Dan Ives launched a fund that lets retail investors buy exposure to private AI companies. The same private AI companies that won't let retail investors within a hundred yards of their actual cap table. Yorkville Ives priced this thing so you can finally participate in the boom you've been reading about for two years while the real money already cashed out three funding rounds ago.
Private means you can't buy it. That was the whole point. Now Ives figured out how to package the thing you're not allowed to own and sell it to you anyway at a markup. Genius doesn't cover it. The man saw retail traders desperately refreshing their Robinhood accounts looking for the next Nvidia and thought what if I sold them a wrapper filled with companies that might be worth something someday or might be dog shit but they'll never know because there's no price discovery.
You get access. Not ownership. Not control. Not a vote. Not a board seat. Not even a quarterly earnings call where some CFO lies to you in real time. Access. Like a backstage pass to watch roadies pack up equipment after the concert ended.
The fund gives investors exposure to the private companies helping develop artificial intelligence. Helping develop. Not developing. Not leading. Not dominating. Helping. The companies that sell sandwiches to the engineers at the companies that actually matter. The picks and shovels strategy except the shovels are made of foam and the picks are just sticks someone drew a point on.
Ives spent years telling people to buy Microsoft and Apple while they were public and everyone could already buy them. Now he's charging a fee so you can own a piece of something you can't see the books on until it either goes public at a valuation that already priced in your upside or goes to zero in private where you'll read about it six months later on some blog. The American dream never dies. It just gets repackaged and sold back to you at two and twenty.
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