Slice Podcast

Another season highlighting an incredible group of operator/founder turned emerging managers, and a whole year (+ some change) of building Slice.

We started the slice pod in September 2024 to create a space where emerging managers could speak plainly about their strategy, doubts, and the mechanics of building a firm. Real conversations about what it means to start a fund in this moment.

This past year, we screened 180 funds sub-$50M (most sub-$20M), reviewed 98 data rooms, and made a dozen investments. What’s become clear: the best managers have clarity, consistency, and smaller fund sizes.

“Imagine you’re Nike and the best NBA players are like, I don’t really need shoes anymore. That’s exactly what’s happening with venture capital.” The best founders used to say “I have to raise money.” Now they’re saying “I don’t want to raise a dollar.” One engineer with AI tools can replace a team of 20. Companies can iterate to product-market fit in months instead of years.

Which means the middle of venture, those $50-500M funds, is about to have a very bad decade. Too big to write seed checks. Too small to deploy the $100M+ nee...

“California electricity rates have doubled in less than 10 years. 93% of expected capacity added to the US grid this year is renewables because it is just cheaper and better. The market will always win.”

Anay Shah and Ben Eidelson aren’t career climate investors. Anay spent nearly two decades building companies - beginning at the State Department where he worked across 15 emerging markets, to selling solar lanterns in rural India, then scaling Remitly from 10 to 400 people, and recently running a 250-person team at Tala. Ben sold two startups, one to Google and one to Stripe, before leaving to figure...

Ben’s first angel check was $10,000 into quip when they didn’t even have a name. He’d become their first investor.

Ben treated every angel investment following like he was already running a fund, and wrote comprehensive deal memos for each investment. He sent regular updates to investors in his SPVs, even though they were small and informal. He documented every decision, every pattern he noticed, every mistake he made.

By the time it came to raise SuperAngel.Fund I, he could show his LPs what he’d done so far, and that he’d continue...

“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...

“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...

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 year...

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.

Whi...

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 d...

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 dea...

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...

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...

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...

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 f...

Dakota McKenzie was the first in his family to go to college, and figured out his path into tech by working at startups in Boston to pay for school and becoming obsessed with working in the earliest stages.

That led Dakota into early GTM roles at Databricks and Segment, then he joined Unusual Ventures under John Vrionis. In parallel, he started Dynamic Growth Partners with his co-founder Trey, helping technical SaaS founders find product-market fit and build GTM. That business now supports over 60 companies doing $160M+ in combined ARR, and brings in $2M/year. Over 30% of their...

Ben and Romain met in San Francisco 10 years ago, and like any good partnership origin story, they bonded over what they thought was broken. "We always thought there's something weird with the venture capital industry," they explain. "VCs, investors, mostly work at Blue Bottle Coffee, meeting with founders in real life and working on spreadsheets. We never stopped talking about the fact that probably the people who invest in tech should use a little bit of tech themselves to perform better."

Fair point... In an industry that prides itself on backing innovation, most funds operate like it's...

What happens when you combine moonshot ambition with radical empathy? You get Atypical Ventures, the early-stage fund investing in what they call “plausible science fiction” … think data centers on the moon.

In our conversation with Lili and Chris, we unpacked how they think about frontier investing and why “engineers with empathy” win.

Chris got into venture after years of working with quietly awesome people solving hard problems. He was the first employee at satellite company Spire, then worked in early ops at Clearbit and Vercel. He started Atypical to build something different. Lili joined a year later...

Most VCs are systematically terrible at recognizing patterns when it comes to women's health. Not because they're dumb – these are smart people. But because they fundamentally lack the lived experience to see what's staring them right in the face.

Madeline has grown into the role of an emerging manager, seasoned by her time as a consultant. Instead of going to a multi stage firm, Madeline chose to build something of her own.. To “zag when others zig”. And this makes sense when you peel back a layer, and get to know where she comes from.

She's...

In Latin American venture capital, there's a script. It starts with Stanford or Harvard, maybe an MBA. English fluency. A clean resume. Ideally, a few years at McKinsey. Ivan Montoya never read the script.

Born in Colombia and raised in Silicon Valley, he's the solo GP behind NuMundo Ventures, a pre-seed and seed-stage fund investing in Latin American fintech, property tech, and supply chain startups. While most funds in the region are still betting on polished pedigrees, Ivan is betting on overlooked potential.

His best example? A founder he calls "the Mexican Bill Gates."

