#242 The New Operating System for Venture

Last week, we unpacked Lightspeed’s quiet leap into RIA territory.
This week, we step back—because this isn’t just one firm making noise.
It’s the venture operating system getting reinstalled.

A16z. Sequoia. General Catalyst. Lightspeed.
They’re not just VCs anymore.
They’re infrastructure.

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💥 What Just Happened?

Lightspeed—now managing $31B+—quietly joined a16z, Sequoia, and General Catalyst in RIA territory.

Translation?

They now have full-stack freedom to:

✅ Trade public equities
✅ Lead AI-native rollups
✅ Consolidate cap tables via secondaries
✅ Buy out mid-market companies
✅ Build from scratch—and hold long

“Think Blackstone in a hoodie—with a product team.”

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🧠 Why It Matters

This isn’t compliance theater. It’s structural.

The legacy venture model was built for spray-and-pray, LP-optimized returns, and decade-long waits.

What’s emerging now is something different entirely:

Buy → Build → Rewire (with AI) → Hold → Compound

This isn’t about becoming PE. It’s about absorbing PE’s best tools—and deploying them with a venture-native mindset.

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🚨 The Real RIA Thesis: Full-Stack Control

RIA status unlocks two levers:

1. Asset class freedom – secondaries, public, private, rollups

2. Strategy control – from passive investing to operational ownership

But the real unlock is orchestration—controlling value across the full stack:

– Build AI-native companies in-house
– Roll up verticals
– Restructure cap tables
– Use secondaries as alignment engines
– Hold for duration, not exit pressure

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🔄 From LP-Optimized to Portfolio-Optimized

Old venture:

– 25 early bets
– Minimal ops
– Hope for 2 outliers

New venture (RIA mode):

– Concentrated ownership
– Active operating muscle
– AI-powered rewiring
– Secondaries for flexibility
– Long-term compounding

VCs used to bet on companies. Now they build them.

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🧰 The RIA Stack in the Field

Here’s what the new playbook looks like in practice:

– Secondaries Funds – not a workaround, but a core engine
– AI-native Studios – building where the market is slow
– Roll-up Pods – vertical M&A driven by speed + software
– Crossover Strategies – owning public/private with continuity

This is the structural shift: from “firm” to “platform.”

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🔁 Secondaries Are the Engine

We said this in #237 Secondaries Are (Finally) a Core Part of Seed VC, but it needs a spotlight.

Secondaries aren’t a sideshow anymore. They’re the liquidity valve, the alignment lever, and the recycling engine.

RIA status removes friction:

– No 20% cap
– No fund structure constraints
– Full freedom to consolidate, recap, and reallocate

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🔮 From Firm to Platform

Old model:

3 GPs, 10 associates, fund every 3 years

New model:

Multi-asset platform, internal product teams, evergreen deployment

Expect to see:

– GPs as builders, not just allocators
– AI ops embedded into portcos
– Secondary desks in-house
– M&A playbooks tied to venture studios
– Wealth + fund infra integrated under one roof

This is the “asset builder” era. And it’s just getting started.

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🧰 Bonus: Tools for Builders

We’ve been building for this moment too. If you're adapting your fund strategy to this new model, here are a few tools: