How To Invest In OpenAI and Anthropic Before They Go Public | Ankur Nagpal

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**Ankur Nagpal** (0:42)
My hot take is one of the many reasons that the general public doesn't love AI, is they're not benefiting from any of the economic boon it's given.
Who are the people who love AI? The venture capitalists, people getting paid really high salaries. The average American is fully locked out of that wealth creation. And I think the companies are realizing that. They're like, okay, fine, if I can give the average American some piece of that wealth creation, they'll start feeling more favorably towards it.

**Anthony Pompliano** (1:08)
What's going on, guys? Today, we have a great conversation with Ankur Nagpal. He is the GP of USVC. And we talk about the state of private markets, whether you should invest in private markets, what are the pros, the cons, how you should allocate your capital in your portfolio. And then we talk about USVC, which is a brand new type of public access venture capital fund. It gives people exposure to private markets, but it does so in a somewhat liquid format. So we talk about what are the risks, what are the advantages, and how should you actually think about this type of asset in your portfolio. This conversation is wide-ranging because we talk about different themes in private markets, what some of the risks are. We even go over a controversy that recently USVC caught themselves in. And I think that you're going to find this conversation very, very interesting. Here's my latest conversation with Ankur Nagpal. All right, let's talk through private market investing. I could make a very strong argument that it is not worth investing in private markets anymore.
I also think I could make an argument that it is worth doing. And I think that's part of the controversy as to what people are trying to figure out here. Let's start with maybe the argument as to why people are saying it's not worth investing. And a lot of friends who do angel investing, they're like, somehow I've lost all the money. It's like the best way to go broke is just keep giving money to people who are trying to build something that's nearly impossible, it doesn't work. The second thing is a math argument. So I think the average venture fund is reported to be like 17, 18% return. If you look at the NASDAQ, historically over the last decade or so, it's somewhere in the like 12 to 13% range depending on the exact dates.
So if you get 400 basis points of outperformance or so, then I think a lot of people say it's worth locking up your capital. But as the NASDAQ has done much better and the venture funds, people are trying to figure out how much of those paper marks are real or not. Maybe the outperformance is really like 100 basis points, and maybe that's not worth me locking up my capital. So how are you thinking about the argument for people to invest in private markets right now?

**Ankur Nagpal** (2:48)
Yeah. So I think private market investing is one, I don't think everyone should invest in private markets. I think private market investing is something you do when you kind of have your index funds, you have the majority of your portfolio locked in. Personally, I'm very irresponsible. I have more than half my money in private markets. I do not think people should do that.
So I totally would that. But I think as you think about you're building a legitimate portfolio within that, owning 100 percent index funds or whatever, a certain point starts to feel a bit irresponsible because you're fully kind of hedged with how the market is. And while the market goes well, you don't have that many opportunities to have asymmetric bets, right?
Again, Bitcoin back in the day was an asymmetric bet. And I think if you can afford it, if you have 70, 80, 90 percent indexing the market, you can afford to take asymmetric bets with the leftover 10, 15, 20 percent. And that's where I think private markets can come in because so much of the compounding of wealth in America lately happens in private markets. Companies are staying private longer. On average, the number of public companies in America has fallen by half. Companies are going public on average after 13 years, and all of that wealth is being built in private markets.