Mason Vranes

Making high finance accessible to all. scaling to $1B | with $630m portfolio AUM

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

Design and launch your fund by chatting with AI 🚀

Gone are the days of $100k+ lawyer fees and 6+ months of back and forth on docs.

[Fund Launch @fundlaunch_ai]

Now anyone can build a Venture Capital, Hedge Fund, Real Estate, or Private Equity fund by chatting with AI.

Vetted by real attorneys and advisors

Comment "AI" and I'll send you the link

[tobi lutke @tobi]

You have absolutely disgraced yourself publishing this, globe.

We all clearly don’t hate the media enough.

[Bridger Pennington @bridger_penn]

The response to @fundlaunch_ai over the last week has been wild.

Watching my notifications explode over the last 48 hours has been one of the coolest, most humbling experiences of my career. When you build something that actually solves a real problem, the community lets you know immediately.

Thousands of you are asking how this changes the game, and the energy is shifting fast.

We are officially dropping the platform live on Zoom this June 16th. Given the crowd already forming, this room is going to fill up fast.

We’re leaning into the hype by giving away over $1,000 live on the call, plus a free gift for everyone who shows up to support the launch.

Zoom capacity is the only bottleneck here, and it’s going to hit the limit the second we open the doors.

Reply with "AI" below, and our team will send over the link. See you there.

[Bridger Pennington @bridger_penn]

Comment “AI” for the link for June 16th, $1000 giveaways, everyone live gets a free gift, first public release of Fund Launch AI!

Redbulls, all nighters, startup life! We’re building something big here… 👀

Why I’m a big believer in working in office!
See yall live June 16th 1pm EST on Zoom

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

Expect they are not in a tribe. They are mercenaries.

If you can’t understand the difference then you’re cooked

[BABUSHKA ENJOYER @SeloSlav]

A lot of people are talking about how the assistant made almost no money relative to the success of the film. This is what I think.

It’s generally gauche not to treat your tribe. You can appeal to meritocracy and capitalism all you want, but people are social animals. We notice large disparities, especially when the winner clearly did not create all of the conditions that produced the outcome.

From a purely epistemic standpoint, it is obvious the success of the film was not proportional to the risk the producer took. In a world with global distribution and increasing returns to scale, one film can absorb attention that might once have been spread across ten similar films. The reward gets concentrated, but that does not mean the underlying contribution became ten times greater.

A lot of people who build products or provide services do not seem to understand this. They look at the outcome and assume it perfectly measures value created. It does not. Winner-take-most markets distort the relationship between effort, talent, risk, and reward.

That is why some redistribution makes sense even before you start talking about morality. The scale of the reward often reflects the structure of the market more than the actions of the winner.

And beyond all that, there is a basic social expectation that predates capitalism. When someone came back from a successful hunt, they fed the tribe.

[tobi lutke @tobi]

Absolutely correct: "The fate of the world depends on more people giving Entrepreneurship a shot"

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

@geoffreywoo Sharp advice

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

never waste a good crisis

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

@Willob Lol this is peak

[will o’brien @Willob]

“So you bootstrapped the whole company?”

“Yeah, I turned it down. Turned down the funding.”

“Oh.”

“Yeah, I turned it down just to do this, just to grind it out, build it myself.”

“So you had an opportunity to take venture money?”

“Yeah, a term sheet and everything.”

“From who?”

“Yeah, a big fund out in Menlo Park. It was a top-tier firm, though. And they offered me like 15, some shit like 10 billion or something like that, 5 billion, something like that.”

“Wait, wait, wait. A term sheet.”

“Yeah.”

“Okay, but not 5 billion dollars. They offered you 5 billion dollars for your seed round?”

“Yeah.”

“For a seed round?”

“Yeah.”

“What are we doing here?”

“Like, what the y’all, like, you know what I’m saying?”

“That’s more than the GDP of a small country.”

“But I was so younger, like, I didn’t know what a cap table was.”

“Are you sure they offered you 5 billion dollars?”

“I turned it down.”

“You didn’t even have a product.”

“It was a SAFE, like, I had to give up equity for this decade.”

“But you would get $5 billion?”

“Yeah.”

“You’d be one of the most valuable companies on earth.”

“It was somewhere, it was in the billions, though.”

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

@christophersaum I'm seed - $1.5m ARR off our soft launch a few weeks ago.

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

@FactoryAI This is a problem we've been burning cycles on

Excited to try it out

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

@nic_detommaso FOMO is real but it's downstream of something else: do they actually believe this is going to be huge

if they don't, no amount of manufactured urgency saves you. if they do, you barely need the FOMO

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

been bootstrapped for 7 years ($47m in rev) and about to raise for the first time.

what this story gets right is that taking money should be a deliberate choice, not a default

the founders who struggle with VC aren't bad at business. they just never asked if the tradeoff made sense for the company they were building

knowing why you're raising matters more than whether you raise

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

Most emerging fund managers are still running their operations like it’s 2009.

That’s about to become a real problem.

The funds that pull ahead won’t be the ones with the biggest teams or the best pitch decks.

They’ll be the ones that run their entire fund like a living system with a brain that learns from every LP conversation, every deal, and every operational task.

Most managers are still stuck with spreadsheets, email chains, manual reporting, and teams wasting time on work that should be automated.

That model worked a few years ago. It doesn’t give you an edge anymore.

The funds treating AI as real infrastructure, not an add-on, are going to move faster, raise more efficiently, and make better decisions while running leaner.

This isn’t theoretical. It’s already starting to happen.

So the real question is whether you’re building your fund for how things used to work, or for how they’re about to work.

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

@kseniam0s Can relate. We spent 6 years proving the market with info adjacent products. Now with our tech product, the market is still relatively untapped but we've proven the demand

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

@danielcberk @AnthropicAI now I am become Venti, destroyer of worlds

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

@kseniam0s Depends on the context. If it's for a high value relationship, say a potential LP, then yes.

Otherwise no

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

@Antifund This is exactly why we bootstrapped to $47M before raising. Wanted the seed round to mean something specific, not just "we got funded."

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

Public company data is just the warm-up.

The real unlock is private fund data: performance, allocations, LP terms, manager track records. None of it is on the internet. All of it is verifiable against actual returns.

That's the corpus that builds the finance model no one else can replicate.

[Mason Vranes @MilliMase]

@niklaslindgrenn @a16z From an unheated wine cellar in Stockholm to $74M with a16z in 18 months.

Congrats to you, Anton, David and Gustav. Can't wait to see what you do for the MEP world.