Miko Matsumura, a venture capitalist who built neural networks at Yale in 1990 explains why a 5x return is life-changing for a founder but a rounding error for a VC fund. Miko is a Managing Partner at gumi Cryptos Capital ($130M+ AUM, 8 unicorn-scale outcomes) and joins host Ron Schmelzer on the Exponential Scale podcast to expose the structural misalignment between entrepreneurs and venture capital, and why small teams may not need VC at all.

Miko raised $50M+ as a founder before deploying $130M+ as a VC. He and Ron (who worked together during the ZapThink/SOA days) dig into whether single-founder companies are fundable, why the VC model demands 1000x+ returns that make 5x founders irrelevant, and how the Japanese keiretsu model of equity-swapped federations could become the new deal structure for AI-era companies.

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