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behind the slice of venture built to last: emerging managers and the art of small founder-led funds

  1. suds sridharan / sf1

    Jun 23

    suds sridharan / sf1

    There's a moment in venture when the gravity flips, the investor stops chasing deals and the deals start chasing the investor. Suds is already there. VCs send him their best founders not purely out of goodwill, but because they can't unsee the pattern that every week there's a hot Series A, and every week it seems to be one of his. It’s likely that Suds has already found next year's breakout, and before it has a name. Sudarshan Sridharan, Suds, is the founder and GP of SF1, a $10M Fund I writing the first check into hyper-technical founders. He’s placed the groundwork as a former founder, angel investor of eighty companies, where Sixty-five of his first eighty angel checks were first money in, all before he turned twenty-five, Greptile, Delphi, Sail Research, and a long tail of others. A South Carolina kid with eight thousand Twitter followers a year ago, is now the name VCs drop when they want to sound early. We get into the SF1 flywheel, where founders he backed at the first round introduce him to the friends raising next, so he's in at the early price on the round he'll later help run. And we get into the parts of venture he won't perform.  SF1 Fund I companies have raised > $450M in follow-on capital from top tier funds in 13 months. The performance is the one part of this he never bothered to learn.

    38 min
  2. helena gagern & teddy schaumburg-lippe / embassy ventures

    Jun 2

    helena gagern & teddy schaumburg-lippe / embassy ventures

    Most of the conversation about European founders in SF is about geography, about who relocated, who's bouncing back and forth, who's still trying to do it from Paris or Berlin. Helena and Teddy know that Europe's best talent is coming to SF, and now earlier than ever. The bottleneck isn't whether to be here. It's what happens in your first 90 days when you don't yet know who to meet, who matters, or which dinner to say yes to. They built The Embassy for that gap, a Pac Heights Victorian where the best European founders get invited to land, sleep, and end up across the table from the person who changes their trajectory. The $15m fund they've now built is central to the Embassy's strategy, cutting checks as early as possible into European founders in SF.  Our conversation gets into how they identify the founders they call "opportunity compounders," and why they ran The Embassy for a year without taking a salary, setting a quality bar they'd never compromise, not even for the VC who wants to place a portfolio founder there for big bucks. It's free for the founders, but only if you make the cut. We get into the moment a portfolio company went zero to $650M in five months, when they realized a fund was the right model, not fees on programming. And we get into where they see The Embassy growing in the SF ecosystem, and yes, it’s already a hotbed!  The bet is that the Europeans who win in SF carry something specific home, and that the diaspora, properly connected, is the most concentrated bet you can make on European tech right now. Full episode below, or on Spotify / Apple Podcasts.

    32 min
  3. daniel ha & gadi borovich / antigravity capital

    May 12

    daniel ha & gadi borovich / antigravity capital

    Most of the AI conversation in venture is about tools. Who's running Claude Code, who built the better agent stack, who's moving faster. Gadi and Daniel are making a different argument. The tools are already everywhere, that's not the constraint anymore. The constraint is formation. People who've developed the right instincts for working with these tools, which mostly comes from having been in environments that built those instincts. And then Gadi pulls the thread: what the Puentes program is doing, finding engineers in Latin America who have the ability but never had the rails. It’s the same thesis, running in both directions at once. Daniel Ha dropped out of UC Davis in 2007 to go through Y Combinator and spent nearly a decade building Disqus, a blog comment platform that reached 4 million websites and 2 billion monthly users, before its acquisition by Zeta Global. Gadi Borovich is from Montevideo, Uruguay. He got into Minerva University, tracked down the Wefunder office across three different addresses until someone let him in, grew their market share to 45%, and built XX, an accelerator for technical outsiders, before most people his age had a degree. Together they built Antigravity Capital. Our conversation gets into what it actually means to build an AI-native fund, not as a brand claim but as an operational one. It gets into where scarcity actually lives now that code generation is ubiquitous, and what that implies for who ends up building the things that matter.  Throughout the episode, you’ll get the sense the fund is just the form their restlessness took, they'd be doing this anyway.

    37 min
  4. matt curtolo

    Apr 26

    matt curtolo

    Matt Curtolo is an independent LP advisor and 20+ year private markets veteran. He spent seven years at Hamilton Lane, led the private equity portfolio at a $25B outsourced CIO, and co-managed a substantial private equity & venture book at MetLife before joining Allocate, where he went deep on emerging managers for the first time. He left to do the thing he found himself most drawn to: work one-on-one with GPs and LPs to better understand the hardest parts of today’s market, especially fundraising. His current practice lives in the middle. He's not a placement agent, and he's deliberate about that. What he offers is the voice of the LP; the candid feedback that most LPs won't give because there's no real incentive for them to. In an informal survey of over 40 groups he worked with last year, 80% said they get zero or minimal feedback after LP meetings. That gap is where Matt operates. Our conversation gets into what he looks for in the managers he takes on (self-awareness, humility, receptiveness to feedback), why he thinks LPs are asking the wrong questions about fund performance far too early, and what the industry would look like if LPs just said what they actually thought. The opacity between what an LP says and what their actions indicate is the single biggest inefficiency in the emerging manager ecosystem.

