Nik Talreja

CEO @sydecario. Recovering attorney (ex-Cooley & Weil). Passionate about automating away inefficiency. You can find me in Houston with my better half + pups.

[Nik Talreja @niktalreja]

On a flight from NYC to SF and my thoughts about @sydecario’s future are way more interesting than anything on United’s in-flight entertainment. Can’t wait to share where we’re headed with the world.

[Nik Talreja @niktalreja]

There are mutually aligned mechanisms here that we can, and should, champion that may someday inform regulators on how to satisfy a more efficient market that to borrow Munger’s philosphy, is a “win win”.

[Nik Talreja @niktalreja]

There is no obligation for a private company to support secondary trading. While it’s awesome that there is more demand for a company’s equity than supply, it isn’t the issuer’s responsibility to satisfy that demand, nor is it their responsibility to facilitate liquidity.

[Matt Grimm @mttgrmm]

We get the occasional comment like this, and I wanted to respond thoughtfully… so replying here in a quote rather than getting it buried deep in a thread. Not intended as a dunk!

@holdyourwinners I completely 100% understand your frustration… truly and genuinely I do. But I don’t think you’re seeing the whole equation here, and I wanted to at least explain my perspective. Probably not going to convince you of anything, but hopefully you’ll at least get a glimpse into how I view the situation.

First, there are many, many iconic companies in the US (and the world more broadly) that are privately held and are impossible to buy into. McMaster-Carr and Uline (two companies that are near and dear to any hardware startup) are both huge, wildly successful and impactful companies… and both are privately held and you or I can’t invest in. McMaster has annual revenue estimates of $1.5-2.0b, and Uline estimates are around $8b. Your doctor most likely uses Epic as their EHR, and Epic Systems is estimated to do about $6b in annual revenue… they’re privately held as well. Can’t buy shares of any of them. All professional sports teams in the US are privately held, with the narrow exception of the Packers’ peculiar shareholder scheme… you can’t buy a slice of any sports team (and I’d argue those teams are way more iconic and generational, or at minimum more well known than us at Anduril). There aren’t many schemes out there where someone is selling a triple nested SPV tranche of the Miami Heat… and why not? Because sports teams have said, repeatedly, “we don’t allow those transactions” and the market has, for whatever reason, just accepted that as fact. Yet even for companies like us who have publicly declared our hostility to bizarre structured deals like this, some corners of the market ignore us and do sketchy shit anyway.

Second, I think you have a bit of a definitional/semantic issue to think through… what size startup crosses into the “I should be allowed to invest in this company” threshold? Series B? Series D? A certain length of duration since founding? A certain amount of money raised? A certain amount of buzz? At what point in time did Anduril become the bad guy in your mind for not permitting open secondaries?

Third, there are mannnnnnnny massively successful, important, and “generational” companies that have decided it’s best for their company to NOT go public and stay privately held for longer. SpaceX has been private for 24 years. Palantir was private for 17 years before IPO’ing. Stripe, Databricks, Revolut, Canva are all private. Do the same fraudy shenanigans happen with all of them? Maybe! But it’s worth thinking about the structural reasons why so many companies are opting to stay private longer vs reaching a conclusion that they’re malicious and “pulling up the ladder” and responsible for the crimes committed using their name. Is it that these companies all collectively decided against going public because they don’t want or like retail investors? Or is there possibly something else, for instance that the cost/benefit of going public just isn’t worth it when private markets will happily sustain growth for much longer… IMO it’s structural and regulatory. Happy to expand on this more.

Fourth, how would allowing more secondary transactions help with your point about allowing broader access to Anduril or SpaceX shares? SpaceX has run semi-annual secondary liquidity events for the last decade or so, in addition to large primary fundraises… LOTS of SpaceX investment volume moving. Anduril has run ~annual liquidity events for our employees and shareholders for the last few years, and we’ve raised pretty sizable primary rounds too. And yet there’s still fraud in both companies. I could be wrong, but I *think* your point is that you want a freely trading secondary market, where any accredited individual or fund can buy shares with or without the company’s approval… if that is actually your perspective, I guess I’d say that we have a fundamental difference of opinion regarding an individual’s and a company’s rights. To wit, just as you as an individual have the right to choose if you want to invest in a company or not, privately held companies have a right to chose their investors and what terms/rights/votes to offer those investors. Maybe Anduril doesn’t want investors who are domiciled in a particular foreign country, or maybe we are skeptical, ahem, of some firm’s prior conduct on privately held Boards of Directors. Maybe we decide that we value one investor’s structured finance expertise (we do build a lot of factories and are increasingly using complicated debt structures to finance that production ramp) more than we value another investor’s experience with scaling internal operations… We’re well within our rights to choose investors who we think will best help Anduril succeed in the long run, just as you’re free to choose which companies you think will be the best financial investments over time. And I simply don’t think any of those decisions mean that Anduril is “pulling the ladder up” or justifies financial fraud committed using our name.

