shoulder. It's not about proving you can do everything, but about proving you can be the best at certain things in certain areas than anyone else.As Sarah continues building, her model serves as a blueprint for what's possible when you combine relentless focus with innovative thinking. She's not just managing a fund; she's architecting the future of what success looks like as a solo GP (who wants to remain a solo GP).Special thanks to Nakul for introducing us to Sarah, and to Sarah for sharing her time with us. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slicefund.substack.com

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!! This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slicefund.substack.com

Will Lehmann, founder of Step Function, shares insights from his journey transitioning from Bain Capital Ventures to running his own specialized fund. He discusses the importance of size in venture capital, arguing that smaller funds foster deeper relationships with founders. Lehmann highlights the potential of investing in infrastructure software and AI, noting the rise of successful outcomes in this sector. The conversation also explores Boston's emergence as a tech hub and the evolving landscape of venture capital, emphasizing collaboration in supporting visionary founders.