Investing in people: the Liberman brothers' bet on founders themselves

Executive overview

Most startup investment is a bet on a company. The Liberman brothers bet on the person — buying a percentage of a founder's future earnings across all companies they build, not just one.

Founders with a prior exit are 6.5x more likely to build a unicorn next. That data anchors their valuation model.

The core insight: the value is in the founder, not the company — and locking that in early, without taking control, is the structural innovation.

How the investment model works

• Investors buy a stake in an SPV that owns a share of a founder's future companies and income
• Deals run 15 or 30 years; valuations range from roughly $500K to $2M per person for ~5%
• A formula ingests past achievements and 30 years of founder data to generate a predicted valuation
• Investors get financial rights but zero control — the founder retains full decision-making authority
• No control clause is credible because founder-led companies outperform on average, despite higher variance

Why prior exits are the strongest signal

• 90% of unicorn founders had some form of exit before their breakout company
• YC data shows the same cohort of founders created more unicorns after failing inside YC than their peers created inside YC
• YC is therefore better understood as a people-selector, not a company-selector
• The model currently focuses only on US-based founders due to legal framework constraints

The tokenisation thesis

• Founders and creators can eventually have their equity stakes tokenised and publicly traded
• Current bottleneck is investor education and liquidity structure, not founder demand — hundreds of qualified founders are in the queue
• Institutional money has not entered yet; early backers include Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman (via Humanism)
• Medium-case timeline: first tradable individual shares within this decade, widespread adoption a decade later

Growth and the success corridor

• 60% year-over-year growth is success; 2.4x year-over-year is "superhuman"
• Facebook and Tesla both compounded at roughly 2x per year — no company sustains faster long-term
• The fund targets doubling the amount invested each year; at that rate the math compounds to "all money eventually invested in people"
• Current deployment: ~$10M across 15 founders and one creator; a second $10M tranche recently raised

Why financial stability matters for founders

• Most billion-dollar founders come from upper-middle-class backgrounds — financial security enables risk-taking
• Founders who hold paper wealth but can't pay salaries or mortgages face pressure to exit early
• Providing upfront liquidity removes that pressure and aligns long-term incentives between founder and investor
• Student debt is a structural barrier: Stanford dropouts who built Snapchat could afford to drop out precisely because they had no debt burden