And finally, I think it’s interesting you mention SpaceX as being complicit in this market dynamic (“I view this as a failure on the part of Anduril+SpaceX fwiw”), implying some sort of hostility or ambivalence to the broader retail investor market. Elon, of all people, LOVES the retail market. Retail engagement and enthusiasm is a significant part of Tesla’s stock market success, and reports are that SpaceX is allocating very large chunks of their IPO directly to retail investors. And I think that’s great! Anduril will likely have a similar approach when we’re ready to go public too. So if one of the most retail-friendly Founder/CEOs in history is still blame-worthy in your opinion, who, then, is praise worthy? Or maybe the system and structure are primarily to blame, and companies like us are doing the best we can to optimize for our company's success. I’d genuinely like to understand what you might see as the magic solution here?

[Nik Talreja @niktalreja]

We at @sydecario have a base of GPs that want to conduct transactions the “right” way. They're not trying to route around you; they're looking for a sanctioned path and can't find one. I think there's a real opportunity for issuers like Anduril to help shape what a well-functioning private secondary market looks like, rather than cede that ground to the corners of the market that don't care about your preferences at all.

[Sydecar @sydecario]

Also included in this month's Sydeletter: Sydecar’s 2025 SPV Year-in-Review, based on proprietary platform data from SPVs closed in 2025.

Sign up and get the full edition in your inbox today: https://t.co/lbInZfjvYM

[Sydecar @sydecario]

We are incredibly proud of everyone on the Sydecar team and thankful to our customers and partners who helped make this possible: as of the end of September, Sydecar has surpassed $3B in assets under administration.

[Nik Talreja @niktalreja]

@mattshumer_ Happy to chat about Sydecar, Matt.

[Colin Gardiner @ColinGardiner]

Big News!

I am thrilled to finally announce the launch of Yonder Fund I - an early-stage fund that invests in marketplaces that create new economies.

After I helped scale Outdoorsy to $3B+ in gross revenue, helped raise $200M across companies, worked with 50+ marketplaces, and created the largest marketplace newsletter, I kept running into the same problem:

There is no first-check/pre-seed fund built by marketplace operators, for marketplace operators.

Thus, Yonder Fund I was born.

Why marketplaces?

1. Since 2010, 50% of the top VC IPOs, 80% of the top 5 exits have been marketplaces.
2. If you invested in every seed deal the year Airbnb did its seed, you would have a 3.5x fund (Airbnb was a 7,000x outcome). Uber was also that year.

That's the power law in action for marketplaces.

I have been working hard on this.

In the past three years, I've put together $4.5M in AUM across 36 investments, including early checks into Autopilot ($13M ARR, $800M AUM, Craft), Packsmith (Bessemer, Interplay, Trust Fund), Throne (Moxxie, Long Journey), and Howie.

The fund has been very active, and the early results are promising:

- 14 investments completed before or alongside Founders Fund, Norwest Venture Partners, Lerer Hippeau, Seven Seven Six, Mucker, Precursor, Hustle Fund, Night Capital, Motivate, Slauson & Co., m]x[v, Boost VC, Flex Capital, Unusal Ventures, m]x[v, SNAK, ANIMO, Ritual Capital, Coughdrop Capital, Superangel, Mu Ventures, and more!

- 2/3 of companies graduated to their next round

- Top decile trajectory based on Carta's benchmarks.

- World-class LPs: Founders from Grubhub/Seamless, ACV Auctions, Mercari, OLX/FJ Labs, Outdoorsy, Avail, Rematter. Operators from Airbnb, Uber, Amazon, DoorDash, eBay, Thumbtack, StubHub, OpenTable, Trulia, Zillow, Whatnot, Turo, Peerspace, and more.

The thesis is proving out, and the timing is right.

AI is the key to a new marketplace model in which the heavy lifting of aggregation, matching, and decision-making is no longer human-driven but agent-led.

The Cambrian explosion is happening, and there are so many great founders to invest in right now. I am going to need a bigger fund!

I am announcing my fund but also reopening and increasing my initial, fully subscribed proof-of-concept fund.

Learn more about being an LP below. 👇

Thank you to...
- Jack Greco for convincing me to do this and for being my first check.
- The LPs who believed in the vision before I had a website.
- The founders who trusted me as their first institutional check
- The 4,000+ Take Rate readers
- Sydecar for making it easy to launch

And the best for last, a very special thank you to my wife and family for their support.

I would be nothing without you! 🙏

If you're building a marketplace, I want to meet you: I'm writing $50-200K checks at first-check and pre-seed.

Let's create the next generation of marketplaces together!

Link to the full announcement in the comments. 👇

[Nik Talreja @niktalreja]

@haridigresses Thanks for taking the time to write this out, Hari. I appreciate your thoughtful takes. Going to buy copies of both book recs :).

