James Thomason

Introducing USVC - a single basket of high-growth venture capital, for everyone. No accreditation required, SEC-registered, and a very low $500 minimum. Includes OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, Sierra, Crusoe, Legora, and Vercel. As USVC adds more companies, investors will own a piece of that too. Liquidity typically comes when companies exit, but we’re aiming to let investors redeem up to 5% of the fund every quarter. This isn’t guaranteed, but if we can make it work, you won’t be locked up like in a traditional venture fund. It runs on AngelList, which already supports $125 billion of investor capital. And I’ve joined USVC as the Chairman of its Investment Committee. — Go back to the 1500s, you set sail for the new world to find tons of gold - that was adventure capital. Early-stage technology is the modern version. It says we are going to create something new, and it’s risky. It’s daring. But ordinary people can’t invest until it’s old, until it’s no longer interesting, until everybody has access to it. By the time a stock IPOs, most of the alpha is gone. The adventure is gone. Public market investors are literally last in line. This problem has become farcical in the last decade. Startups are reaching trillion dollar valuations in the private markets while ordinary investors have their noses up to the glass, wondering when they’ll be let in. Investing in private markets isn’t easy. You need feet on the ground. You need judgment built over years. Most people don’t have the patience to wait ten or twenty years for an investment to come to fruition. But there is no more productive, harder-working way to deploy a dollar than in true venture capital. USVC enables you to invest in venture capital in a broad, accessible, professionally-managed way, through a single basket of innovation, focused on high-growth startups, at all stages. It is how you bet on the future of tech: the smartest young people in the world, working insane hours, leveraged to the max, with code, hardware, capital, media, and community. Your dollar doesn’t work harder anywhere. There is an old line - in the future, either you are telling a computer what to do, or a computer is telling you what to do. You don’t want to be on the wrong side of that transaction. USVC lets you buy the future, but you buy it now. Then you wait, and if you are right, you get paid. Get access here: usvc.com

Announcing: USVC AngelList exists to power the innovation economy. To date, we have powered $125 billion in assets, 25,000+ funds, and 13,000+ startups. Today, we’re opening it for retail access. @usvc_ is a regulated fund that holds stakes in promising private companies. There are no accreditation requirements and anyone can get started with as little as $500. Early portfolio includes xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Sierra, Vercel, Crusoe, and Legora. Own a stake in the companies defining the future. Learn more: usvc.com

"85% accuracy on Wall Street will get you 100% fired." Brett Caughran (@FundamentEdge) has managed analysts at Citadel, D.E. Shaw & tiger cub funds. His take on AI and the future of junior analysts: "There's almost no better time to be starting a career as a fundamental investor. These tools let junior investors get to the juicy part of the investment process more quickly." We cover: - Why the junior analyst role is transforming faster than any point in the last 20 years — and why the juniors who adapt will reach the real work of investing years sooner - The old grunt work that's already dead — and what's replacing it - Why billion-dollar funds won't cut analyst headcount, but the job description is changing dramatically - “Should I still learn Excel modeling?" — yes, because you can't debug what you don't understand - Why creativity & tenacity are becoming the new differentiators over raw quantitative skill - How multi-manager alpha factories scaled from $10B to $60B+ while sustaining double-digit returns — proof that more information hasn't compressed alpha - Why reading a 10-K with pen and paper still matters even when AI can summarize it in seconds - The most underrated skill in the best investors he's worked with: genuine curiosity Thanks so much to Brett (@FundamentEdge) for coming on Odds on Open! Highlights: 00:00 Intro 01:29 Frameworks for developing a differentiated variant perception 05:16 Financial drivers vs. narrative cycles: The Focus 5 framework 08:29 Analyzing the stock vs. business: Bayesian updating in public markets 12:52 AI as an intellectual power tool vs. consensus "alpha slop" 17:21 Accelerating the hunch-to-hypothesis pipeline with AI sniff tests 21:52 The evolution of junior analysts: From data entry to primary research 28:46 Why market microstructure and behavioral alpha prevent index efficiency 38:44 Training junior analysts: Earning the right to use power tools 48:28 LLMs as orchestration tools for human primary research 54:55 Teachable scientific process vs. revealed investment judgment 57:54 Common threads across Multi-Managers, Single Managers, and Tiger Cubs 59:49 Curiosity as a meta-skill and the art of system thinking

SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI. The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models. Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.

SpaceXAI and @cursor_ai are now working closely together to create the world’s best coding and knowledge work AI. The combination of Cursor’s leading product and distribution to expert software engineers with SpaceX’s million H100 equivalent Colossus training supercomputer will allow us to build the world’s most useful models. Cursor has also given SpaceX the right to acquire Cursor later this year for $60 billion or pay $10 billion for our work together.