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Comment by swanson | Hacker News Reader

> Investors can buy a share of the fund, called the Access Fund, for $100,000 or more.

This is really interesting to me, but I wish it were at a $10k level. That would be a no-brainer shift for me to move some money going into Vanguard into this, but I'm in that weird spot where I'm not rich enough to have $100k to toss around but am maxing out a Roth IRA and looking for more upside.

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Agreed; we do this for regulatory reasons. We've got a limit on how many investors we can have per fund, and we can't sidestep that requirement by spinning up duplicate funds.

The high minimum investment is our equivalent of surge pricing.

We're working on it, though!

Anything stopping me from buying one of your $100k shares with an LLC that has multiple members?

No issues with that on our end. Plenty of investors using funds or LLCs with multiple members to invest.

You'll want to work with a lawyer to structure the vehicle, and have a full understanding of legal, compliance and tax considerations associated with it.

Edit: the entity investing must be accredited. Here's an overview of the criteria:

https://angel.co/help/accreditation/what-is-an-accredited-in...

Accredited investors only? If so, even lowering the floor to $10k might not help the OP (geared toward helping swanson with the details rather than any kind of suggestion).

Edit: and Kapil has answered :-)

Thank you! I'll get in touch shortly.

How are you guys assessing the lookthrough in that case? If an entity is formed for the sole purpose of investing in your fund, I believe those investors count towards your limit.

Are you seeing any regulatory openings here? We (www.agfunder.com) think that indexing is a much better approach for individual investors looking to get some exposure to an asset class like venture.

Be careful to examine what's actually in the fund as your underlying. This isn't like buying the S&P500 where the sector exposure is well defined. One "startup index fund" can perform very disparately from another "startup index fund".

edit: If there's data that shows the performance of a basket of random 100 company samples being equivalent to any number of other random 100 company samples, then I am happy to admit that I am mistaken in this regard.

Yep -- I understand what I'm buying (well, not buying yet...). Something like this would be a great for a Taleb-esque 90/10 barbell I think -- 90% in target-date vanguard funds and 10% in startup investments by proxy.

Didn't Taleb advocate cash holdings (90%) and high risk investing (10%). I always though that 90% cash was a pretty whacky idea and personally just stick to portfolio theory.

I think your plan (substitution index funds for cash) is already a lot better than what Taleb suggested.

Taleb considers the stock-market at large to be extremely risky. He advocates the exact opposite of keeping 90% of your assets in the stock market.

Sorry, I wasn't clear. Taleb-esque in the sense of 90/10 (safe/risky) split, not his specific recommendation. Thanks for clarifying :)

central limit theorum?

Statistically the central limit theorem is assuming sampling from the same population, there is no guarantee that two startup indexes are actually sampling from the same population

The Central Limit Theorem needs the prerequisite that your distribution has a finite variance. It's not at all clear that this holds for the return of startup investments. In more practical terms, when the variance is very high or there are outsized impacts from small portions of your population, it can take arbitrarily many samples before your average starts to converge. So it's entirely possible that sampling 100 companies isn't enough.

Lots of conditions that may not be satisfied. Independence is a very hard one. results may be well correlated even if they look like they should be independent

You can't really max out a Roth IRA (that's an illusion). Backdoor contributions are unlimited.

what do you mean? would love to know more about this.

Do you mean it's possible to contribute more than the contribution limit in a given tax year?

(For the sister posts - it's called a backdoor Roth. Make nondeductible contributions to a "vanilla" IRA, and immediately convert.)

https://www.bogleheads.org/wiki/Backdoor_Roth_IRA

Weird, i thought its 5500/year. That's what you can do with betterment at least....

It is. All a backdoor Roth does is it gets around the income limits for Roth IRAs. If you make more than ~$130K per year, you aren't allowed to contribute.

With a backdoor Roth, you contribute to a normal, post tax IRA, then convert to Roth. However, if you have a rollover IRA, then you can't do it without taking a tax hit.

However, I have heard of people putting more than $5500 per year in a Roth. Search for it on the Bogleheads forum. I can't remember the details, but your employer needs to be on board as you contribute to a 401k, then do some conversion.

Look up backdoor roth and mega backdoor roth.

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