    34 min
  5. drew austin / red beard ventures

    Apr 15

    drew austin / red beard ventures

    Drew Austin is the Founding Partner of Red Beard Ventures, an early-stage crypto and frontier tech firm. He bought his first Bitcoin in a parking lot in 2013, started his first company at 19 running food delivery out of a Syracuse dorm, and has never had what he'd call a real job. Before starting red beard, he built and sold Wade & Wendy, an AI recruiting platform. Red Beard started as an AngelList syndicate in 2021 and became the springboard for everything else. Over five years, the syndicate has done around 250 investments and deployed $75-100M in SPVs, with 9,000 accredited investors. That led to a $25M Fund I, and then Denarii Labs, a tokenomics accelerator that's run four cohorts and invested in about 30 companies. Drew thinks about the ecosystem he’s creating where the fund and denarii are feeding into each other.  Our conversation gets into a thesis Drew has been carrying for years: the blockchain wasn't built for humans, it was built for AI agents. We were the beta. The next billion users of the internet won't be people, they'll be agents that need wallets, stablecoins, and decentralized infrastructure to act as economic participants in the world. Fund II is his bet on that convergence. For most of 2025, Drew takes us into his journey of burnout. The crypto world he'd spent twelve years in had split into corporate suits on one end and meme coin degens on the other, and the middle he believed in was dying. He took a real break, went skiing with his kids, and came back and started vibe coding. That's when the AI and blockchain convergence he'd been waiting seven years for finally clicked into place.

    38 min
  6. ramzi rizk / wip capital

    Mar 31

    ramzi rizk / wip capital

    Ramzi Rizk is the Founder and General Partner of Work in Progress Capital, a €10M fund in Berlin backing scientists and engineers building the future he wants to live in. He left Lebanon on his 21st birthday looking for his tribe, landed in Germany, and dropped out of a PhD on privacy and social media to build a photography platform. It grew to 25 million photographers, pioneered computational aesthetics and computer vision, and went public on the Swiss Stock Exchange in 2021 after an 11-year journey. He started angel investing in 2020 and quickly noticed a pattern that the founders he liked best were scientists and engineers who looked different than what European VCs were used to seeing. Our conversation gets into what drew Ramzi to build a fund around that instinct. Work in Progress Capital is targeting 35-40 companies at pre-seed and seed, writing €150-250K checks. Ramzi’s thesis starts from a place that by almost every measurable standard, we're living in the best time in human history. Ramzi believes technology finishes the job. He's backing founders digitizing the human brain, building implantable neuromodulation devices, and rethinking cancer diagnostics. He doesn't want one shot on goal for any of these problems but multiple bets across different approaches. Full episode below, or on Spotify / Apple Podcasts

    38 min
  7. somrat niyogi / recall capital

    Mar 17

    somrat niyogi / recall capital

    Somrat Niyogi is the Founder and General Partner of Recall Capital, a $14M Fund I now building a $25M Fund II, writing $350-900K checks into AI-native B2B companies. Before Recall, Somrat joined Salesforce as an early employee. He went on to build two venture-backed companies, and spent years as an early operator at Clari and Gusto. His network runs deep because he was there early, at most of the companies that matter in San Francisco. He and his wife Sarah, first general counsel at Plaid, six years at Scale, started angel investing together out of their own network. Recall was the natural next step. Somrat runs buyer dinners for his founders, fills the room himself, and does sales coaching the way a hired coach would. He’ll also tell you he was one of the worst CEOs during his first company. Decades of operating and building, and he still hasn’t found the ceiling. You get the sense that clarity about what didn’t work is what makes him sharp about what Recall is supposed to do and the resilient founders they back. Full episode below, or on Spotify / Apple Podcasts

    37 min
  8. arkady kulik / arkane

    Mar 3

    arkady kulik / arkane

    Arkady Kulik is the founder of Arkane a $21M fund writing $350K checks into what he calls hidden needs, three major problems science can already solve, but that most investors don't yet see.  To find them, he's built an army of AI agents that surface 400-500 page deep reports on specific needs, run them through a nine-dimension judgment framework, and map thousands of potential solutions: patents, papers, stealth founders on LinkedIn. He calls it hunting. Most VCs farm or fish. Before venture, Arkady built Thankyou, the largest digital music label in Russia, in his early 20s. Then became COO of VK.com, the country's biggest social network, where revenue crossed a billion dollars. He left in 2021 when the platform was effectively acquired by the Russian government. He started RPV shortly after, deploying a $7M Fund I before launching Arkane.  His foundational principle is that you can't time a solution, but you can time a problem. For example, rather than betting on one Parkinson's company, Arkane builds 17-20 companies across surgery, vaccines, gene editing, and neuromodulation. If they're right about the need, they hit their unicorn. What struck me throughout our conversation was how this fund is a genuine extension of who Arkady is. The vehicle is almost beside the point. He'd be doing this anyway, hunting for the scientists and founders who can speak both languages, and building the bridge between them.

    33 min
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behind the slice of venture built to last: emerging managers and the art of small founder-led funds

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