Slice Podcast

About Slice Podcast

Fresh Emerging Managers and Other Venture Capital Stories slicefund.substack.com (https://slicefund.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast)

Publisher

slice pod

Category

business · business

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

25 Sept 2024

Latest episode

17 Dec 2025

Latest episodes

8 of 37 episodes have a transcript.

1. 

   17 Dec 2025

   The Best of Slice: Top Lessons From Season 3

   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. The landscape bifurcated. YC’s SAFE made early capital frictionless. SoftBank’s $100B fund forced everyone bigger. The middle collapsed. What’s left: mega-funds at growth and a fragmented network writing true first checks. That’s where we believe the alpha lives. Sub-$10M caps where the Tier 1’s don’t deploy. Managers who move first because they’re not dragging $500M funds behind them. The managers who win are former operators and founders. They’ve lived the zero to one. They know what it takes to make your first hire, land your first customer, figure out product-market fit with six months of runway. They become the first call not because of brand, but because they actually help. Vivek (Supercharge): product founder whisperer and first checks for technical founders using frameworks he built while building Superhuman. Sarah (Sarah Smith Fund): best-in-class systems at scale as a solo GP. Turner (Banana Capital): building top-of-funnel everywhere. Jamie (Wave Function Ventures): writing first checks into hardware companies because he’s been there as not only an operator but as a founder...twice. Ben (SuperAngel Fund): with superangel speed. Helen (Articulate): after Facebook, Dropbox, Plaid, AngelList. Jonathan (Space Capital): concentrated frontier tech before American Dynamism had a name. Clarity means one sentence explains your unique edge. Not “strong network.” Specific advantage that’s true to you. Consistency means the math works. Fund size, check size, portfolio construction.. everything aligns. When it makes sense, it’s obvious. When it doesn’t, it’s painfully obvious. Most ambitious managers don’t maximize AUM. They say they’ll be the absolute best at writing the very first check into a specific category with their specific skillset. Then size the fund to do that well. Take Pietro (Firedrop): sub-$15M vehicles repeatedly, oversubscribed over a weekend. He easily could have gone bigger but didn’t. Fund size is fund strategy. Scale up and you’re churning LP base every vintage, losing compounding. Self-awareness is a fundamental piece to laying a strong foundation. Knowing who you are, what you’re really good at, what you say no to. Most people raise because they can, not because they should. After 100+ data rooms, you see how rare it is when what the manager pitches matches what they’ve been doing and where they’re headed. Next year we’re going in-person. New York, San Francisco, Austin, Los Angeles. Live recordings. Mini AGMs gathering the best emerging managers and the LPs who back them. THESE ARE NOT NETWORKING EVENTS, and all elephants on the table. A sincere thank you to our guests, to every manager who joined us this season: Sarah, Finn, Soso, Turner, Helen, Jamie, Jonathan, Vivek, Ben, Anay, Amit. For trusting us with your story. For sharing the hard parts, not just the wins. For showing up as builders. This pod wouldn’t exist without you, and it wouldn’t be worth making if it didn’t help the next wave of managers feel a little more seen, and a little less alone (!!) See you in season 4, which we’ve already started recording with a new host (I wonder who! ;)) HAPPY HOLIDAYS FROM SLICE This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slicefund.substack.com (https://slicefund.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

2. 

   12 Dec 2025

   S3E11: From Building Clearbit to Backing Builders – Amit Vasudev on Earl Grey Capital

   “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+ needed for late-stage infrastructure plays. Amit, Alex, and Matt spent a decade building Clearbit from scratch to a 9-figure exit to HubSpot. Every major B2B company from Stripe to Airtable to Notion used their products early on. Naval Ravikant was one of their angel investors. When they started making their own angel investments, Naval encouraged them to start a fund. So they did. They’ve deployed across 100+ companies since launching Earl Grey in 2020. Early on it was classic spray-and-pray with $100K checks. It tracked well, but they’d soon feel the flaws of the strategy. Too broad. Not enough ownership. Not enough discipline on valuation. They’ve since tightened the strategy: bigger checks ($300K-$1M), ownership targets of 1.5-3%, typically the second-biggest check after the lead or helping recruit the lead. Higher concentration with more discipline. They took the data from their early portfolio and iterated like founders building a product. “Fund size is your fund strategy. When you go after $50M AUM, your sourcing funnel shuts off. You get mediocre deals.” Identify what’s broken. Ship a new version. Measure. Iterate. Most emerging managers raise their first fund, then immediately start optimizing for fund size and management fees. Amit’s optimizing for what actually generates returns. The portfolio tells the story. They were early into CrewAI, where Amit convinced the founder João Moura to start the company after Clearbit’s acquisition by HubSpot. They’re consistently in competitive rounds and consistently winning allocation. Not by pitching, by doing the work. “Don’t talk about it, just do it. Help them think through the company, the product itself, help them find their co-founder or founding team members. We’ve done all of that many times without asking for a thing back.” The strategy is brutally simple: go early before anyone’s paying attention, add value before asking for allocation, be honest about where you fit on the cap table. They invest in technical founders and second-time founders building in spaces where you need to understand the weeds, where surface-level pattern matching doesn’t work. “If we’re the only check or we’re the biggest check, there’s actually a problem. You’re not arranging your cap table right. For example, you should have some people who are really good for the brand, some who have time and effort to help you. Know what you’re getting from each investor.” The pattern across our conversation was that Amit isn’t following a playbook, he’s building one through constant iteration. The early portfolio taught him what doesn’t work. The current strategy is testing what does, and they’re gathering the data points that will inform where they take it next. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slicefund.substack.com (https://slicefund.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

3. 