With its third fund now closed at $54 million, Dynamo continues to lead investment in the technologies that make, move, and monetize the world's goods.

When Santosh Sankar co-founded Dynamo Ventures in 2016, supply chain tech wasn't trendy. Today, the Chattanooga-based firm has become the go-to investor for founders reimagining global commerce infrastructure.

"Our thesis has always been about the backbone industries of the economy…When we started ten years ago, people questioned why we'd focus solely on supply chain and logistics. Now, everyone understands that these foundational systems need modernization."

What struck us in ou...

In a world where many venture capitalists shy away from the complexities of the food industry, Cam Crowder and Shane Larisey are charting a different course with Redstick Ventures. This early-stage fund is laser-focused on transforming the food ecosystem, addressing challenges from labor shortages to supply chain inefficiencies.

Cam Crowder's journey into venture capital is rooted in hands-on experience. As a former operator of six Tim Hortons franchises, he managed over 200 employees and faced firsthand the operational hurdles of the food industry. These challenges sparked his interest in solutions that could alleviate such pain points, leading him...

Some of the most iconic companies in the world didn’t come from polished decks or pedigreed founders. They were built by outsiders. The people who saw around corners, operated on instinct, and had the grit to pursue a vision others couldn’t see. They didn’t follow the roadmap. They rewrote it.

That’s the kind of founder Ethan Austin has always been, and the kind he’s now betting on as an emerging manager. At Outside VC, Ethan is building a platform that attracts the non-obvious bets, the ones most VCs overlook until it's too late.

In the next era of enterprise software, general-purpose tools are fading. Verticalization is no longer a niche strategy. It's the battleground. And at the forefront is Nick Tippmann, founder and GP at TipTop Ventures, who’s betting on a new generation of software: intelligent, embedded, and purpose-built for specific industries. It’s not just SaaS anymore, it’s Vertical SaaS 3.0.

From his operator roots in the Midwest to his front-row seat at Greenlight Guru, Nick’s journey is a playbook for how specialization, fintech integration, and now AI are reshaping the software stack. And like all the best fou...

While most VCs avoid industrial tech because it’s too complex, too physical, and too far from the cloud, Cameron Porter and Talal Atteih are doing the opposite. At Steel Atlas, they’re doubling down on the overlooked frontier between software and heavy industry, where hard problems and real-world systems collide.

The industrial economy is in the midst of a major transformation. In just the first nine months of 2024, private equity and venture capital firms invested $14.87B into industrial automation. That’s more than double the total for all of 2023, and nearing the all-time high set in 2021. It’s a...

Welcome back to the Slice Pod for Season 2!

In a world where the lines between technology, defense, and national security are increasingly blurred, Eric Slesinger stands out as a unique figure in the world of early stage VC. As the Founder and General Partner of 201 Ventures, he brings a rare combination of experience from his time as a mechanical engineer, at the CIA, and as an investor at In-Q-Tel, the U.S. intelligence community's venture capital arm.

At 201 Ventures, Eric has adopted a highly focused approach, concentrating on a select portfolio of companies in defense...

This week on the Slice Podcast, we’re flipping the script with a special holiday episode, sharing our top learnings from the 10+ guests we’ve interviewed so far. From uncovering shifts in early-stage investing to redefining what it means to be a great founder or emerging manager, here are the key takeaways:

The Unbundling of Accelerators

One recurring theme has been the shift away from the traditional accelerator model. The best founders are no longer coming out of accelerators. Instead, we’re seeing institutionalized angel funds like Pietro cutting $100K to $300K checks, enabling syndicates to pul...

This week, we’re joined by John Gleeson, Founder and General Partner of Success Venture Partners (SuccessVP), a $10M fund investing in founders with customer success at their core, from pre-seed to seed. SuccessVP stands out with its extensive base of 87+ Limited Partners, many of whom are Chief Customer Officers from industry giants like Toast, Slack, GitHub, Braze, MuleSoft, Notion, Aurora Solar, and more.

Before founding SuccessVP, John moved from Canada to NYC, where he scaled Customer Success at Motive (now valued at $3 billion) from $1M to $300M in ARR. During this time, he also made strategic in...

This week, we’re joined by Mike Annunziata, Founder and General Partner of Also Capital, a $22M fund investing in the next generation of hard tech founders from pre-seed to Series B. Also Capital stands out by leading pre-seed rounds with checks up to $1M and reserving $500k-$1M for follow-on investments at seed and beyond with a mission to strengthen America’s leadership in transformative technology.

