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 regional relationship, or help navigating a political constraint. Vashon’s role is to be present enough to recognize the problem early and credible enough to assemble the right people around it.

Our conversation gets into why they are focused on long-duration industries rather than the current venture cycle, what they learned from B2B SaaS about the limits of a standardized startup playbook, and how they think about political complexity as an operating skill. We also talk about the early friendship behind their partnership, including their attempt to paddle to Vashon Island in toy plastic kayaks.

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 the team, buy from, or back them. Turner places these emerging companies in a feed alongside public-company CEOs and established investors. He has had candidates use an episode as diligence before ultimately joining a company, while founders use it in outreach. It is a conversation that keeps working after it is published.

That is why Turner now treats media as the priority rather than the side project. The platform creates access to operators he could not simply ask to spend two and a half hours with. Better production makes the show more valuable to sponsors. That revenue funds more production, and the portfolio companies that take the opportunity seriously get a durable recruiting and distribution asset.

We also get into what it takes to keep a media platform useful as distribution changes: following the formats algorithms reward, using clips to shape an LLM footprint, and looking for the counter-positioning that creates a new lane.

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 bought by optum financial (united health group) in 2022, with a firsthand understanding of how Washington actually moves, and that access sits alongside them, available to founders while the rules are still being written.

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 up shop, after noticing the gap between the builders already there and the early-stage capital that had not followed them into town. He started building the community, which became cohorts of young engineers building for the American interest.

That convening became a nonprofit. The nonprofit became a $9M Fund I. Fund I became an oversubscribed $30M Fund II. What has not changed is Jakob’s discipline around getting in extremely early, and the early pricing is a byproduct of spotting talent before anyone else is in the room.

Jakob writes $175K checks across 13 companies per cohort.

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 nothing to anyone.

building is the cheapest it's ever been, and the leverage that used to take ten people is a stack of agents now, everyone is networked in, and none of it separates anyone anymore. everyone runs with their army of agents, and what's left is being irreplaceably good at one narrow thing. perhaps that's gadi and daniel finding the most talented young engineers across latam who have the ability but never had the rails. helena and teddy running the pac heights victorian as a landing spot for european founders in sf. suds holding next year's breakout before anyone knows its name. if a manager has to ask how they stand out, they've probably already lost it. standing out isn't a marketing problem but a focus decision.

the last piece is one we've never talked about publicly, which is how you ever give money back to your lps. companies stay private forever now, so dpi is the conversation everyone is having. we think that conversation belongs to the funds between $50m and $500m that got caught mid cycle with great markups and no liquidity. it was never about the emerging managers with sub-$20m funds.

four seasons in, it only keeps getting sharper that the smallest funds win by compounding into the one thing they're irreplaceably good at, sized small enough to finish the job and return the money.

thank you to ryan, molly, arkady, somrat, ramzi, drew, matt, gadi, daniel, helena, teddy, suds, and carmen. and to the folks who attended our events in los angeles and new york. this one was fabri's last, and season five picks up this fall with a familiar and fresh new face :)

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 access. she asked herself how a fund works without optimizing for ownership stake, wrote the equation down where fund return equals fund size divided by ownership stake at exit, realized stake matters but is relative to fund size, and went out to build a fund around it.

Carmen Alfonso Rico spent a decade inside europe's most established funds. first Felix Capital, where she joined before the office existed, then Blossom, where she watched series As go from €4m rounds to €30m and the path to founder become the most coveted thing in the room. she walked away and built Cocoa, a now €23m fund II writing €250-500k angel checks at pre-seed and seed across european founders. no board seats. doesn't lead.

our conversation gets into where the whole thing started.. carmen was a first check into johnny boufarhat's pre-launch events platform, built the entire early cap table through her own network, and watched hopin go from nothing to $140m ARR and nearly $8b valuation in 24 months. she never sold. made nothing. yet, her optimism sees it as one of the best things that ever happened to her because it showed her the power of small to access the best companies and build trust with founders. we talk about "killer with a heart" as an investment thesis, and what it actually looks like in practice… the founder who slept at a hamburg steel mill to work from 1am to 5am, as electricity prices surged and all steel mills in Europe shut down; , the founder who saw the future of inference coming and bet everything on it . we also get into the sf welcome committee she's quietly built for european founders making the migration west, and why she thinks the great pre-seed migration has already started.

since we recorded, Cocoa’s story with Killers with a Heart got a new chapter. cocoa invested in AI hardware company fractile in 2024, and carmen just forward deployed herself into the company to lead execution.. in her words “the unimaginable became inevitable. cocoa keeps going, with carmen backing killers with a heart, now from inside the AI buildout.”

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 before it has a name.

Sudarshan Sridharan, Suds, is the founder and GP of SF1, a $10M Fund I writing the first check into hyper-technical founders. He’s placed the groundwork as a former founder, angel investor of eighty companies, where Sixty-five of his first eighty angel checks were first money in, all before he turned twenty-five, Greptile, Delphi, Sail Research, and a long tail of others. A South Carolina kid with eight thousand Twitter followers a year ago, is now the name VCs drop when they want to sound early.

We get into the SF1 flywheel, where founders he backed at the first round introduce him to the friends raising next, so he's in at the early price on the round he'll later help run. And we get into the parts of venture he won't perform. 

SF1 Fund I companies have raised > $450M in follow-on capital from top tier funds in 13 months. The performance is the one part of this he never bothered to learn.

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, or which dinner to say yes to. They built The Embassy for that gap, a Pac Heights Victorian where the best European founders get invited to land, sleep, and end up across the table from the person who changes their trajectory.

The $15m fund they've now built is central to the Embassy's strategy, cutting checks as early as possible into European founders in SF. 

Our conversation gets into how they identify the founders they call "opportunity compounders," and why they ran The Embassy for a year without taking a salary, setting a quality bar they'd never compromise, not even for the VC who wants to place a portfolio founder there for big bucks. It's free for the founders, but only if you make the cut. We get into the moment a portfolio company went zero to $650M in five months, when they realized a fund was the right model, not fees on programming. And we get into where they see The Embassy growing in the SF ecosystem, and yes, it’s already a hotbed! 

The bet is that the Europeans who win in SF carry something specific home, and that the diaspora, properly connected, is the most concentrated bet you can make on European tech right now.

Full episode below, or on Spotify / Apple Podcasts.

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 environments that built those instincts. And then Gadi pulls the thread: what the Puentes program is doing, finding engineers in Latin America who have the ability but never had the rails. It’s the same thesis, running in both directions at once.

Daniel Ha dropped out of UC Davis in 2007 to go through Y Combinator and spent nearly a decade building Disqus, a blog comment platform that reached 4 million websites and 2 billion monthly users, before its acquisition by Zeta Global. Gadi Borovich is from Montevideo, Uruguay. He got into Minerva University, tracked down the Wefunder office across three different addresses until someone let him in, grew their market share to 45%, and built XX, an accelerator for technical outsiders, before most people his age had a degree. Together they built Antigravity Capital.

Our conversation gets into what it actually means to build an AI-native fund, not as a brand claim but as an operational one. It gets into where scarcity actually lives now that code generation is ubiquitous, and what that implies for who ends up building the things that matter. 

Throughout the episode, you’ll get the sense the fund is just the form their restlessness took, they'd be doing this anyway.