Social Leverage Saturday... Some Portfolio Updates

Good afternoon.

I am on my way home after two weeks on the road mostly Manhattan.

Mostly I was working with team Stocktwits and seeing our Social Leverage portfolio founders that were in town.

I also got to spend a lot of time with Rachel and some friends.

The food is always a highlight for me and my diet was a disaster…pizza, cake, burgers, pasta, candy and bread.

Last night I went to see Pete Holmes perform (his show Crashing was so funny) at The New York comedy festival and he crushed.

On the subject of comedy… our fast growing fund 4 portfolio company Punchup.live that is the home for all the best stand-ups in the world, a creators operating system that is focused on helping comedians, monetize new content, grow their audiences, communicate with their fans, and sell tickets. Pete Holmes uses Punch Up of course. Danny, PunchUp’s co-founder was at Facebook/Meta for 10 plus years working on the creator product side.

If you are interested in comedy, building platforms and the creator economy have a listen to Danny here on a few podcasts.

As a seed investor I continue to focus on financial services for investors, traders and the mass affluent. All non obvious products, companies and founders are welcome. We know how much extra time and effort takes to build a brand and trust in the financial industry.

Some of our recent fintech/financial services investments are growing really fast. Two portfolio founders I spent time with this week were Braden at Fiscal.ai (fund 4) and Joe the co-founder of SyntheticFi.com.

Fiscal.ai is coming for the Factset ( $FDS ( ▼ 1.45% ) ) market cap of $12 billion. The markets know Factset is not AI first with a very high cost structure. The stock is being punished as startups come for the king…

Syntheticfi.com is a more recent investment but has immediate product/market fit and fast growth offering ‘box spreads’ to investors. Bloomberg recently covered them and the product.

Box Spreads have been around for a long time but never offered to the mass affluent. Here is how you can refinance using SyntheticFi . Hit me up if you are a financial advisor (for your clients) or in the market for a refinance. We have a long history of making seed investments along these lines including Robinhood, Etoro, Alpaca.markets, Secfi.com and Frec.com.

Another fast growing financial company in our fund 4 is Archiveintel.com. They just closed a Series A of $6.3 million (we participated). Archive Intel is the modern, AI first competitor to financial industry giants Global Relay and Smarsh. Social Leverage is of course a customer.

Last but not least this week, Beehiiv (fund 4) had a massive product launch for their customers - like me - to help creators build their businesses beyond newsletters.

Have a great weekend.