The Inauguration Manifesto

In my experiences having been involved in political processes, starting companies, and building organizations, one of the enduring observations that I’ve had a front row seat to has been the intersection between the public sector and private industry. When I was growing up and first getting involved in politics, the news cycles were dominated by conversations about the meltdown of the banking, insurance, and auto industries in the United States during the Great Financial Crisis in 2008 and the dramatic changes to America’s regulatory regime afterwards. My college years were dominated by deep conversations about the sweeping changes to the American healthcare industry during the Obamacare debates. And my early days in Silicon Valley in the mid 2010s were filled with news headlines about Uber, Airbnb, Zenefits, and Theranos executives being at complete odds with government bodies. The nature of the relationship between the government and industry seemed to be one of tension - between the regulators and the regulated and less about economic development and industrial growth.

I had a front seat to this while building and leading FiscalNote from an idea to a public offering for over a decade working with thousands of companies, over half the Fortune 500, and hundreds of government agencies in helping them make sense of the barrage of regulations and laws that were shaping industries far and wide.

Towards the second term of the Obama Administration and into the early days of the Trump Administration, a new era of industrial policy began to take root. At first it was subtle, President Obama began to talk specifically about bringing advanced manufacturing jobs back to the United States and this was accelerated by the nationalistic industrial policies of President Trump’s first administration and the multi trillion dollar investments coming out of the Biden Administration and tariff policies of President Trump.

The defining accelerator however was the dramatic reorienting of the global economy during COVID-19. Within several weeks since the first case reached American shores, the American government rapidly took charge of the economy, regulating everything from store opening times to trillions of dollars in subsidies for American businesses and the nature of the relationship between government and business was permanently altered. The government was no longer just regulating but it was actively shaping entire industries and picking “winners and losers”.

In 2020, Congress passed the CARES Act allocating hundreds of billions of dollars to the healthcare industry to prepare them for the dramatic changes in the healthcare industry during and post COVID. In 2022, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, authorizing $871 billion for clean energy development, electrification, and pharmaceutical drug pricing reform. Between 2022 and 2024, in a series of spending bills, the United States Government allocated over $200 billion in military aid and purchases to Israel and Ukraine. During this time period, both Presidents Biden and Trump allocated hundreds of billions of dollars towards AI development and created substantial trade restrictions and export controls on the development of AI, culminating in President Trump’s $500B Stargate program. We’ve seen this accelerate even further with everything like the GENIUS Act to the Biosecure Act to the government taking actual equity stakes in businesses. This combined with more favorable tariff and protectionist trade policies are driving a substantial boon for select American industries to grow and scale.

If this sounds familiar to you, it should. The acts of the United States government mirror post war economic development and industrial growth strategies of countries like South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore and others who are placing the enormous might and weight of the United States government and its resources into investing in, growing, and protecting key American industries. Think about that: the most powerful country in the world accounting for almost a third of the world’s GDP is marshaling the might of its government to push and scale industries it desires.

South Korea is a good example of this in what is known as the “Miracle of the Han River”. A country that was known to be one of the poorest in the world, climbed its way to becoming one of the top 10 economies in the world, through sheer industrial investment, education, and a tight partnership between government and the private sector. By partnering with key entrepreneurs of that era that went on to build large companies such as Samsung, Hyundai, and LG, the government worked closely to drive substantial investment for national development and technology innovation. The subsequent public development combined with technology investment creates trillions of dollars of economic wealth and millions of jobs.

In 2025, such an opportunity exists today. But the stakes are much higher and the platform is much larger. Today, instead of consumer electronics and automobiles, we are witnessing the growth of Artificial Intelligence, digitalization and automation of entire industries, autonomous warfare, clean energy, and a whole host of other technology oriented developments that are critical to a national interest and with the United States government as the clear driving force behind all of these new capabilities.

All of this signals a return to the old industrial development state thesis but with a mix of public and private investment in the 21st century. This was perhaps the original theory of Alexander Hamilton and his approach to blending state driven national institutions with private markets. Certainly, we’ve seen periods like this such as the Industrial Era of the 19th Century and the post war boom in America, periods where governments massively subsidized railroad or highway or home development (eg GI Bill) and private companies flooded in to address those opportunities. But in all cases, the role of the American government was to catalyze and support while private founders and entrepreneurs scaled their companies. Industrial policy is back but private execution is lacking. The government can allocate billions of dollars but if high quality innovators do not step up, execution will falter. Government can print dollars but they can’t print execution.

