Origins Sep 21, 2026 38m 21m saved
With Sarah Pinto, Head of Robinhood Ventures and President of Robinhood Ventures Fund 2
Companies that used to list at a few billion dollars now stay private past a trillion, and Sarah Pinto's argument is that almost nobody outside the accredited class gets any of that.
The standard answer to this is a special-purpose vehicle with layered fees and no disclosure. Pinto's is a fund registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940, listed on the New York Stock Exchange, with no minimum, a published portfolio and a quarterly net asset value.
"Only about 1% of Americans have any exposure to privates because most people aren't accredited."
Pinto has been investing since July 2008 and spent nearly eight years running growth-stage investing at Laurene Powell Jobs' Emerson Collective, where she backed OpenAI, Anthropic and Coinbase. She now runs a $700 million listed fund and has just launched a second one.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 38 minutes of audio, 17 minutes of reading.
Here are the 15 takeaways that matter.
Key Takeaways
About 1% of Americans have any exposure to private assets, and Pinto means the whole asset class, not just venture Her framing is political as much as commercial: a healthy democracy needs people to feel the best companies can be theirs
The vehicle is a 1940 Act closed-end fund, the one product the SEC lets anyone buy, with no minimum and daily trading
RV1 is a $700M fund holding 14 private companies, Databricks and OpenAI the largest, raised mostly from retail through an IPO Robinhood's parent seeded it with about $250M across six companies and left the rest in cash to deploy
RV2 is a $200M seed-stage fund aimed at Y Combinator, expecting to invest in roughly 150 companies a year
About 20% of all tech companies worth over $5B came out of YC, which is why Pinto went there
The fee structures differ deliberately: RV1 charges 2% and no carry, RV2 is 2 and 20 inside a business development company
Retail is 25 to 30% of the stock market, and Pinto's pitch to founders is that it is the one constituency nobody talks to before an IPO
Every tweet in the road show had to be filed with the SEC, which she thinks gave these two IPOs more Edgar filings than any in history
The daily mark is the job's hardest part — her equivalents at private funds are not repriced every day and she is
Retail investors are neither unsophisticated nor fickle, in her account; the institutions marked to market daily are the ones that panic
1. Why She Left Emerson
Beezer Clarkson opened on the move: a decade investing in mission-driven growth-stage companies at Emerson Collective, then a jump to build a public-markets product at Robinhood.
Pinto corrected the timeline first. She has been investing since July 2008, which she noted was an interesting moment to start, and focused on technology from 2010, mostly at growth stage. She was also careful about the credit she was being given: she did invest in Anthropic before most people had heard of Claude, but says that is less true of Coinbase and OpenAI.
The job she left was not a job anyone leaves
And it's the kind of job that is really, really hard to leave.
Sarah Pinto
What she described as the through-line is the intersection of investing and purpose. The investing half she framed as an unusually good job because the ground keeps moving.
The appeal of the work itself
you get to revisit your priors constantly
Sarah Pinto
The purpose half goes back to the Harvard Kennedy School, which she attended because she wanted to work at the World Bank and use finance to change things. Emerson Collective, founded and still led by Laurene Powell Jobs, was built to do that through philanthropy, policy and investment, and Pinto's mandate there was to back consequential companies — successful in the ordinary ways and changing something for the better.
2. The 1% Problem
The Robinhood job, in her telling, is the same purpose applied to a different constraint: companies do not go public any more.
The scale of what stays private now
we have at least one or two companies in the private markets today that are worth over a trillion dollars
Sarah Pinto
And who gets any of it
Only about 1% of Americans have any exposure to privates because most people aren't accredited.
Sarah Pinto
Clarkson pushed on the number, asking whether it meant venture-backed companies or everything. Pinto said the whole gamut. Clarkson's own conclusion was the one that follows.
Venture is a fraction of that fraction
So venture is going to be even a smaller bit because private equity is such a bigger market.
Beezer Clarkson
Accreditation is only the first gate. Pinto's list of the others is what makes the problem structural rather than regulatory.
Even the accredited have to be let in
Even if you are accredited, you have to be invited into rounds. You have to be invited into funds. You have to have hundreds if not tens of thousands of dollars to invest.
Sarah Pinto
What that leaves everyone else doing
which means that they can only watch companies like Anthropic or OpenAI emerge from the sidelines. They can't be a part of it.
Sarah Pinto
Her argument for why this matters is not about returns.
The case she makes is a civic one
if you want to have a healthy democracy, everyone needs to feel like they can have skin in the game and that the best companies can be theirs.
