Naval's GP, Ankur Nagpal, Breaks Down The Viral “USVC” Fund | E2284
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Guests:
USVC
USVC Portfolio
USVC Prospectus (PDF)
Chutes.ai
Chutes on CoinMarketCap
Humwork.ai
Ankur Nagpal on X
Jon Durbin on X
Yash Goenka on X
Companies and Topics:
GameStop (GME)
Ryan Cohen on X
Amazon Shipping Services
Cerebras Systems
Spirit Airlines
JetSuiteX / JSX
Surf Air
Matthew Prince (Cloudflare CEO) on X
DeepSeek Chat
Fictio.ai
Micro1
Harvey
Waymo
Amazon Mechanical Turk
Timestamps:
0:00 Intro + Plaud AI sponsor read (Jason demos the NotePin S)
1:20 Plaud: If your work depends on conversations — interviews, meetings, calls — you need a Plaud NotePin. You can check it out at https://Plaud.ai/twist and use code TWIST for 10% off!
3:04 Episode overview: USVC, Chutes, Humwork
4:09 Ankur Nagpal on USVC — What is a closed-end fund?
6:55 USVC structure: $500 min, no accreditation, quarterly redemptions
9:42 Northwest Registered Agent - Get more when you start your business with Northwest. In 10 clicks and 10 minutes, you can form your company and walk away with a real business identity — Learn more at https://northwestregisteredagent.com/twist
10:53 Fee structure breakdown: 1% mgmt fee, ~2.5% net expense ratio
13:25 Incentive alignment
14:55 USVC portfolio: xAI, Anthropic, OpenAI, Crusoe, Vercel
15:31 Strategy: 1/3 emerging managers, 1/3 growth, 1/3 secondaries
18:14 $1B cap and path to expanding the fund
19:47 Vanta - Compliance and security shouldn't be a deal-breaker for startups to win new business. Vanta makes it easy for companies to get a SOC 2 reports fast. Get $1,000 off for a limited time at https://www.vanta.com/twist
20:14 How everyday investors should think about VC allocation
26:14 Jon Durbin, core contributor at Chutes (Bittensor Subnet 64)
27:14 What is sovereign compute? Permissionless GPU networks explained
29:24 Render - Find out why 5 million developers are already using the all-in-one cloud platform, Render. Go to https://render.com/twist and apply for the Render Startup Program to get $500-$100,000 in free credits, depending on your stage and backers.
34:48 Trusted Execution Environments (TEE)
35:37 How Chutes uses end-to-end encryption and open-source attestation
44:07 Usage history: 160B tokens/day peak, free-to-paid transition
45:55 GPU pricing: from $0.77/hr to $3.50/hr as shortage bites
48:27 DeepSeek censorship demo: Taiwan test on DeepSeek chat
48:53 Chutes token economics: TAO, subnet emissions, burn mechanism
56:41 Permissionless supply curves: Uber/Airbnb analogy for induced demand
58:34 Yash Goenka, co-founder of Humwork (YC S26)
1:00:03 Lightning Round: Ryan Cohen wants to buy eBay — Jason's hot take
1:07:32 Lightning Round: Amazon launches third-party fulfillment (takes on FedEx/UPS)
1:11:50 Lightning Round: Cerebras IPO update ($27–36B valuation range)
1:13:19 Lightning Round: Spirit Airlines / JetBlue / M&A regulation debate
1:18:24 OFF-DUTY: Star Wars: Maul - Shadow Lord
1:21:31 AI-generated Star Wars fan films via Seedance
1:26:29 Annotated.com $5,000 bounty challenge
1:32:11 Alex's OFF-DUTY: Captain of Industry
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