The Best of Slice: Top Lessons From Slice Podcast Season 4

The layer underneath this season was the managers who won deals by arranging their whole world so the right founder couldn’t not call them, before that founder was even looking for money. Brand is the most misunderstood word in the business, and it’s not the logo or the colors on your deck but what people say about you when you’re not in the room. If you’re a different thing to everyone, you’re nothing to anyone.

Building is the cheapest it’s ever been, and the leverage that used to take ten people is a stack of agents now. Everyone is networked in, and none of it separates anyone anymore. Everyone runs with their army of agents, and what’s left is being irreplaceably good at one narrow thing. Perhaps that’s Gadi and Daniel finding the most talented young engineers across LATAM who have the ability but never had the rails. Helena and Teddy running the Pac Heights Victorian as a landing spot for European founders in SF. Suds holding next year’s breakout before anyone knows its name. If a manager has to ask how they stand out, they’ve probably already lost it. Standing out isn’t a marketing problem but a focus decision.

The last piece is one we’ve never talked about publicly, which is how you ever give money back to your LPs. Companies stay private forever now, so DPI is the conversation everyone is having. We think that conversation belongs to the funds between $50M and $500M that got caught mid-cycle with great markups and no liquidity. It was never about the emerging managers with sub-$20M funds.

Four seasons in, it only keeps getting sharper that the smallest funds win by compounding into the one thing they’re irreplaceably good at, sized small enough to finish the job and return the money.

Thank you to Ryan, Molly, Arkady, Somrat, Ramzi, Drew, Matt, Gadi, Daniel, Helena, Teddy, Suds, and Carmen. And to the folks who attended our events in Los Angeles and New York. This one was Fabri’s last, and season five picks up this fall with a familiar and fresh new face :)

Full episode below, or on Spotify / Apple Podcasts