We build companies for the national interest. We are deep believers in industrial policy-driven entrepreneurship. When Congress passed the CARES Act, we built Nitra, a leading platform to help digitize, manage, and automate the long tail end of healthcare delivery in America now managing billions of dollars in payments through the healthcare industry. When Congress passed the IRA, we built Amber, a vertically integrated insurance and repair company for the new and emerging electric vehicle industry - the first in the country. When the United States entered into military conflicts with Ukraine and Israel, we built Jericho Security, a new generative AI cyber defense and warfare company - winning two major Air Force contracts in defensive and offensive AI security. When the government loosened restrictions at the SBA to allow for more government oriented lending, we built Exponent to support the biggest beneficiaries, the food and beverage industry and the millions of quick service restaurants who were boosted by capital inflows. When the White House announced massive investments in Artificial Intelligence and GPU clusters, we built Vibranium Labs to support the reliability and stability of AI-driven cloud software for developers across the country. Legislation drives strategy drives execution and capital formation for real equity value creation.

At each stage in the country’s national development, we are building Inauguration to be a venture builder in the nation’s service. Working closely with governments and identifying and spotting key technological growth trends, capitalizing on both government backing and technological change to grow new companies.

We are persistently scouting opportunities today in areas that are being driven by the decoupling of US-China in pharmaceuticals, energy grid independence and efficiency, dramatic privatization of Medicare and Medicaid, consolidation in the airline industry post COVID, increasing capital restrictions in emerging market securities, miniaturization of the weapons industry, the balkanization of the space industry, etc. that are all at the intersection of key technological trends and large government action.

Today is the right time. We are seeing a flood of capital, hungry and ambitious talent, and substantial opportunity to build enduring and lasting companies that have the potential to solve some of the country’s largest problems today. Capitalism, and in particular, venture capital driven growth is the fastest and most agile force to implement national industrial policy in our technology driven age and Inauguration combines the best of policy, technology, and company building. We can harness these forces of civic entrepreneurship to combine public power and private entrepreneurship to advance national strength and solve some of the largest problems facing our country today from healthcare affordability to housing to energy transition.

Through a deep level of market research, we build and fund the next generation of industry-defining, fast growing technology companies that are dramatically accelerated by government industrial policy in the 21st century.

The Inauguration team collates key observations about sustained government action and we go through an endless cycle of analysis testing feasibility, business model attractiveness, defensibility, and acceptance by capital markets. During this process we interview hundreds of end users, conduct market research into funding trends and talent availability, prototype and validate hypotheses with our network in a process that might take up to a year.

Throughout all of these Inauguration looks for companies that serve the national interest, have a clear reason for being - the why now is an important test both politically and technologically, have validated and growing demand from end users and customers from day one, have the right timing from a customer adoption and funding availability perspective, and have strong financial fundamentals with monetization capabilities from day one. These companies can range from strategic deterrence, economic resilience, and infrastructure development but all serve a national interest. We focus on the right markets with the right talent and process for customer development (yes, calling hundreds of customers in a market no matter how tedious it can be) and finding opportunities that are large and differentiated enough to build a scalable company. Each idea goes through a process of deep market research starting from zero and building conviction through each additional data point from a customer, partner, or key thought leader/investor.

Speed is key here. Speed to regulatory insight, speed to prototype, speed to execute especially in the long tail end of “unsexy” opportunities - opportunities buried deep in 900 page legislative texts or dense policy speeches of deputy under secretaries. These are areas where startups have a distinct advantage overall. Especially in a world where GTMs and products are being reimagined every day, it will be critical to do so.

The extended Inauguration team includes deep cross-cutting relationships across government, financial markets, and technology as well as founders who have repeatedly built and scaled unicorn companies. Our ability to routinely navigate complexity, regulations, capital markets, and politics puts us in a unique and differentiated position to find ideas that have the potential for explosive growth. Beyond the core Inauguration team the most ambitious advisors, investors, operators - engineers, policy experts, defense technologists, and repeat founders - seek out Inauguration because they want to build enduring companies with purpose, not just raise capital. Inauguration will in 2025 and 2026 build policy advisory boards to cover research, regulation, and key policy trends for thesis development and idea sourcing.

