Turning Expiring Options Into Venture Exposure [Vested’s Dave Thornton] | #597

The Meb Faber Show - Better Investing

The Idea Farm

Management, Investing, Business

4.8 • 978 Ratings

🗓️ 12 September 2025

⏱️ 41 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Today’s guest is Dave Thornton, co-founder & Chief Customer Officer of Vested, which helps startup employees unlock the value in their equity. In today’s episode, Dave walks through the messy reality of startup stock options, noting $600 billion of startup equity is abandoned over a market cycle. He explains how Vested helps solve this problem by providing funding to help employees exercise their expiring stock options, in exchange for exposure to a portion of the now-owned shares. Dave also previews Vestimate, a tool to track the fair-market value of your equity over time that’s already reducing abandonment, and shares practical takeaways for employees, advisors, and allocators seeking exposure to venture capital. (0:00) Starts (0:34) Dave Thornton explains Vested (9:35) Vested's selection model, data sources, and proprietary insights (17:22) Vested's investment strategy and funds (21:19) Trends in IPOs (23:13) Venture exposure (26:18) Introducing the Vestimate (31:12) Future goals for Vested (37:38) Final remarks ----- Follow Meb on X, LinkedIn and YouTube For detailed show notes, click here To learn more about our funds and follow us, subscribe to our mailing list or visit us at cambriainvestments.com ----- Follow The Idea Farm: X | LinkedIn | Instagram | TikTok ----- Interested in sponsoring the show? Email us at Feedback@TheMebFaberShow.com ----- Past guests include Ed Thorp, Richard Thaler, Jeremy Grantham, Joel Greenblatt, Campbell Harvey, Ivy Zelman, Kathryn Kaminski, Jason Calacanis, Whitney Baker, Aswath Damodaran, Howard Marks, Tom Barton, and many more. ----- Meb's invested in some awesome startups that have passed along discounts to our listeners. Check them out here! -----Editing and post-production work for this episode was provided by The Podcast Consultant (https://thepodcastconsultant.com). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Medfavor show, where the focus is on helping you grow and preserve your wealth.
0:10.9	Join us as we discuss the craft of investing and uncover new and profitable ideas, all to help you grow wealthier and wiser.
0:16.9	Better investing starts here.
0:19.5	Metfabor is the co-founder and chief investment officer at Cambria Investment Management.
0:22.5	Did it industry regulations, he will not discuss any of Cambria's funds on this podcast.
0:25.8	All opinions expressed by podcast participants are solely their own opinions and do not reflect
0:28.9	the opinion of Cambria Investment Management or its affiliates.
0:31.2	For more information, visit cambriainvestments.com.
0:34.7	If you were interested in participating in a 351 ETF exchange, you can find more information at
0:40.9	Cambriafunds.com forward slash 351, or you can email us for more info at 351 at cambriainvestments.com.
0:53.2	Cambria funds are distributed by Alps Distributors, Inc. Investing involves risk, including possible loss of capital. Welcome back, everybody. Summer's over. Get back to work. Today, we're joined by Dave Thornton, co-founder and chief customer officer vested, which helps startup employees unlock the value in their equity. You can go back to episode 447 to hear Dave's first appearance on the show
1:13.0	almost three years ago. Dave, welcome back. Good to be back and that's crazy that it's been three
1:17.6	years. First, let's remind people what vested is because you're a bit unique. There's not a lot of
1:23.7	ideas and strategies out there like what you guys are doing. So maybe explain it first from
1:28.6	the employee side and then the investor side and then we'll dig in.
1:31.8	Notice a handful of years ago when we were serving startup employees with educational
1:37.6	content around their equity that the very long tail of rank and file startup employees tended to not have the money that they needed
1:46.5	to exercise their expiring stock options, usually after they had left a company to go wherever
1:52.3	they're going next to Google and other startup, back to business school, et cetera. And although
1:58.0	the folks that needed a lot of money were well served, the folks that needed
2:00.9	50 grand a pop were completely ignored by the market.
2:03.6	So what we do for the rank and file employees of VC-backed startups is we provide capital
	...

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