[Sydecar @sydecario]

(1/4) We just released our Q1’25 product update, and it’s packed with features designed for emerging SPV and fund managers running lean teams and handling operations themselves: https://t.co/B5zG6LtGJx

[Sydecar @sydecario]

(1/6) New headwinds, like rising tariffs, are cooling the already-frozen IPO window. That’s putting pressure on VCs to create liquidity, free up dry powder, or raise capital faster without relying on traditional fundraising or exit timelines.

[Nik Talreja @niktalreja]

Great post and a catalyst for personal reflection. The 0-1 "founder mode" of doing it all can create habits that are hard to shed. As a founder becomes a leader, and as this leader's team grows, the game changes. A founder has to evolve to maintain the right to lead.

[Hiten Shah @hnshah]

Most founders don’t manage. They just react.

They confuse motion with momentum. They run from fire to fire. They say things like “I’m heads down” or “I’m in the weeds” and convince themselves that’s leadership. It’s not. It’s drift. And if you’re not careful, it becomes identity. You become the person who is always busy and never clear.

Startups make it easy to hide. When everything’s broken, chaos looks like progress. You feel needed. You feel important. But underneath it all, your team is guessing. And worse, they’re guessing what you want because you haven’t made it obvious what matters.

Management in a startup isn’t about control. It’s not about being on every call, reviewing every line, or approving every pixel. It’s about making your team feel like they’re not guessing anymore. That’s the job.

The highest form of management is clarity. Not process. Not oversight. Clarity.

What are we solving? What matters most right now? What does good look like? What can we ignore?

Most teams aren’t blocked by capacity. They’re blocked by uncertainty. People don’t burn out from hard work. They burn out from working hard on things that go nowhere.

And the founder sets the tone. If you’re scattered, the team is fragmented. If you chase every idea, they’ll stop committing to any of them. If you speak in riddles, they’ll write their own stories.

So ask yourself: are you being clear, or just being loud?

Don’t confuse being in the middle of everything with being useful. Good management is invisible. It makes other people better when you’re not in the room.

You don’t need to inspire every day. You don’t need to micromanage every outcome. But if no one on your team can tell me what the most important thing is this week, you’re not managing. You’re floating.

[Sydecar @sydecario]

Exciting News!

We’re kicking off 2025 with a bang by announcing our Series A, led by Deciens Capital (@Deciens) and supported by Pipeline Capital Partners and Runa Capital (@RunaCapital). We are so grateful to our customers, partners, investors, and team members for getting us to this milestone and trusting us to build the infrastructure that powers private markets.

Since Sydecar launched in 2021, we've grown into the leading SPV and fund administration platform for emerging venture capitalists. SPV and fund managers have closed thousands of investment vehicles through Sydecar, investing over $1.6B through our platform.

This additional funding will provide us with more opportunities to create value for our customers and community. We’re investing in tools and features that will streamline workflows, support complex transactions, and lead to stronger connections across the ecosystem. And we’re just getting started. Read more about our Series A funding round and what’s next for Sydecar here: https://t.co/3fZsC5iRyk

[Nik Talreja @niktalreja]

@halleka_ That 2020 article is 🧑‍🍳😙🤌

[halle @halleka_]

i don't need a big flashy milestone to be proud of this team, but it certainly helps! filled with gratitude for everyone who helped us get here, especially the customers who put their faith in @sydecario to be the leading spv & fund admin platform for VC

https://t.co/7Cpapkv6dL

[Nik Talreja @niktalreja]

@NWischoff @sydecario Thanks, Nichole. You inspire us.

[Nik Talreja @niktalreja]

Pumped for what the future holds for our customers, team, and investors. Since founding @sydecario four years ago, I have had the privilege of working with some of the most incredible colleagues and partners. I have been inspired and humbled as we laid bricks to methodically build the Sydecar of today. The future is bright and our vision is clear. Now let’s have some fun.

[Sydecar @sydecario]

Exciting News!

We’re kicking off 2025 with a bang by announcing our Series A, led by Deciens Capital (@Deciens) and supported by Pipeline Capital Partners and Runa Capital (@RunaCapital). We are so grateful to our customers, partners, investors, and team members for getting us to this milestone and trusting us to build the infrastructure that powers private markets.

Since Sydecar launched in 2021, we've grown into the leading SPV and fund administration platform for emerging venture capitalists. SPV and fund managers have closed thousands of investment vehicles through Sydecar, investing over $1.6B through our platform.

This additional funding will provide us with more opportunities to create value for our customers and community. We’re investing in tools and features that will streamline workflows, support complex transactions, and lead to stronger connections across the ecosystem. And we’re just getting started. Read more about our Series A funding round and what’s next for Sydecar here: https://t.co/3fZsC5iRyk

[Nik Talreja @niktalreja]

@hugoperis @sydecario Thanks, sensei :).