In this sense, the modern approaches to building companies are much more networked, founder driven, and reliant on venture capital to scale large global outcomes than previous historical eras; as a result Inauguration is building the infrastructure to do so.

We then move forward with a fully battled tested idea, and begin to form a plan for the short term in a series of execution oriented milestones and a long term view of what the business can be; with an eye towards building billion dollar plus outcomes that move the needle for the industry and for the country. And from there we incorporate the company, source an amazing founding CEO, management team, and key leaders to begin accelerating. Up until this point we have either bootstrapped or brought in a tight circle of funders who have backed ideas from this point on.

I myself partner directly with the CEO for several months through the incubation process and typically work with CEOs who have a substantial force of grit, deep industry knowledge or passion, and ideally have led or managed teams with a heart for the customer. These CEOs partner with an Inauguration team member and the research advisory boards to do the market testing required to get the company off the ground. These CEOs are whip smart, work insanely hard, bleed for their companies, can go deep on a technical product or engineering issue, but can also sit comfortably with enterprise customers and pitch their future vision of the industry and the company. Overtime we have developed a framework for evaluating best-in-class CEO and management talent that spans across industries and stages.

For the next 6-12 months, the Inauguration team and myself work in a deep partnership to recruit key executives and engineers using our vast network, get a product to market, validate its business readiness, obtain the first customers, position the company with the right customer segments and pricing, and scale distribution with key partners. We only work on 1-2 ideas at the same time at any given time and the entire team is bought into bringing this company into success.

In the earliest stages of a company, enterprise sales isn’t about hitting revenue targets - it’s about accelerating product and market discovery. That means the sales motion isn’t transactional; it’s exploratory. You need a tight, real-time feedback loop between what the sales team is hearing and what the product team is building. And because this motion is fundamentally different from traditional sales, few teams know how to run it well. But when done right, it becomes the foundation for true product-market fit. That means essentially going deep on product development, hiring, initial customer development, sales process, capital raising, market positioning, and commercial partnerships. As the companies gain traction and scale past product market fit we bring in outside growth capital partners to help scale the businesses to their next stage. Our broad network of talent and customers allows us to spin up networks extremely quickly and with high success, networks that continue to compound with each new company. As each company scales, we stay focused on people, customers, and products and bring winning organizational values into the company from the start.

In the case of Jericho we secured a major Air Force contract and scaled to several million dollars of ARR ($4M+) in the first year after product launch, creating real dual use opportunity with the likes of Carmax, Wingstop, and Bain. Vibranium Labs is also on a similar trajectory winning early contracts with Shutterstock, TIAA, and Capsule just months after incorporating. Nitra was a two year journey in obtaining regulatory licenses directly in all fifty states and scaling to over $1 billion in annualized payment volumes within 18 months after coming out of beta. In each case, I partnered directly with the CEO and scaled customer acquisition, capital raising, positioning, team building, and growth. I chair the board of every company with strong partnership with the founders and Inauguration staff supporting in key PR, IR, marketing, and product support. Because we only work on 1-2 ideas at any given time we maintain a laser focus on ground up incubations and maintain centralized decision making through active portfolio monitoring.

In each and every company we brought in an Advisory Board spanning the CEOs and CTOs of some of America’s largest companies from MGM, Walmart, TIAA, Intuit, and Square alongside key government officials from Cabinet Secretaries to Governors who provide market leading support and advice to companies. All of these companies benefit from common R&D economies of scale in Taiwan as a low cost engineering group where we employ dozens of engineers today. They all benefit from cross-company synergies as they get larger and more developed.

We are now building platform-wide capabilities – shared GTM playbooks, regulatory counsel, capital partnerships, and cross-portfolio technology – that allow our companies to scale faster and more efficiently than standalone startups. We shortcut time to market with key low cost engineering hubs in Taiwan and Seoul as well as leverage key go-to-market advisors at companies from Slack to OpenAI and specialized teams securing government and SBIR contracts. With a global footprint headquartered in the US, but with key strategic alliances in Korea, Japan, Singapore, and Europe Inauguration can bring to bear international resources to all of its companies as well. 2025 we are building a full network of platform, IR, PR, design, and go to market resources with key support for all companies.

