Sam Slover

Been a while since I posted here. Sat down with the Seed Club team to talk about what we're building at my new venture, Ultramarkets, why prediction markets break traditional perps models, and why conviction should matter more than capital. A few things we covered: - Why binary markets need a fundamentally different approach to leverage - Why real trades on Polymarket beat synthetic exposure every time - How human attention on world events becomes a yield source for LPs - The infrastructure vision: leverage as a layer, not a product If you've been watching prediction markets grow and wondering what the financial infrastructure looks like on top of them, this one's worth 28 minutes. https://lnkd.in/e_fFP4hz

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Come and hear Carrie Levine and Jordan Combs demo the new Planscape Funding Opportunity Report. We're excited to extend Planscape into helping forest collaboratives get more projects funded, and grateful to our partners Blue Forest, The Freshwater Trust, USDA Forest Service and others who have made this possible.

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TechCrunch covered the trend. Let’s talk about the truth behind it. A few hard truths from actually being in the trenches of this “venture zombie” work: 1. The work isn’t diligence, it’s reconstruction: - Early-stage VCs optimize for potential. - Hold-forever investors have to optimize for reality: broken systems, misaligned teams, faulty pricing, shaky GTM, and unfocused products. 2. You have to rewire founder psychology, not just cap tables: - Most “zombies” aren’t dying from lack of opportunity, they’re dying from the residue of venture conditioning: chase TAM, ignore margins, hire ahead of PMF, optimize for the next round. - Evergreen acquisition requires un-teaching bad habits and re-anchoring operators to fundamentals: cashflow, unit economics, customer retention, and repeatability. 3. The arbitrage isn’t cheap price, it’s time preference: - VCs need velocity and outliers. - Evergreen buyers need durability and cash yield - That mismatched time horizon is where the real value surfaces. You’re not betting on a future markup, you’re betting on transforming a company into a compounding asset. 4. Most people underestimate the operational drag: - Turning these companies around means stepping into the weeds: rebuilding finance, revamping GTM, fixing data infrastructure, restructuring teams, restarting product discipline. The “ton of work” is literal. 5. The winners will be operator-centric, not capital-centric: - The capital structure matters. But the real moat is the operator bench behind it. Funds that treat these acquisitions like PE-lite won’t survive. The ones that bring real hands-on turnaround muscle will. This shift isn’t about buying zombies, it’s about accurately assessing how much value gets trapped in early-stage companies that were built for a venture world that no longer exists. https://lnkd.in/gpSjtUaJ

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As a pre-seed/seed investor, what should I do with this whole "triple, triple, double, double is dead. Just do 0 to $100M ARR in N months deals" trope being told everywhere? We have limited data to work with at seed. And it's not that I am managing a $B growth fund that can schmooze into late-stage rounds of these point-in-time outliers. Besides serving the LP fundraising narratives of large, cross-over franchises, what use is this podcast/X hockey-stick flex for early-stage investors?

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USVC, our public venture fund, is up 10%+ in the last few weeks We also completed our first tender offer a few weeks ago, buying back everyone who wanted out Here's a quick FAQ for people wondering exactly how all of this works before the upcoming Anthropic IPO: -- USVC is a public tender-offer fundwith exposure to some of the top private technology companies Anyone in the US can invest in USVC with as little as $500 and get exposure to companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Mercury, Supabase, Mercor etc. (Portfolio: https://usvc.com/portfolio) -- When you invest in USVC, you receive shares at the current NAV (net asset value) price This NAV is marked to market daily as companies in the portfolio have updates Right now, SpaceX is a public position (that we bought when they were private) and SPCX moves our NAV If we do a good job of investing & the startups gain value, the NAV of the fund moves up Every quarter, we aim to make 5% of the overall fund available for investors to "tender out" aka get their shares bought back We successfully completed the first tender a few weeks ago -- Our strategy at USVC: 1 - We aim to back some of the best early stage managers investing in new companies being created today We believe the most successful startups are yet to be built 2 - We get exposure to some late stage technology companies (frequently, at a discount) -- We charge a management fee of 1% and no carried interest If you include all fees, including underlying fund management fees, the fund's net expense ratio is capped at 2.5% annually The gross ratio is higher, but expense limitation agreements are in place above 2.5% -- Do you have any questions I can answer? Happy to have an open dialogue about all things USVC And as always, you can read our prospectus and disclosures here: https:// usvc.com/docs before investing

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