Overall, this is a great idea. The point of a value added investor is to increase the likelihood of positive outcomes. This is a great way to do that.
The amount of carry involved is interesting but in no way will misalign a founder's interest in their own company doing well. Their interest in seeing their own company perform is many more orders of magnitude higher than the shared carry.
The other thing to consider is that the shared carry will give the founders of other companies in the portfolio added incentive to help. This help would benefit every shareholder.
That's an odd statement. Even in the most successful of funds, the vast majority of companies return modest amounts of capital or no capital at all. The general rule is that most of a fund's overall return will come from ~20% of the portfolio companies.
Already there is a big split between incentives for a founder and incentives for an early employee, and even moreso between the company and investors.
Early employees at many successful startups have a long, accomplished history of getting royally screwed over on their equity to work ratio. In my experience, I've seen how that can build into real resentment over time, but of course they can't leave until they've vested, so they're just stuck doing all the work and getting compensated well, but no where close to they might deserve or what the founders end up with.
Employees, early or not, have absolutely zero input into what investments founders decide to take. It's also possible that employees may join before a start-up gets an investment from this fund, making the (potential) screwed-overness even worse. Employees can get as mad about this as they want, but they'll have pretty much zero recourse in any situation.
That said, Kent's a great guy to work with - if you don't like his experimental fund structure, the opportunity to work with him should more than make up for it.
But this is about much more than diversification, it's about the community that forms when the founders have an interest in one another's success.
In my experience, buying love is not nearly as effective as winning it.
When a founder helps a fellow company out of the goodness of their hearts or just for Karma, or with hopes of reciprocity, that help will likely be more valuable than a bunch of founders who feel somewhat invested in the other companies and maybe think they know better.
I think this is an interesting experiment...but I wonder how this will actually play out. I can see it having the exact opposite effect you are hoping for.