How VCX Put Anthropic & OpenAI Into Public Markets

**Ben Miller** (0:00)
I have been around Venture and Tech for 20 plus years. I don't believe the story that venture people somehow invest in Facebook and they're the genius. No, the person who created the business is the genius. If I invested in Amazon or Meta today, no one would think I'm a genius, but mostly the person who built the business, 99% is the business builder, maybe 100%. Well, the fund went public at about a $700 million valuation. We had about 100,000 investors in the fund when it went public, so it was very broadly held. Normally, companies don't go public with 100,000 investors. The last time I checked, it was trading at $6.5 billion. It's up like nine and a half times since we went public three days ago. The weighted average growth rate of public tech companies last year was 25%. The weighted average growth rate for our portfolio for VCX was 193%.

**Molly O'Shea** (0:47)
That's crazy.

**Ben Miller** (0:47)
Ten years from now, every single person in America will have 5% of their portfolio in public capital. It will be totally normal. It will be like an ETF. It will be just this thing that's standard. The public market will be a huge source of funding for private tech companies.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:12)
Ben, welcome to Sourcery.

**Ben Miller** (1:14)
Thanks for having me.

**Molly O'Shea** (1:15)
Well, thanks for joining the Sourcery Club. You're now one of the names behind Sourcery and backing us, so thank you so much. Today, we're gonna talk about VCX, the latest of Fundrise's financial innovations. I wanna get into the origin story, but also, congratulations, you just recently listed, and it's going phenomenally well. So we'll go through all that, the growth, we'll talk about the VC market, we'll talk about the infrastructure, how things have changed, what might happen in the future, the companies that you have access to, and everything else, maybe some hot takes. But to start, how did we get here, and why now, why is it time to list something like VCX?

**Ben Miller** (1:58)
Before VCX, before the Fundrise Innovation Fund, we were democratized investing in real estate. And I remember going to my board and saying, we wanna expand from real estate into tech, and democratize investing into tech. And the board said to me, that's a horrible idea. Should not do that. You guys aren't VC people. You guys don't know how to get access to the best companies. And I was like, well, the board's against it. It must be a good idea.

**Molly O'Shea** (2:28)
Why?

**Ben Miller** (2:30)
I don't know. It just seems to be like my experience is when like the consensus view is that something's bad, and we have conviction. We don't get conviction. We only get conviction probably once a year on something. Maybe not even. Maybe once every two years, we get so like conviction on something. And when we get conviction, it's like, it's magic. It feels so good. So we had conviction. We were like, no, we got to democratize investing into tech. It was 2022 And I've raised money for venture funds. I've been around venture and tech for 20 plus years. I was like, no, no, no, no. I don't believe the story that venture people somehow, they invest in Facebook and they're the genius. Like, no, the person who created the business is the genius. Like, you know, you invest in, like if I invested in like Amazon or Meta today, no one would think I'm a genius. But for some reason, like if I invest in them, like in their series B or C, like somehow that makes me like special. But mostly the person who built the business, 99% is the business builder, maybe 100%.
So anyways, I was sceptic of that venture was some magic industry I couldn't do. And we were just lucky when we launched VCX, we launched our Fundrise Innovation Fund. It was bottom of the market. And all the venture funds were really shell shocked from the collapse of the stock market. They were like, I mean, it was such a negative sentiment that venture funds were actually dumping their shares.

**Molly O'Shea** (4:06)
Yeah, I remember this.

**Ben Miller** (4:07)
And one of the things that happens, this happens in all sectors, actually one of the great things about being in real estate and credit, public markets, private markets, is you actually see a lot more. And so you see a lot of these patterns and you actually see things move from private to public and from tech to real estate and back and forth. And so when things go bad, you have to sell your good things first.