Sarah Pinto
She also made the historical comparison directly: in the Amazon, Google and Apple era, companies listed after some proof but with most of their history still ahead of them, so buying at the IPO beat the private rounds. That is no longer true, and she was candid that the argument for capturing most of the value creation in public markets is now much harder to make.
3. Why A 1940 Act Fund
The product choice follows from the access problem.
The one wrapper open to everyone
It is the one type of product that the SEC allows anyone to invest in
Sarah Pinto
The specific form is a closed-end fund registered under the Investment Company Act of 1940. It carries no minimum, it is listed, and it trades every day like an exchange-traded fund, so a holder can buy or sell whenever the market is open. Pinto's claim is that the innovation is the wrapper rather than the underlying assets.
The second half of why Robinhood can do this at all is the company's own shape.
Distribution and product in one place
It's both a distribution and product company which is fairly rare.
Sarah Pinto
She put the platform at about 30 million funded accounts, and said the two things those customers asked for were exposure to very late-stage household names and a diversified portfolio of very early-stage companies. The two funds exist because those were the top two requests.
4. RV1: 14 Names, $700M
The first fund and its size
So RV1 is our first fund which we raised through an IPO in March of 2026. It's a $700 million NAV fund.
Sarah Pinto
It holds a concentrated portfolio of later-stage private companies: 14 today, with Databricks and OpenAI the largest, alongside Stripe, Ramp, Revolut, Whatnot, Mercor, ElevenLabs, Boom, Oura, SpaceX and Airwallex. At scale she expects 20 or 30 names rather than hundreds.
Her framing of the risk in that portfolio was unusually plain: these are companies where one could argue they have already won, and the bet is that a lot of value creation still compounds as they keep growing.
Where the money came from is the novel part
Most of the capital was raised from retail which is very very novel and very exciting.
Sarah Pinto
There is institutional capital in it too, which she said the team is proud of, but the retail share is the thing that had not been done.
5. Deploying The Cash
Clarkson asked how companies get added, since the portfolio is clearly still growing.
The mechanism is that the IPO raised primary capital, and Pinto's job as portfolio manager is to invest it. Buyers at the IPO were buying into a portfolio the parent had seeded — about $250 million across six holdings.
The six the fund started with
There was six companies at the time. Mercor, Ramp, Revolut, Airwallex, Boom and Oura
Sarah Pinto
The rest was cash, to be deployed over 12 to 24 months. In the eight months since she joined, the fund has added ElevenLabs, Stripe, OpenAI, Canva, SpaceX and, most recently, Whatnot.
What that structure produces is a fund that holds shares directly rather than a synthetic exposure, with the fund's own shares trading on the New York Stock Exchange in the secondary market.
Trading in the shares does not touch the portfolio
So, I don't have to do anything. I don't have to sell anything in my portfolio for people to be able to buy and sell.
Sarah Pinto
Clarkson tested the limit: a holder who dislikes a new position cannot sell that one holding, only the whole fund. Pinto agreed, and said the prospectus is explicit about it.
What an investor is actually diligencing
We are the fiduciary.
Sarah Pinto
The decision, she said, is two decisions: whether you want the asset class, and whether you trust these particular people to pick the companies.
6. Marked To Market Daily
The structural cost of the listing is that the fund reprices every day.
Pinto was precise about what moves and what does not. The cash does not move. The value of the portfolio does, but that is not what she has to live with — the adjustment variable is the share price, and no private-fund manager doing her job has to be repriced daily.
She did not treat that as a flaw. The scrutiny and disclosure that come with it are, in her words, healthy, and the daily mark is the price of being the only structure the SEC will let a non-accredited investor use. On whether the accreditation rules themselves are well written, she was willing to debate it but would not argue the protection is pointless.
7. Compliance As The Job
Asked what she does differently now, Pinto gave a one-line answer.
The change in the work
compliance has become a much bigger part of my life.
Sarah Pinto
Her read on Robinhood is that it is unusually good at holding two things at once, heavy regulation and product innovation, and that the tension between them is real, hard and enjoyable in the way building in financial technology is.
The discipline she described is about attention rather than strategy.
Watching the price without being run by it
So, it's caring about the general trend of the stock price without caring about the daily volatility. And that's hard.
Sarah Pinto
What she can control is access, and access is competitive. Every round she wants into is at least twice and sometimes ten times oversubscribed, which means a founder has to cut an existing investor's allocation to make room for her.
The input she can actually control
I need to earn the right to be in those rooms.
Sarah Pinto
Clarkson's follow-up was about the tension between two stakeholders, which she pointed out is common in investing even if Pinto's version is unusual. Pinto's framing: doing right by retail investors and by portfolio companies, building for the long term while caring about the short term.
