On My Mind: Exposure to Private Assets

Plus, a framework for building slides and some good book recs

Photo of the week: my newest piece of art - a framed newspaper from the history-making men’s Australian Open final.

On My Mind

Today’s topic: vehicles to enable individuals to invest in private companies.

People want to invest in the companies building the future. The software engineer who uses Claude Code to 10x her productivity may want to invest in Anthropic, both because she sees first-hand how it’s disrupting coding and because she wants to hedge against any risk that AI puts her out of a job. A lawyer using Harvey may feel similarly. Same with the musician using Suno. The list goes on.

Yet these companies are staying private – often with significantly higher valuations than historical averages. I jokingly tweeted that we now need a name for private companies that exceed $1T in valuation. There’s undeniable demand for investors to get exposure to these companies. Everyone wants to own a piece of the future.

So, on my mind is the question: what’s the best vehicle to give investors exposure to these assets?

There’s two ways to decompose the set options: with each company’s permission, or without. With a company’s permission is challenging. One can invest directly in a private funding round (largely inaccessible for the average Joe). Sometimes companies allow employees or early investors to sell secondaries (also often difficult to get access to). There are a growing number of SPVs that attempt to provide exposure – but they’re typically riddled with fees and may lack investor protections.

The path I’m more interested in is the latter: products that provide exposure without needing a company’s permission. These are likely to be some form of a derivative. And we do have some early attempts, like Robinhood’s synthetic share tokens and select pre-IPO perpetual markets. One could imagine prediction markets eventually serving as a directional venue for exposure, where markets for the over/under on a company’s next private round valuation provide some upside related to the company’s appreciation (even if far from a 1:1 with the payoff structure from a direct investment).

But there are challenges with all of the above. And personally, I’m unconvinced any are the form factor most investors have been looking for. Low liquidity limits volumes. Severe information asymmetries may undermine the integrity of the markets and/or impact the price oracles.

This week I was struck by another construction: venture funds going public. Investing in (certain) VC firms may provide exposure to baskets of assets of many of the most important private companies. The idea was sparked by the launch of Robinhood’s Ventures Fund I, which will be a publicly traded vehicle. Its focus is to invest in highly desired private companies. By going public, the shares will be highly liquid, widely accessible (i.e. no accredited investor credentials required), and marked to market daily. The premium or discount to NAV may even become a mechanism for price discovery for some of the underlying assets the fund holds!

My guess is that, in the years to come, we see more venture firms go public. And maybe we even see an entirely new crop of venture firms emerge with the primary intent of going public to give retail venues to build exposure to the companies building the future.

Frameworking

Designing a slide deck.

I kind of love building slides. I’ve written about the art of a pitch deck before. I even spent last fall making a 150 page deck on crypto trends as a passion project. It’s an art.

This week’s frameworking was a buzzer beater, inspired by a conversation I had last night with a founder and friend. The question: how do you build the perfect deck?

Claude or ChatGPT can likely design a good slide. But it’s more like a paintbrush than the actual artist. You’re still the painter. And the role of the painter is to figure out the content that should go on the canvas (each slide).

So this week’s frameworking is: always ask yourself what question(s) each slide should answer.

People often put too many slides in the core of a deck. They think about the content they want to show and the work they’ve put in, not the set of questions they need to answer. By flipping this framing – and focusing on the questions first – the author puts themselves in the audience’s shoes.

If you can’t figure out what question a slide is answering, the slide probably isn’t that important. And if the question it’s answering isn’t a good one, the slide can probably go in the appendix.

Content I Consumed This Week

1. The Stablecoin Podcast (self-promo) – I appeared on this week’s episode of The Stablecoin Podcast. It was great to jam on where value accrues, how I anticipate the infrastructure will evolve, and even share a few tips for how I separate the signal from noise when looking at markets.

2. Stripe’s Annual Letter – always a fun read. My favorite section was on the “five levels of agentic commerce.” I can’t wait for the day I can have an AI help me find the perfect jacket for 45-55 degree weather. That being said, I am maybe more skeptical than the letter authors of soon seeing a day when we’ll fully outsource purchasing decisions to agents. Nonetheless, a great example of frameworking.

3. Open (by Andre Agassi) – Agassi is one of the greatest tennis players of all time. I’m about halfway through his autobiography and would highly recommend. The most shocking part of the story? He continuously emphasizes and restates how much he hates tennis.

Books on the docket: Setting the Table by Danny Meyer; Hit Refresh by Satya Nadella.