Access Isn't Charity, It's Alpha

The first time someone told me my fund was a “great mission,” I said thank you.

I shouldn’t have.

I know they meant it as a compliment. But sit with the word for a second. Mission. It’s the word you reach for when you want to be kind about something you don’t quite believe will make money. It’s the pat on the head. It’s the polite way of saying: cute, but not serious.

Here is what I’ve come to understand after founding a company, spending nine years investing other people’s money, and now raising a fund of my own: when people call access a mission, they are telling you exactly where they think the returns aren’t. And they are wrong.

Let me show you the math they’re missing.

The talent is everywhere. This is not a hopeful statement. It is an observed fact. Brilliance does not check your zip code before it shows up in a person. It does not consult your last name, your accent, the school you got into, the network you were born inside of. It just arrives, distributed more or less evenly across every kind of human being there is.

The access is not everywhere. That part is rationed. Tightly. The warm intro, the room where the check gets written, the benefit of the doubt on a first pitch, the second meeting after a rough first one. Access clusters. It pools around people who already look like the last person who got funded.

So here’s the whole thesis in one line: the talent is evenly distributed and the access is not. That gap between them is not a tragedy to be pitied. It is a mispricing to be traded.

I keep coming back to a conversation I had with Samara Hernandez, who built Chingona Ventures backing exactly the founders the rest of the market keeps overlooking. She doesn’t frame it as generosity. She frames it as edge. When the whole industry has agreed, quietly, that a certain kind of founder is a lesser bet, you can buy that founder’s company at a discount that has nothing to do with the quality of the company. You are being paid to be right about something the market is being lazy about.

Being underestimated, it turns out, is a form of information. Ask any of the founders I’ve had on the show who were counted out early. The dismissal wasn’t just an insult. It was a signal that the person doing the dismissing hadn’t done the work.

Because here is the thing about a market that misprices people: it does not stay mispriced forever. The founders who got told no build the thing anyway. The categories everyone called small turn out to be enormous. And the investors who did the unglamorous work of looking past the pattern get to keep the difference. That difference has a name in this business. We call it alpha.

I want to be very precise about what I am and am not saying.

I am not saying you should invest in the new majority because it is nice. Nice is not a strategy. Nice does not return capital to your limited partners. If your entire thesis is that you’d feel good about it, you will make sentimental decisions, and sentimental decisions lose money.

I am saying the opposite. I am saying the “feel-good” framing is the expensive mistake. The moment you file access under charity, you stop underwriting it like an investment. You lower your standards because you’ve already told yourself the point was the gesture, not the return. You leave the actual money, the real alpha, sitting on the table for someone less sentimental to come pick up.

Treat it as charity and you will get charity’s returns. Treat it as alpha and you will underwrite it with the same rigor, the same ownership math, the same conviction you bring to any other bet. That’s the whole shift. It is not softer. If anything it is harder, because it holds these founders to the standard they deserve: not a favor, a fair fight.

Does it really have to be this way? The clustering of capital, the warm intro as gatekeeper, the quiet agreement about who gets to be a default yes? No. It really doesn’t. Precedent is not physics. It is just a decision that got made so many times that people forgot it was ever a choice.

So I’ll say it plainly, the way I wish I’d said it the first time someone called my fund a mission.

This is not a donation. It is a trade. The gap between where the talent is and where the access goes is the most durable edge I know of in this business. Closing it isn’t the charitable thing to do.

It’s the smart thing to do.

And the people still calling it charity? They’re the ones leaving money on the table.

This week pairs with our latest episode of Breaking Precedent: “Breaking the Pipeline Myth - Who Really Gets Funded in Venture Capital.” If this resonated, the conversation goes deeper on the myths investors tell themselves about who's fundable, and the math six investors used to prove them wrong.