The line she uses on herself
every day I wake up and I tell myself I'm telling a differentiated story to companies and I'm fighting for the little guy.
Sarah Pinto
8. The Pitch To Founders
Clarkson asked the obvious competitive question: how do you win a round against a name-brand venture firm?
Pinto's answer starts with what founders want that firms cannot offer.
Founders did not build the company for institutions
Most founders when they started their company didn't do it, just to make institutional investors wealthier
Sarah Pinto
The companies she says this lands with hardest are the ones whose customers are their growth engine. Whatnot, the fund's most recent investment, depends on the buyers and sellers on its platform, and those people ask how they can own a piece of it. Until now there was no answer.
The competitive claim is about structure rather than brand.
They sit on the cap table directly
We get on their cap table directly.
Sarah Pinto
The comparison she drew was with the retail private-market products that stack special-purpose vehicles on top of each other, with fees at every layer and limited transparency. A regulated fund that gets each company's approval and holds the shares itself is, in her view, a category with one member.
9. Retail Is A Constituency
The second half of the pitch is aimed at the finance chief rather than the founder.
The share of the market nobody courts early
they know that retail is 25 to 30% of the stock market
Sarah Pinto
And why that matters before the listing
in order to have a successful IPO and a successful public story, you need retail.
Sarah Pinto
Her analogy is the crossover institutional investor a company brings into late rounds to have a public-market relationship ready. Retail, she said, is the one constituency a company does not speak to until the day it needs it.
What the platform offers in return
we have 30 million very vocal investors who really read about the companies they invest in before they invest in
Sarah Pinto
For a business-to-business company such as Databricks, she framed that as a way to start telling a story to an audience it would otherwise meet cold. The funds publish company information of the kind a professional would find on a private-markets database: who leads the company, what it sells, how much it has raised and at what valuations. The team is also building live streams and question-and-answer sessions between portfolio companies and the fund's retail holders.
Her third argument is the one about AI specifically. Companies on that continuum, she said, can see that people feel excluded from it, and giving those people a stake is a way to keep them from opposing it. She drew the parallel to companies offering equity to the government.
10. Learning By Doing
Clarkson raised the standard objection: is venture, with 15- to 20-year holding periods and a gap between private and public marks, really a public product?
Pinto's answer, prefaced with the disclaimer that none of it is investment advice, was that it can be done well and that disclosure is what makes the difference. The fund has to publish every company it holds, the securities it owns, the cost of each investment and a quarterly net asset value — none of which an investor building their own angel portfolio or buying into a special-purpose vehicle would get.
The first fund takes no performance fee
Our first fund has 2% management fee, no carry.
Sarah Pinto
Her broader argument is behavioral. She compared it to a child putting pocket money into a stock they recognize and learning what compounding feels like.
Why she thinks disclosure beats education
I'm a believer in this behavioral economics idea that financial education doesn't really work. What works is trying it out for yourself.
Sarah Pinto
The caveat she added herself is the one about allocation.
The line she will not cross
if you don't have extra savings don't invest money you don't have
Sarah Pinto
11. RV2 And The Seed Barbell
The two funds are deliberately opposite
RV1 is a concentrated portfolio of late stage names a lot less risky. RV2 is essentially the other side of the barbell.
Sarah Pinto
RV2 is a diversified seed-stage portfolio. Pinto defined seed for a general audience rather than assuming it.
What seed stage actually means
it's companies that have existed for months not years
Sarah Pinto
They may have a product and may have revenue, and both will be early. What is being bought is a team.
Her case for the stage has two parts. The first is portfolio construction.
Seed is not correlated to anything else
First of all because it's very uncorrelated to anything else in the economy.
Sarah Pinto
The second is the moment. With AI widely available, she argued, the bar for being a capable builder has fallen, and at the same time every buyer, consumer and enterprise alike, is looking at software they already own and asking whether it is obsolete.
The structure follows from the power law: most of the return comes from a very small number of companies, so the portfolio has to be wide.
12. Why Y Combinator
Wanting both diversification and a high hit rate led to one name.
The concentration statistic that decided it
it's like about 20% of all companies valued over $5 billion came from YC in tech
Sarah Pinto
She cross-checked it against her own book: RV1 had no Y Combinator mandate at all, and five of its 14 companies are either YC companies directly or founded by YC alumni, OpenAI and Ramp among them.
Getting in required the accelerator's cooperation, and Pinto was direct about why: it is a high-trust, insider-led ecosystem, and a fund that wants high-signal access has to be inside it. Y Combinator's team was interested in the idea of their companies tapping retail capital, and one of the ways they helped was handing over a list of people to hire.
