Origins: Inside Venture Capital
Robinhood's Sarah Pinto: Bringing Private Markets to the Public
What happens when you take the most exclusive asset class in the world and list it on the New York Stock Exchange? Sarah Pinto is finding out in public, every trading day. Sarah spent close to a decade investing in mission-driven growth-stage companies at Emerson Collective, the organization founded and led by Laurene Powell Jobs, where she helped build the venture effort and backed names that are now household ones: OpenAI, Anthropic, and Coinbase. She began investing in July of 2008, which turned out to be an instructive moment to start, and has been focused on tech since 2010. Today she is a portfolio manager at Robinhood Ventures, where she runs two funds built around a structural problem rather than an appetite one: only about 1% of Americans have any exposure to private companies, because most people aren’t accredited. Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI) is a ’40 Act closed-end fund that IPO’d in March 2026 and holds a concentrated portfolio of late-stage frontier companies: Databricks, OpenAI, Stripe, and SpaceX among them. Fund II (RVII) is the other side of the barbell: a BDC investing in a broad, diversified portfolio of Y Combinator seed-stage companies. Beezer digs into the machinery and the tensions - why the ’40 Act and BDC wrappers make any of this possible, how she pitches founders against Sequoia and Index, whether venture really belongs in a public product at all, and what the data actually shows about how retail investors behave when the price drops. It is a conversation about access, structure, and the strange discipline of running a venture portfolio in full public view. Quotes “Only about 1% of Americans have any exposure to privates, because most people aren’t accredited. Which means that they can only watch companies like Anthropic or OpenAI emerge from the sidelines. They can’t be a part of it. They can’t actually benefit from that value creation.” “Most of my GP equivalents at other funds don’t have to be marked to market every single day, whereas I am. That is the challenge. It comes with a lot of additional scrutiny and it comes with volatility that you don’t have if you are private. But it is the only way today that the SEC will let non-accredited investors invest - and frankly for good reasons.” “The CFOs of the companies we invest in know that retail is 25% to 30% of the stock market. In the same way that you bring crossover institutional investors into your late rounds, you should probably bring retail as a constituency. It’s the one constituency you don’t talk to until your IPO. And now you really need them.” Time Stamps [01:05] Meet Sarah Pinto: Emerson Collective to Robinhood Ventures [03:58] The Through Line: Investing at the Intersection of Purpose and Returns [05:46] Why Only 1% of Americans Can Access the Private Markets [07:10] What Emerson Collective Was Built to Do [08:15] RVI and the '40 Act Innovation: A Venture Fund That Trades Like an ETF [09:49] Robinhood as Both Distribution and Product [11:29] How the Portfolio Actually Gets Built [14:02] What You're Really Diligencing When You Buy the Fund [14:33] Why the Apple IPO Math Doesn't Work Anymore [15:44] Marked to Market Every Single Day [16:44] What Changes When You Manage Venture Publicly [19:38] The Pitch to Founders: Why Robinhood Is an N of One [21:35] Retail as a Constituency Before the IPO [23:58] Is Venture Really a Public Product? [24:19] Learn by Doing: Fees, Disclosure, and the $25 Share [28:01] RVII and the Other Side of the Barbell [29:48] Why YC: The Power Law, Concentration, and Hard Data [31:11] Taking a Seed Fund Through the LP Inquisition [31:59] The Live Roadshow and the Most Edgar Filings in IPO History [33:13] What's Next for Robinhood Ventures [36:30] Getting More Women Investing Early Links Connect with the guest and host on LinkedIn! Sarah Pinto Beezer Clarkson Learn more about: Robinhood Ventures Robinhood Ventures Fund I (RVI) Robinhood Ventures Fund II (RVII) Emerson Collective LGT Capital Partners OpenLP
