Ramtin Naimi

That deal had a timer on it because I didn't want to be owned by anybody in perpetuity.

And that lapsed a couple of years ago.

So I'm proud to say I'm 100% of my business again.

It was kind of a surreal experience where I went from having no network to

And these were only individuals that I'd read about to having met all of those people in a matter of three weeks and finding a way to structure a deal with all of them.

Kevin and Michael were probably the two most instrumental people in that and have stayed my two closest mentors to date.

I kept doing the SPVs and I kept writing the angel checks for an additional year until at which point I realized that I actually can institutionalize this approach.

I set out to raise Seed Fund 1.

That was a $100 million fund that I raised in 2018.

Those guys had anchored the fund with about $50 million.

The remaining chunk of the fund came from a lot of people that looked like them.

So Josh Kushner, Matt Kohler, Neil Mehta, Leif Excel, Dan Rose, Thomas LaFont, Chase Coleman, Santo Politi, and then I got a bunch of operators.

Jerry Yank, who founded Yahoo, Frederick Crest, who founded Okta.

I ended up getting four institutional LPs and fund one.

Those four institutions were two college endowments and two fund of funds.

But I basically rewrote the book on portfolio construction with my first fund, and it

Stems back to what my initial part of the strategy was, but what I was basically doing, part of the reason I had such a hard time attracting institutional capital was institutions had this framework that venture capital firms needed to own 15% of a company in order for the math of a deal to work out, which never made that much sense to me because they were stuck on that 15% framework for like the last 25 years.

And the difference is in that 25-year window, these funds have grown 10, 20, 30x, but that 15% threshold stayed a constant or 15, 20% they wanted these firms to own.

What I focused on was ownership as a relative metric as opposed to an absolute metric.

I knew I could get 5% ownership in these deals very consistently.