In private markets, the wins and the losses come from the same process, and the difference is structure, not nerve.
Chris Norton explains how private market funds get access to SpaceX and Anthropic, and why the wins and losses come from the same process.
Chris is my own advisor, so I have watched some of this up close before we ever sat down to record. What struck me this time was how plainly he laid out the plumbing behind deals like SpaceX and Anthropic. There is no secret Rolodex. There is a bank desk, a VC with more allocation than demand, and a fee for passing along what nobody else wants.
What I appreciated most is that he did not stop at the wins. He put Energy Vault, which fell from twenty dollars to one, right next to SpaceX, which some clients are up twenty or thirty times on. Same process, same discipline, different outcome. That is the part worth sitting with.
Private market shares come through a fee, not a personal connection to the company.
Later-stage deals trade some upside for better odds of keeping principal.
Keep the safe money safe and the aggressive money separate, always.
- 01The access
The shares come out of somebody else's allocation
Chris's fund does not maintain a list of SpaceX employees or early investors. It works with private markets desks at investment banks, which call in when a venture firm on the cap table has more allocation than its own clients want, and the leftover gets syndicated out for a fee, sometimes five percent on a twenty million dollar transaction.
- 02The tradeoff
Later stage, less upside, better odds on principal
His fund almost never touches seed or Series A rounds and rarely does a Series B, choosing instead to play where the investment has already been de-risked. Where he does back earlier companies, he prefers established founders with a prior public exit, deep pockets, and revenue already coming in, since most startups fail from running out of funding rather than a bad idea.
- 03The foundation
Invest off the foundation, not out of it
One CPA he works with put twenty million into a foundational strategy of stocks, bonds, and mutual funds, stopped adding to it, and now invests off the growth while continuing to work. Buying a piece of a trillion dollar company out of a stock portfolio is a reasonable decision, but pulling from that same foundation to fund a speculative seed round defeats the reason the foundation was built.
From the conversationKeep the safe stuff safe, keep the aggressive stuff aggressive.”
Separate your safe money from your aggressive money
Spend twenty to thirty minutes this week checking whether your own portfolio or business reserves actually follow the split Chris describes.
- 1
Diagnose your current holdings by listing what percentage of your total investable assets sits in speculative or illiquid positions right now.
- 2
Choose a cap for that aggressive bucket, somewhere in the ten to twenty percent range Chris uses with his own clients.
- 3
Write down the dollar amount that represents your foundation and commit in a note or spreadsheet that you will not draw from it for speculative bets this quarter.