Our vision is to have every single company be a stand alone entity by itself, fully independent after initial government and venture capital acceleration.

While Inauguration has only done ground up incubations today, we are now beginning to explore platforms for roll-ups and M&A and co-partnered incubations with other institutions if they can bring key distribution, capital, products, or customers to the table. In other words, partnering incubations with other funds, in other countries, and with other companies could afford the opportunity to replicate this model to support Western aligned countries and their desire for a similar industrial policy driven hybrid of venture capital and growth. We could partner with Middle Eastern countries to build similar company ecosystems or emerging market conglomerates of national champions to ground up incubate nationally important companies that solve critical problems and ride along key technology and government backed trends. We actually have already had conversations with the likes of EDB in Singapore and Mubadala in the UAE to this effect and as Inauguration scales can do so by building regional incubation teams with strategic partners, essentially acting as a non state actor to advance diplomatic opportunities to build up national champions. Similarly, identifying and acquiring traditional businesses that could benefit from the technology, partnership, and distribution of our companies could remain a focus as well. Back home in the US, closer partnerships with state and local governments could do the same thing in a nationally scalable approach.

In 2025 and 2026, Inauguration Group will raise three funds:

Flagship Incubation Fund: A $75M initial permanent capital vehicle and evergreen fund to initially “pre-fund” 7 new incubation concepts from scratch in a diverse range of companies and industries but aligned to the overall thesis of Inauguration and recycle exits into more and more incubations over time with a projected liquid cap of $500M - it would be unlikely that we’d be able to have the proper discipline to incubate companies beyond this (end of 2025)

The following funds will come once the flagship has proven its worth, functioning as quasi CVC vehicles to build off of the Inauguration ecosystem of companies:

Exploration Fund: A $25M vehicle to seed early ideas and partners within our ecosystem that can accelerate the growth of one of our companies (early 2026)

Growth Fund: A $200M growth vehicle to fund winners and additional growth capital in the Inauguration ecosystem of companies who can help accelerate portfolio companies with separate SPVs and co-invests for breakout winners. The target is to deploy $15-25m checks in non-control, downside protected securities with potential for equity upside by providing structured equity / high yield convertible bonds to high quality growth technology, technology-enabled and related growth companies globally. Focuses on transactions that may offer capital preservation and attractive upside potential via smart structuring in sectors that have significant secular growth potential. These deals will primarily be hybrid equity securities with low detach points (<30% of security/TEV), a contractual return expectation (minimum PIK return), and equity like participation (late 2026)

Buyout Automation Fund: A $500 million vehicle - targeting lower middle market ($75-200m) companies that are growing <30% but <70% to optimize R&D roadmaps, sales efficiency, and G&A expenses to drive consolidated M&A and exit into public markets or other strategics using automation, bringing them into the Inauguration ecosystem, and prioritization of resources

Inauguration International Equities: A $500 million vehicle leveraging the research and operational expertise of geopolitical trends to find public equities that benefit massively from government trends and actively facilitate government subsidies.

Inauguration has selective private credit vehicles for instance at Nitra, Midian, and Vibranium that can and will invest in speciality finance situations ranging from healthcare to data centers. We expect that these vehicles will lend out more than $1B+ in 2025.

In our flagship fund, Inauguration Group, LLC (our holding company that I own 100% of) and the Inauguration team holds common equity alongside the cofounding team of the company and LPs are able to participate in owning preferred equity at pre-set valuations of $4M (at $15M post) at market validation and team formation and within one year another $6M (at $40M post) crossing $1M+ of annualized revenues scaling to $10M of annualized revenues within 18 months after, deployed at predetermined milestones and valuations and are able to participate in the upside of each new company, owning up to 35%+ in preferred equity with standard terms of each incubated company. In this scenario, even one company scaling to above a normal Series C type outcome modeled to a $250M exit (typically $15-20M+ in ARR) would return the fund even if the entire remaining incubations were to fail. We expect however that given the deep amount of market preparation that 100% of companies will at least hit product market fit. This has been the case so far and our track record. This approach paired with a fund level shared services platform, government and commercial GTM, strong central IR, capital markets, and partner approach with CVCs should drive superior graduation rates for companies overall. We may selectively choose to raise capital at the holding company level at a later date with select value add partners.