   5 Dec 2025

   When the Train Has Left the Station – Anay Shah on Building Stepchange for the trillion dollar energy transition

   “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 (https://www.linkedin.com/in/anayshah) and Ben Eidelson (https://www.linkedin.com/in/beneidelson) 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 out climate. Neither had a climate investing pedigree when they started Stepchange (https://www.stepchange.vc/) in late 2023. What they found surprised them. The climate investing community is unusually collaborative. “There isn’t as much pointy elbows of securing the deal and pushing everyone out,” Anay explains. “If these founders are gonna succeed against the headwinds in the macro environment, we need the best talent on the cap table and all hands on deck.” Because everyone feels the existential threat, investors pull each other into rounds rather than compete. Their fund structure plays into this. Stepchange writes $100-400K checks at pre-seed and seed. They don’t lead, don’t price, don’t take board seats. “We’re a sub-$10M fund. As a result, we’re very collaborative and high-conviction investors.” They raised $7M+ total with 100+ LPs who are tech execs and energy CEOs that act as scouts. Bain Capital came in as anchor. The climate community welcomed them because the sector needs more capital, not less. The partnership works because they bring different operator backgrounds. Ben’s a two-time founder with deep product expertise, he wrote the definitive guide to software in climate tech that synthesized their thesis. Anay’s the scale-up operator who took companies from 10 people to pre-IPO, with a go-to-market and product-market fit focus. “He’s much more of a product person. I’m much more go-to-market,” Anay says. They met through angel investing in 2023. Started talking every two weeks, then weekly, then spending six hours a day on calls looking at companies. After five months remote, Anay flew to Seattle. They spent a full day walking the city. “We talked mostly about ourselves and our values and what motivated us and realized we shared some really fundamental ways that we look at the world.” Like most who have previous operator and founder experiences, Anay mentions the power of being able to switch out of evaluation mode into feedback mode for founders who pitch them. “The worst thing a VC can do is take the pitch, ask a bunch of questions, say ‘great, we’ll be in touch’ and never talk to you again. They just leave the founder in a lurch; they gain nothing from that experience.” They write detailed notes on passes. They iterate with founders they’re not investing in. They’ve asked technical questions about product stacks that lead investors haven’t asked. “How are we gonna invest in a product company if we don’t understand deeply how the product stack is built?” Stepchange’s thesis is specific: changes in the climate are affecting every part of our economy and 60% of greenhouse gas reductions can come through technologies that exist today. The problem is adoption and deployment. While other funds in the sector invest in hard-to-abate sectors like nuclear fusion and sustainable aviation fuel, they’re focused on software solutions that have large customer demand today. They target five sectors: transportation, the built environment, energy generation and grid, climate adaptation and resilience, and AI infrastructure. Notable investments include Nevoya, a zero-emissions trucking company; Hammerhead, power orchestration for data centers; Skyward, stopping lightning to prevent wildfires; and Futureproof, offering property insurance accounting for structural resiliency. “We’re looking at asset-light companies and products that have immediate commercial pull in the market. Technologies that don’t require government incentives,” Anay explains. They’re selling to CFOs, not CSOs (Chief Sustainability Officers). The products are cheaper and better and happen to decarbonize the economy. They’re targeting 30 investments at 1% ownership stakes, with a soft cap at $30M seed valuations. They’ve got 17 portfolio companies and nearly half have already been marked up. While typical funds have a 1-2% GP commit, Stepchange is more than 5x that – demonstrating their conviction in building a top decile fund in energy and infrastructure. The train has left the station. “We are in the early innings of a trillion-dollar energy transition,” Anay says. “Businesses being founded today are going to be the next decacorns building this future low-carbon world.” Thanks to Ethan Austin (https://www.linkedin.com/in/fintech-investor) for the introduction to Anay 🙏 This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit slicefund.substack.com (https://slicefund.substack.com?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_1)

Inside a recent episode

S3E9: SuperAngel Speed – Ben Zises on Agile Deployment, Building in Public, and the Power of Documentation

Published 8 Nov 2025 · Transcript excerpt

[…] And honestly, it was a confluence of events where Angelists started to separate itself and become established just about the time I was considering graduating from an angel to a full -time fund manager. They announced a new product called the Rolling Fund, tailored towards solo GPs. They handle all the back office functionality. I mean, hours and tons of money that you wouldn't otherwise have. I was early to raise my hand and join some information sessions with Angelists as they launched this Rolling Fund product. What was incredible is that I didn't have to come out of pocket a single dollar to launch my fund. […]

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YouTube views

667,209

Score snapshot 15 Sept 2025

Podcast Authority Score: 37 / 100

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Quality

41

Social presence

0

YouTube

82

Engagement

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