Opportunity Manifesto Portfolio Team Summit

Backing the builders of tomorrow's companies

Vault Fund invests in company-building firms that systematically create new companies — maximizing upside through a repeatable, risk-managed playbook.

The Opportunity

A differentiated edge in private markets

Company-building firms span private equity and venture capital — including venture studios, roll-up platforms, and serial entrepreneurs. Their repeatable playbooks create structural advantages that drive faster, higher returns.

Repeatable build process
Efficiencies from a tested, systematic playbook reduce friction at every stage.
Rigorous early testing
Ideas are stress-tested before significant capital is deployed.
Capital efficient ownership
Lower cost basis from day zero reduces entry risk significantly.
Minimized downside
Concentrated portfolio construction limits capital loss exposure.
Reduced fee exposure
Structural alignment lowers total fee drag versus traditional alternatives.
Shared services advantage
Portfolio companies benefit from centralized resources and emerging talent networks.
Manifesto

A champion of visionary founders

01
We empower founders to have a greater impact. Through building rigorously tested solutions to today's challenges, we help visionary leaders shape the world around them.
02
We believe talent comes in all shapes and sizes — regardless of race, gender, age, or origin. The best ideas don't come from one place.
03
Company builders create a step change to traditional private market investing. We're not afraid to buck the trend to seek better returns — because we know the strength of a repeatable playbook.
04
The best time to invest is on Day Zero. Instead of following the money, we become the money. We seek great ideas today to create the major companies of tomorrow.
05
We believe the company building model can help solve humanity's biggest problems. That conviction drives every investment decision we make.
Portfolio

Ground zero for tomorrow's game changers

Team
Sarah Anderson
Sarah Anderson
Founding Partner

Sarah has over 12 years of private equity and banking experience and has been investing in early-stage ventures for more than eight years. Prior to founding Vault Fund, Sarah was the Fund Manager at The Cintrifuse Syndicate Fund — a strategic fund of funds with more than $100M in AUM, investing in early-stage venture capital funds across the United States.

Cintrifuse Syndicate Fund investors include P&G, Kroger, Great American Financial, Smuckers, Western Southern, along with other large corporations. The Fund invests primarily to give its member corporations access to innovation. Sarah's Cintrifuse investments included Atlas, Atomic, Greycroft, Lerer, Upfront, Madrona, and Revolution Ventures.

Prior to her role at Cintrifuse, Sarah worked with early-stage venture funds and technology companies as Vice President at JP Morgan in San Francisco, and as an investment banker at the Royal Bank of Canada (RBC).

Sarah earned her Bachelor of Science from the University of Florida, where she was a pole vaulter on the Women's Track and Field team, and her MBA from UCLA's Anderson School of Management.

Francisco Gomez
Francisco Gomez
Partner

Francisco is a Partner at Vault Fund, focused on pipeline development, diligence, and regularly working with our underlying portfolio of company creation funds.

Prior to joining Vault Fund, Francisco was a Director at Allocate, a digital platform for private alternatives, where he worked closely with fund managers across the different stages of venture. Francisco and Sarah also worked together at Cintrifuse, where he focused on early-stage venture. During his time as an allocator, he has met with 400+ funds across the country and led diligence on 40+ investments.

In prior roles, Francisco worked in Finance at Fifth Third Bank and Schneider Electric where he covered Corporate Treasury and FP&A.

Francisco earned his Bachelor of Science in Finance and a minor in Spanish Language and Culture from Miami University.

Summit

Strategic Partnerships Done Right

by Sarah Anderson

Strategic partnerships between corporations and company creation funds are an important component of the thriving company creation ecosystem. Company creation funds give corporations access to the advantages of fast and efficient 0-to-1 builds and strategic partners give company creators access to ideas, early customers, and scale. However, these partnerships are often poorly structured and have a checkered history of success for two main reasons:

1) Many strategic partners work with company creators on a fee for services basis. This is largely due to internal structures, legal complexities, and IP ownership. However, fee for services arrangements lack mutual incentives to build big, successful companies, and instead incentivize hours spent and costs reimbursed. There is simply no upside for the builders other than covering operational expenses.

2) In addition, strategic partners tend to want a solution that is exclusive to their use. Thus, the builders are building for one customer. There are very few new products or services that drive outlier returns with one customer. While one customer can drive early scale, it is not a sustainable growth strategy. The struggle of embedding a still early start-up within a large corporate environment tends to kill the product or service before it has a chance to get to scale and limits the upside growth beyond a single customer use case.

Conversely, the potential advantages of partnerships between corporations and company creation funds are vast and varied, and these partnerships can be structured to succeed for both entities. Beyond the plagued fee-for-services arrangement, company creation funds are working with strategic partners to successfully generate equity value through: 

  • Ideation: Strategic partners experience unique industry pain points, which provide valuable insights into new solutions that can help industries advance beyond those pain points. As strategic partners surface needs and interests, it allows new company creators to spend more mindshare on those areas in order to find novel solutions. Strategic partners represent the second largest source of ideas for company creation funds after internal teams. 
  • Testing: Strategic partners also provide early testing centers for new capabilities, especially those that solve existing pain points. This can readily identify weaknesses in the capability to provide fast iteration and optimization of novel solutions. 
  • Efficiency in Scale: Strategic partners also provide access to embedded distribution channels and beta customers. Company creation funds that have existing strategic partners benefit the most from the efficient scalability that comes with large, early customers. 
  • Strategic Capital: Many strategic partners have the capability of providing follow-on capital at later stages. Usually this is beyond seed and into early scale rounds. Having access to this early capital provides benefits of additional business development and customer adoption.
  • Exit Opportunities: Probably the most obvious advantage is the ability of strategic partners to acquire portfolio companies. Given these builds are rigorously tested with high growth potential, they create strong acquisition targets. 

We believe strategic partners provide strong advantages to company creation funds as they move through their development cycle from ideation to testing to scale. However, these relationships necessarily need to be structured in a mutually beneficial way to create the significant upside that is possible.

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