The shape of the strategy
every batch now is about 200 companies. They have four a year. And so we'll invest in probably 150 companies a year.
Sarah Pinto
13. A BDC And 2 And 20
The second structural change is the vehicle itself. RV2 uses a business development company rather than a closed-end fund, which lets it take a larger percentage of each company, something closed-end funds are tightly limited on, and lets it charge a performance fee.
The two funds price differently on purpose
while the first fund is a 2% management fee, no performance fee, the second one is a 2 and 20 fund.
Sarah Pinto
Her reasons for the change were hiring and alignment: a standard venture fee structure is what lets the fund hire a manager of the quality the strategy needs, and it puts the adviser and the investors on the same side.
14. A Road Show On Edgar
The RV2 road show ran on the Robinhood app and on YouTube, which Clarkson watched. The team filmed at Y Combinator, ran a live stream, did an interview with Sequoia, and posted on social media throughout.
That last part collided with securities law.
Every post was a regulatory filing
because road shows are incredibly regulated processes, we had to file every single tweet or LinkedIn post.
Sarah Pinto
Which produced a record she is fairly sure of
we are probably the two IPOs that had the most Edgar filings of any IPO in history.
Sarah Pinto
Her point is not that the rules are wrong but that they were written for a different audience.
The plumbing assumes an institutional buyer
All of these systems were designed with the institutional in mind. They weren't designed with the retail investors in mind.
Sarah Pinto
15. What Retail Gets Right
Clarkson's last question was what people get wrong about opening the asset class up.
The first misconception
One is they think that retail investors are not smart and that is definitely not true.
Sarah Pinto
They are informed, they read, and they are educated, in her account. The second misconception is about behavior: that retail moves as a herd, selling into declines and buying into rallies. Pinto says the data she has seen says the opposite.
Who actually panics
Sometimes institutional investors, particularly the ones that are marked to market daily, tend to be more daily nervous than a lot of our investors who buy and hold.
Sarah Pinto
Clarkson liked the phrase enough to repeat it.
The host's verdict on the coinage
Daily nervous. That's such a great description.
Beezer Clarkson
Pinto's illustration was of the professional who calls when the mark moves.
What she says back
Like, don't call me every day.
Sarah Pinto
Bonus Insights
A third fund this year, and a partnership model behind it
Pinto said the team has another fund defined and expects to raise it this year. The longer ambition is to give retail the same range of choices a wealthy individual already has: private equity, thematic funds, sports teams and live events, art and collectibles, real estate, AI infrastructure. The open question she named is which of those to build end to end and which to co-create with existing managers — bringing another firm's deal flow to Robinhood's distribution.
The road show that anyone could watch
The RV2 offering kicked off on 3 August and listed on 13 August on the New York Stock Exchange. Unlike a conventional road show, which is closed to everyone except institutions, this one was streamed on the Robinhood app and on YouTube.
Who is actually buying
The thing Pinto said she most wanted to raise was that Robinhood's customer base, including for these funds, is still overwhelmingly male. She was candid that despite a career in finance it took her a long time to invest her own savings properly, and said her hope is that a woman, a mother and an immigrant running these funds gets more young women to start earlier and stay invested.
Pinto's bottom line is that the access problem is a structural one rather than an appetite one, and that a regulated, listed fund with published holdings and a quarterly net asset value is the only way she has found to hand a non-accredited investor the same optionality an institution already has.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
Robinhood (Runs the two listed venture funds; about 30 million funded accounts, which Pinto says makes it both a distribution and a product company)
Emerson Collective (Laurene Powell Jobs' organization, where Pinto ran growth-stage investing for nearly eight years)
Y Combinator (RV2's target: about 200 companies a batch, four batches a year, and Pinto's claim that about 20% of $5B+ tech companies came out of it)
Databricks and OpenAI (The two largest positions in RV1)
Anthropic (One of her Emerson investments, made before most people had used Claude)
Coinbase (Another Emerson-era investment, though she was careful not to claim she was early to it)
Stripe, Ramp, Revolut, Whatnot, Mercor, ElevenLabs, Boom Supersonic, Oura, SpaceX, Canva and Airwallex (The rest of RV1's 14 holdings, six of them seeded by Robinhood's parent and the others bought since Pinto joined)
New York Stock Exchange (Where both funds list; RV2 went public there on 13 August)
Sequoia Capital (Interviewed as part of the RV2 road show)
EDGAR (The SEC filing system that had to receive every road-show tweet and LinkedIn post)
World Bank's International Finance Corporation (Where Pinto started her career after the Kennedy School)
Harvard Kennedy School (Where she studied international development, intending to work in development finance)
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