Public venture funds provide liquidity for private tech
“A closed ended fund means that when, as opposed to open ended fund, a closed end fund is when it's closed, essentially, when you're buying it in the public markets, the fund is shares in the fund is trading rather than shares in the inside of the underlying asset portfolio. So the actual shares inside the ETF will trade. The closed ended fund, it's like any other venture fund and people are buying and selling the actual fund itself in the public markets.”
AI will significantly disrupt white-collar job markets
“I think more than 20 percent, but less than 50. So like let's say five years, 20 to 30 percent of jobs are not just displaced, but also suppressed. So you don't make that marginal higher, and that adds up to tens of millions of jobs. For us, for sure. We were 350 people, now we're 200 people. I think we're at the cutting edge of every department, product development, real estate analysis, accounting.”
Private market growth far outpaces public tech benchmarks
“Ten years from now, every single person in America will have 5% of their portfolio in public capital. It will be totally normal. It will be like an ETF. It will be just this thing that's standard. The public market will be a huge source of funding for private tech companies. The weighted average growth rate of public tech companies last year was 25%. The weighted average growth rate for our portfolio for VCX was 193%.”
VCX democratizes access to elite private tech companies
“The big idea was and has been for us for the last 15 years is to democratize private markets. And so the last few years, AI has become potentially like the end of technology in a way. Like we're at the knee of the exponential. And so the need to democratize access to these companies, investing in these AI companies was more important than ever. And so we created what was the first public venture fund.”
“I think democratic ownership is the solution to how we deal with AI. The idea that everyone wants to get like universal basic income, I think that's a horrible idea. But universal basic ownership, I feel like that is magic. It's like instead of people saying, okay, the American dreams own a home, the American dreams own like the means of production, which is AI.”
Macro shocks create opportunities to buy distressed assets
“We were lucky when we launched VCX, we launched our Fundrise Innovation Fund. It was bottom of the market. And all the venture funds were really shell shocked from the collapse of the stock market. They were like, I mean, it was such a negative sentiment that venture funds were actually dumping their shares. Some of the companies you named, we bought from distressed funds who were having to sell in early to mid 2023.”
Network investing leverages customer bases for startup growth
“We call it network investing. There's social networks. So we have network investing, where basically the network of investors is a value add. And so like with Loyal, I think Loyal is just gonna be like a blockbuster. And it's a really good example of like democratizing ownership. We can roll it out to our 2 million customers. I'm sure we have hundreds of thousands of dog owners. We probably have tens of thousands of vets as customers too.”
