slice podcast

Santiago Pliego, Josh Clemens, and Ryan Hiepler are building Vashon, an expeditionary capital firm designed to be useful where physical-world companies actually operate. They steward a network across the fields, mountains, oceans, deserts, supply chains, and jurisdictions their founders have to navigate. That model compounds through proximity. A founder needs an introduction, a manufacturer, a reg...

We invited Turner back to the pod to unpeel The Peel, the platform he has created to distribute in-person podcast conversations among current founders, exited founders, portfolio founders, and investors. The Peel gives Banana Capital’s portfolio companies an asset most Series A founders cannot create on their own: a long-form record of how they think, made for the people deciding whether to join t...

sean and suraj are building humanrace capital to help founders navigate regulation early, before it becomes a Series B problem. they've learned that building starship, a mobile HSA for gig workers, inside a market controlled by Fidelity, Optum, HealthEquity, and HSA Bank where even small changes meant going through a banking partner, an industry operator, or a congressional office. starship was bo...

Jakob Diepenbrock is the front door to the young talent building hard tech in El Segundo. The exclusive Demo Days he runs are hard to get into for both investors and founders. Now with more than 1,000+ applications per cohort, they’re bringing together the youngest technical talent in hard tech and the investors backing companies of American interest. He landed in the Gundo before any GP had set u...

the layer underneath this season was the managers who won deals by arranging their whole world so the right founder couldn't not call them, before that founder was even looking for money. brand is the most misunderstood word in the business, and it's not the logo or the colors on your deck but what people say about you when you're not in the room. if you're a different thing to everyone, you're no...

the formula came out of a pretty specific moment. end of 2020, carmen was living in two worlds, writing €50k pre-seed angel checks into european companies, getting into anything she wanted, building cap tables with friends and also writing €25m institutional checks, competing for 15-18% ownership at every turn. one world felt like collaboration. the other felt like combat. And combat meant less ac...

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...

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,...

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 env...

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 on...

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 Ange...

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 ae...

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...

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,...

Molly is the Founder and General Partner of Moth Fund , a pre-seed fund backing what she calls moth founders - intrinsically motivated builders driven by agency rather than ambition. Molly grew up in Mendocino, a town of 1,000 people in Northern California. Her graduating class was five people. She left at 15 to study film, and eventually found her way to Figma, Notion, and Stripe Press - where he...