Over time, we pursue scale outcomes but build with profitability and long-term cash flow in mind - enabling both traditional venture exits and strategic rollups with sovereign buyers, PE funds, or IPO pathways. After the first batch of companies begin to exit we will likely not accept additional outside capital and continue to recycle capital into new companies.

These funds are built off of the success we have seen so far in scaling over 8 different companies with a track record of success. If we had pursued a fund model from the beginning LPs would have returned over 3x into the fund as of our fourth year (Nitra alone would have returned the fund).

Long term, Inauguration Group (like IAC, Softbank, etc) will grow to build a dozen-plus core operating companies within its portfolio with a group of investors and LPs as partners. Each of these core operating companies will become platforms for future growth (Nitra in life sciences, Jericho in defense, Amber in electrification, etc.). Over the next decade, Inauguration aims to become the defining 21st century industrial group - combining the agility of a startup studio, the capital efficiency of a growth fund, and the long-term staying power of a modern conglomerate.

“It is proposed that the contemplated monument shall be […] unparalleled in the world, and commensurate with the gratitude, liberality, and patriotism of the people by whom it is to be erected….[It] should blend stupendousness with elegance, and be of such magnitude and beauty as to be an object of pride to the American people, and of admiration to all who see it”

— Dedication of the Washington Monument

The world is a complicated place and finding opportunities to invest at the cross-sections of change are even harder to predict. Doing so requires a tremendous amount of acumen in being able to not only understand macroeconomic concepts such as markets and trends but also the minutiae of individual personalities and dynamics of teams, execution ability, and down to individual lines of code and product features that serve increasingly segmented customers in every slice one could think of.

In this context, investing in Venture Capital in the 21st century requires a Tale of Two Cities. An investing team that is both sufficiently disciplined/well-researched and ambitious/audacious; An investing team that is well prepared to understand macro trends while understanding the micro dynamics of teams and product; An investing team that is comfortable conversing about the latest fine tuning methods in large language models and can simultaneously drill down into pricing and segmentation discussion around go-to-market.

Every several decades investors are presented with macro trends that drive outsized and excessive returns for investors. The confluence of capital, talent, and changing customer demand drives a differentiated S-curve where investors can “ride the wave” to soaringly high and generationally changing investment returns overall. Most of these trends can roughly be divided into geopolitical/social trends and technology oriented trends. Geopolitical trends involve mass dislocation as a result of some political movement that drive excessive returns: industrial manufacturing and residential post World War II in the United States, South Korean manufacturing and electronics in the 1980s, Chinese industrial production in the 1990s, most recently movements towards globalization in the global south post free trade agreements through the early 2000s, and massive investments into electric vehicles and semiconductors in the 2020s. A careful understanding of what’s driving these trends, the incentives associated with these trends, and market opportunities for new entrance to exploit government incentives, customer demand, and regulatory arbitrage present investors with opportunities that are unprecedented in nature.

Similarly, technological trends have followed similar super cycles for value creation. These movements tend to be more discrete in nature and punctuated by key underlying innovations that drive massive tectonic shifts that literally create entire mountains of value over night. These transition points from the mainframe to the personal computer to the Internet to the Cloud to mobile to AI present investors with tremendous opportunities of new entrance to exploit the simultaneous combination of massive technology innovation, capital infusion into the industry, sheer human talent and the brightest minds, and raw new sustainable customer demand in such a short amount of time that give new entrance just enough time to enter the market. At each points starting from hardware through protocols and infrastructure through applications we see massive opportunities for disruptive potential.

Today wide swaths of the enterprise still remain open to digitalization. There are over 1,000+ unicorns that have been created today with an unprecedented amount of wealth creation happening. This is perhaps the largest wealth creation event in history since the Gilded Era of the 19th Century. The technology industry now constitutes 45% of the market capitalization of public equities and every single one of those companies began as a startup.

