Naval’s GP, Ankur Nagpal, explains his new fund, USVC.

Added: 2026-05-12

[00:00:00]Aner, can you define closedendin fund for everybody? Because I know you and Jason are talking about it. I know what it means, but I'm not sure that everyone knows that term of art. Might help.

[00:00:07]>> Absolutely. I'll caveat that like, you know, even the people like this is all new to to me as well. Um, but the way USVC works is it's a closed end fund, which means you buy in. When you buy in, there's a certain NAV or net asset value. when you buy in, you receive shares at that price and that reflects the underlying value of the assets underneath. So the startups, the funds, whatever. Now let's imagine the startup underneath has a markup or a markdown.

[00:00:37]Um the asset value changes and then when you redeem out of the fund, we have we're going to we aim to offer quarterly tenders that allow people to sell out of the fund. It happens at the new asset value. So, it's a very interesting structure because traditional venture funds lock you up for, you know, 10 years typically. Here, this is still not, you know, it's still not a liquid product. It's still venture capital, but the aim is to give people the opportunity for liquidity every quarter up to 5% of the fund.

[00:01:09]>> Yeah. And a way to think of it, Alex, is it's not an IPO, but people often refer to closed end funds as similar because you issue a certain number of shares.

[00:01:19]That number of shares doesn't change.

[00:01:22]Then if people want to sell their shares, then those get priced as some percentage of uh the NAV, right? The underlying asset value. So when we used to talk about uh mister uh sellers publicly traded um >> yeah bitcoin product you would say hey what's the underlying value so here if you had anthropic open ai stripe in this uh USVC closed end fund people might say hey in the at the end of the second quarter when the redemption happens they might say okay It was a billion dollars worth of share. A billion dollars when we essentially IPOed it. When we offered it, let's take out the IPO term which say when we offered it to the market. It was a billion dollars. Hey, the market thinks anthropic went up but Open went down yada yada. The market might say, okay, I'm going to buy I'll buy it 90 cents on the dollar. So now everybody's down 10%. Right? Uh but only a certain amount of people sell maybe up to 5%.

[00:02:28]Then and you have to have demand for that. Then the next quarter, hey, Anthropic goes public. The shares are worth a lot. Now it goes up. So it's it's a nice bridge between completely being locked up except for finding a secondary sale for individual stocks and then you get this great mutual fund.

[00:02:47]But how the GPS get paid is always very interesting and that's where incentives matter. If you were to look at me doing SPVS, I do mine over at the syndicate.com. There's plenty of them over at angelist or angel.co I think is still the domain.

[00:03:01]>> Angelist.com now.

[00:03:02]>> Oh, angelist.com. There you go. Uh somebody had sniped it back in the day.

[00:03:07]Uh so angelist.com you pay two and 20 typically. Uh I'm sorry. You pay 20% carry and then you might pay some fees. The fees might wind up being depending on the size of it one or two% uh essentially $50,000 a deal, $25,000 deal. That's covered a legal expense. Now SPVS will charge a loadin fee. Some people selling anthropic shares want 10% on the way in and then they have no percent carry. So they're just literally selling the shares. They sell $10 million, they want to make a million. So there's all kinds of different variations there.

[00:03:38]>> But in a closed end fund, there's no concept of carry.

[00:03:43]>> Correct?

[00:03:43]>> You just get 2% a year.

[00:03:45]>> We're not allowed because we want to offer this p uh this publicly. We're not allowed to charge carry on. And as you know, I'm obsessed with a lot of technologies, including my Plaude pin.

[00:03:56]It's time for us to applaud Golf Clap Plaid. As you can see here, I have it on my t-shirt. How did I get it on my t-shirt? I didn't use the clip you usually see me use when I'm wearing a suit. Well, I'm in Tahoe, so I'm not suited up. It has a magnetic one, so you can put it right behind you. Then, Alex, I got you on the plane. I'm recording my plaud right now. So, if I have any ideas like I should uh go to the emergency room and get my pinky, which I dislocated playing basketball yesterday, and make sure I send a note. I can do that. And uh you just flashed your applaud, Alex. And you're using the attachment that let you wear it like a wristband, >> which is kind of cool, too. It's totally privacy first because you have a button.

[00:04:38]You press it, the red light goes on, everybody knows what you're doing. For meetings, it's amazing. People say, "Well, why wouldn't you just use your phone?" Getting your phone out, opening an app, starting it, closing it. Okay, all that's great. It's going to take you 30 seconds, a minute. Whereas here, you just press the button, 1 second or less, and you're recording. And it's got multiple microphones on it. And the battery lasts forever. And if your phone's in your bag or your jacket and you're skiing, but you want to leave it on like a lunatic all day, Alex, I just leave it on when I'm skiing. And I just talk to myself when I'm skiing alone.

[00:05:11]you know, if I ever go down in a tree well or whatever, it'll be my last will in testament.

[00:05:15]>> Didn't we just talk about you not skiing alone anymore like like 10 days ago? It wasn't that far back, man.

[00:05:21]>> But anyway, we have a we have a promo code. People can get a good deal, I think, on Applaud. Yeah.

[00:05:25]>> Yes, we do. If you go to pl aud.ai pla.aiwist, use the code twist, save 10%. Jason, I'm using mine to take ideas for uh blog posts when I'm out and about. Love it.

[00:05:36]And because I have the wristband, my children can't yank it off my body. So, not really a a clip-on guy yet, but give me like five years to have older children and then I'll be able to, you know, safely wear it like that. But yeah, I'm loving it. Long's loving it.

[00:05:48]You're loving it. Kind of a hit here at Twist HQ.