Good piece, and something I've thought a lot about over the past year. I am fascinated by the idea of risk pooling and companies like Pando that make this proc

Good piece, and something I've thought a lot about over the past year. I am fascinated by the idea of risk pooling and companies like Pando that make this process simple. I think it's a great fit for groups of ambitious tech young folks, not just as a way to either reduce risk or capture increased upside, but also as a way to ensure that you will always have a group of extremely competent people looking out for you, even if it's out of self-interest. There are programs (OnDeck, Interact, and others I'm sure?) out there that to bring together groups of ambitious young people in order to build support networks, find co-founders, etc. but to my knowledge none of these programs give the participants any economic interest in the outcomes of their peers. I went to Cal and the best thing about going to school there was the friends I made. I spent a lot of time with people who were clearly extremely talented and I (selfishly) always wanted to be able to ride their coattails if I could. The most common way to do this, of course, is to invest in their start ups. But even just 5 years ago, this was _much_ harder than it is today. First off, I didn't have any money, and even if I did, I certainly didn't have enough to write the $25k minimum check that most founders required, and even if I had _that_, I didn't meet the income thresholds for being an accredited investor and there were no alternative paths to certification. This is less of a problem these days since younger folks can become an accredited investor through alternate pathways, and you can invest in startups at much lower thresholds thanks to products like AngelList's Roll Up Vehicles[0]. Yet, you still have to be invited to invest and I've been continuously surprised about how few of the founders I know want to bring non-strategic or non-famous people (aka their friends) onto their cap table. Another aspect is that startup investing only allows you to ride along with your founder friends. What about your friends who join early stage startups, or breakout unicorns? Everyone wanted to hire engineers from Cal, and the Law of Large Numbers meant that it was inevitable that one of your classmates would be engineer #6 at Stripe or the first hire at Notion. This is almost as risky as founding a company yourself, but there's really no way for me to join a friend on that ride without an actual risk pooling structure. [0] A product brought to the forefront by a contemporary of mine I met at Cal whom I think the world of, Sumukh Sridhara, and my #1 pick if I were to choose a group to risk pool with