Radhika Iyengar and Jorden Woods had tire kicked the idea of starting a venture fund for the better part of the last decade.
Finally, in 2025, they were ready. They had the name: StarChain Ventures. They got accepted to VC Lab. They knew exactly what their thesis would be. They knew some of the early limited partners they would reach out to first. Most importantly: There were a handful of very hot deals they were eager to invest in, and they were lucky enough to have access, thanks to decades of working in their field.
One of those things was a “good problem to have.”
Access to several hot new deals.
You wouldn’t expect that would be a negative for a new venture capital fund. But these deals were closing fast, and if they couldn’t pull the trigger quickly, they were going to lose out. And these deals were so core to their thesis, with such rockstar founders, if they missed out, they’d miss out on a great opportunity to position their fund to future investors.
“We were under a lot of pressure,” Jorden says. “We knew it was going to take three, six, nine months just to get the funds set up, and then bank accounts and all of that. We needed a way to do this in two months if we were going to get into these deals.”
Emerging managers going through VC Lab move quickly, but “quick” means roughly six months to a first close. That was going to be too slow for Radhika and Jorden.
“We had this pipeline of very curated high quality deals we knew we could get into,” Jorden says. “But if we missed them, our pipeline would be almost empty.”
Fortunately, Decile Group came up with Start Fund in 2025.
Start Fund allows emerging managers to shortcut the time and cost to form an institutional grade venture capital fund dramatically. The administrative costs are reduced from as much as $100,000 to zero, and the time to start investing is as long as it takes you to raise $100,000. It can be weeks, not six months. The barrier of entry is raising low six figures, not $1 million before you start writing checks.
It was exactly what they needed for their unique situation.
Particularly because they were hearing a lot of frustrations from limited partners who had invested in emerging managers for years and not gotten any liquidity back. Radhika and Jorden wanted to focus on high-conviction deals that were likely to have near-term liquidity or quick mark ups in valuations with battle-tested founders to build a quick track record and set themselves apart with some quick wins for LPs.
“We had the challenge of: If we missed these deals, what would we invest in?” Radhika says. “But if we did invest in them, we would have a lot of momentum. And fund one is all about building the track record. We want highly performing deals. Start Fund was the only thing that would work.”
Even still, it was such a novel way to structure a fund, it sounded almost too good to be true. They did several weeks of due diligence on the concept of the Start Fund, circulating the documents with their network of experts in the venture world. Was there a downside they were missing?
“Everyone we talked to in Silicon Valley was like, ‘I’ve never heard of anything like this,’” they said. “But everyone came back with the conclusion that it sounded like the best solution to our problem.”