Mike’s background is as dynamic as it is impressive. He co-founded Farther Farms, a Series B startup revolutionizing shelf-stable fresh food technology, served as an institutional investor at Cornell Univer...

In this episode of Slice, we sit down with Sarah Drinkwater, Founder and General Partner of Common Magic, a £10M early-stage fund backing founders whose ecosystems or communities serve as their moat. Common Magic writes checks ranging from £100K to £400K, investing in startups where community is integral to the product’s success.

Though now based in London, Sarah’s career has spanned the globe, from Silicon Valley to Europe. She began as a tech journalist for The Guardian and The Independent, drawn early on to the internet’s transformative potential. “I was always attracted by the internet. I...

At Slice, we look for emerging managers with a chip on their shoulder, a relentless drive to defy the odds and get sh*t done. In this conversation, we sit down with Solo GP of Southpaw Capital, Tanya Soman.

Her story begins in Brooklyn, where she learned the fundamentals of entrepreneurship through her family's ventures. 

"When my parents moved here, they had sold everything in India, we all slept in the same bedroom and my dad pumped gas at a gas station." 

From that gas station, her family built a series of businesses—an a...

At Slice, we're always on the lookout for emerging funds and managers who are redefining the venture capital landscape. In this episode, we chat with Elia Infascelli, Founder and Managing Partner of Forma Capital and Partner/CEO of Cashmere. Elia is forging a new path that blends capital investment with the power of influence. With Forma’s recent partnership with Sweater Ventures to launch the Cashmere Fund, Elia is leading fundraising, marketing, and capital deployment, while Sweater Ventures handles investor relations, compliance, and asset valuation.

https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240923095136/en/Forma-Capital-Partners-with-Sweater-Ventures-to-Power-The-Cashmere-Fund

Elia's journey be...

In the bustling world of venture capital, where full-time dedication is the norm, Rapha Danilo and his partners, Kat and Amir, at Darkmode Ventures are breaking new ground with a unique model, challenging the assumption that venture success requires complete immersion. This approach allows them to remain active in their respective careers while still engaging deeply with early startups. It’s a setup offering a fresh perspective in VC - one that leverages real-time industry insights and networks to invest in exceptional talent. And for Darkmode, its hybrid model is more than just juggling responsibilities; it’s a strategic adva...

In this episode, we share a slice🍕 with Ophelia Cai, partner at Tiny VC, a unique European venture fund that writes $150-200K checks across an expansive portfolio of ambitious technology startups.

The journey to Tiny began with a simple WhatsApp message in May 2021 from Andy Chung, who asked "Would you join tiny full time?". Despite the ambiguity of the role, Ophelia knew three things: 

* She believed in the people (Philip and Andy, first AngelList EU hires)

* She believed in the strategy behind Tiny

* She believed in herself to step up to t...

In this episode, we share a slice🍕 with Reed Robinson, co-founder and general partner of Groove Capital, a $15.5 million pre-seed fund dedicated to investing in the heart of the Midwest - Minnesota.

Over two decades ago, a college professor introduced Reed to the venture world, igniting a spark that would one day lead to Groove. But it was his experience at a startup he "didn't enjoy" that truly set his entrepreneurial journey into motion.

“I found myself pretty miserable in my job… so I decided to leave and run an organization full-time that I had co-foun...

We recently had the pleasure of sitting down with Hugo Amsellem, co-founder and general partner of Intuition Capital, a €10 million fund investing in consumer and culture startups across Europe and the US. Hugo's journey from startup ecosystem builder to fund manager is as fascinating as it is inspiring. 

Hugo's path to venture capital wasn't a straight line. In fact, he admits he used to hate VCs, but his passion for helping founders move culture forward during his time at The Family and Jellysmack led him to realize that starting a fund was the perfect way to channel his...

In this episode, we share a slice with Ashley Mayer, the Founder of Coalition Operators - a $12.5 million early-stage fund that's shaking things up in the pre-seed to Series A space. 

Ashley is a communications whiz who's worked with some of the hottest names in tech - Box, Social Capital, Glossier - who then decided to take her vast network and dive headfirst into the world of venture capital. 

Now, here's where it gets interesting - Ashley didn't do this alone. She teamed up with three other super female operators  ((Jaclyn Nelson, Toyin Ajayi, and Lin...

https://podcasters.spotify.com/pod/show/slice-fund/episodes/E2-OwenOpal-Ventures-e2os0lq/a-abi27uo