It’s important here to understand however how to differentiate between false signs of super cycles as well. Inevitably, the oversupply of technology, capital, and talent into an industry RELATIVE TO sustainable customer demand and value is important to assess. In each technology super cycle going back to the invention of AC/DC currents and modern telecommunications to the Internet and Mobile today, industries have always overbuilt to the point of a bust and investors are left holding the bag on unsustainable companies. While timing the market is near impossible, having a rigorous understanding of true customer value (not “Ponzi like value” for instance in the cryptocurrency markets where the technology itself struggled to find true value for users) is extremely important to understand both the supply and demand dynamics.

In this global context, where do we stand today? Since World War II, the world has attempted to globalize. We collectively built institutions ranging from the United Nations, World Trade Organization, World Bank, IMF, the European Union, G20, etc to diffuse geopolitical tension and resolve conflict. The hope was that despite thousands of years of fighting as a human species we would be able to craft global institutions for the first time to resolve these conflicts and never again face the atrocities of the death of millions of lives to fight wars. As a result, governments have been prompted to create interoperable mechanisms to create similar regulations and create a more stable economic environment. Despite conflicts between the US and USSR and excursions in Vietnam and Korea among others, the world was relatively tame and allowed multinational corporations and financial institutions of increasing economic power to rise up for the first time in human history. These corporations have been able to ride seamlessly between this increasingly interoperable world and expand at an unprecedented rate riding each and every geopolitical and technological wave somewhat seamlessly.

This is, however, coming to an end. We are seeing for the first time a “me first” approach in governments and the general public. This is most evidenced in the United States in the rise of the “Make America Great Again” movements but similar movements in Brexit, the rise of the far right in countries ranging from Italy, to France, to Japan. In particular, the macro trend of globalization via free trade and technological innovation has resulted in an unprecedented level of income inequality where mass swaths of people feel that they are being left behind.

What does that mean for technology investors? We are presented with a technology situation for the first time that is becoming extremely fragmented. The internets of the EU, US, and China are increasingly looking very different due to changing privacy standards as an example. We are seeing the balkanization of data centers and repatriated information security standards that countries are extremely protective about. We are seeing countries hoard technologies ranging from semiconductors, to EV production, to core artificial intelligence. We are seeing an unprecedented branding and talent war as countries try to advance their economic agendas.

The biggest of these shifts is between the United States and China and the decoupling of the countries moving from a bipolar world to a multipolar world with technology wars at the forefront. While tenuous at best, investors in both countries until the 2020s have seen relative success in each other’s markets, collectively accounting for 1/3 of global GDP. Despite the decoupling, demand for goods and services are unlikely to change and the decoupling of these countries however is presenting opportunities for investors to identify the beneficiaries here of these rerouted economic inflows and outflows. Who are those winners? Battery manufacturers in South Korea that are scooping up the business of now banned Chinese batteries. Medical device manufacturers in Vietnam who can certify and get FDA approval in the United States. AI companies in Japan or Singapore who can tap into their expertise in the Asian markets and simultaneously service Western and Asian insights and intelligence and are less restricted in processing global information. Venture capital investors would be wise to identify companies that fall into these trends and win big from the fallout between the United States and China.

The entire American Indopacific strategy of the 21st century has been steadily building up to isolating China from key critical partners and boosting the economic independence of neighboring regions. In a technology driven world, this will only become more important in the context of building nationally resilient startups and innovators at the bounds of AI, security, bio, energy and beyond.

The team at Inauguration are uniquely positioned to identify, exploit, and win these opportunities having collectively raised over half a billion dollars in investor capital and deployed them into market leading enterprise businesses while simultaneously cultivating networks in the Korean and American markets. They are able to simultaneously and seamlessly move between the Korean and American markets from major global Fortune 2000 businesses to emerging startups with relative ease and have access to differentiated deal flow even before the market is aware of them given their stature in the market. Simultaneously, given their success in the American markets, having a track record of success in building and spotting opportunities, allocating investor capital into emerging products and markets, and driving great outcomes for investors. This is macro meets micro with strong founder market fit and a differentiated approach, strategy, and value add thesis that should yield outsized returns for investors.