S2G Summit: Financing Reality — Past, Present, and Future

We just wrapped up our ninth annual S2G Summit and are once again grateful for the chance to bring this community together. This year’s event brought roughly 550 people into one room, our largest gathering yet, and a humbling reminder of how much this community has grown since our first 64-person Summit in 2016. Every year, we are reminded of what happens when investors, founders, operators, and innovators from across sectors sit in the same room. The conversations and cross-pollination of ideas and perspectives are where much of the real work begins.

The central question of this year’s Summit was ​‘what does it take to build the markets, companies, and capital structures the moment demands?’ Sanjeev Krishnan set the framing for the day’s firesides, and the sessions that followed, spanning biotech, derivatives markets, AI infrastructure, royalty finance, and regenerative agriculture, expanded on that question from multiple angles.

Sanjeev’s opening thesis was that the gap between where economic value is forming and where investment capital is flowing is widening, and that gap is where opportunity lies. For the first time since the 1970s, five massive forces are converging to reshape the foundations of economic growth: the shift to AI as both a computational and physical revolution, a move from a unipolar to a multipolar world, uncertainty around the price of money, 2.5 degrees of warming, and an aging global population. These are not temporary disruptions to be waited out. They are the new conditions, and they will define which businesses and investment strategies succeed over the next thirty years.

The core message was that constraints, properly understood, become design features for those willing to build around them. The winners in this moment will not be the sharpest analysts of what already exists, but the ones creating the structures, vehicles, and companies that these new conditions demand. This reset, Sanjeev argued, will favor the physical, the durable, and the resilient. The rest of the day brought that thesis into focus through the people already creating the markets, structures, and businesses these conditions demand.

You can read more about Sanjeev’s Financing Reality thesis in his latest report.

Building Markets That Scale

To kick off the day’s programming, Don Wilson, Founder and Chief Executive Officer at DRW Holdings LLC, spoke with Sanjeev about how some of the biggest opportunities in finance are not found in existing markets but created in the gaps where risk is real, poorly understood, and no one has yet built the tools to manage it. Over the past 30 years, he has applied that logic across Eurodollar options, interest rate swap futures, and crypto infrastructure. In each case, he understood the probability distribution of outcomes, determined what fair value actually is, and built the liquidity and standardization that enable a market to function at scale. 

His current conviction is that compute is the next great commodity, and that the ecosystem is in the same early, inefficient state he has seen before. People are spending on an enormous scale with limited ability to hedge their exposure and no shared framework for what things should cost. Two companies he founded two years ago are working to change that. Compute Exchange is a spot market that brings price transparency and competition to how organizations buy compute. Silicon Data has built the most comprehensive dataset on compute pricing and constructed indices on top of it. The day before our Summit, CME announced that it had licensed those indices to launch compute futures later this year, structured like electricity contracts. The plumbing for a real risk-management market in compute is being built right now. His broader message was that new markets always start fragmented and illiquid, and the returns go to those willing to do the structural work of building liquidity, standardization, and price discovery before anyone else sees the need.

Building Biotech

Keith Crandell, Managing Director and Co-founder at ARCH Venture Partners, spoke with S2G’s Aaron Rudberg about the origins of his firm and the principles that have kept it going through decades of biotech’s boom-and-bust cycles. The insight that proved decisive early on was that licensing without capital has no leverage. Starting with an anchor commitment from the University of Chicago, they raised their first fund, built an initial portfolio, took four companies public, sold four companies, and wrote off four, eventually making an amicable separation from the university to become independent. What they built over decades is a model that has proven durable across multiple market cycles.

Capital, in Keith’s view, is a ladder. In strong markets, public investors move down the risk curve to get earlier access, and when that ladder collapses, you need alternatives, including non-dilutive government and non-profit funding, which ARCH portfolio companies have drawn on to the tune of over a billion dollars across ten years. The syndicate you start with is largely the one you finish with, which makes construction matter enormously, especially at the frontier of new science, where a failed experiment is not always a failed company. And science is global by default, which makes the business global by necessity. The same invention tends to happen in a dozen places at once, and the goal is to consolidate the intellectual property and expertise. The model has produced multiple generational outcomes, including the recent sale of Metsera to Pfizer for more than $10 billion, on which ARCH publicly reported clearing over $2 billion.

Riches in the Niches

Paul Lisiak, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer at Metropolitan Partners Group, sat down with Sanjeev to discuss how to find opportunities in parts of the market that larger investors often overlook. Metropolitan operates as a non-sponsored lender, typically the only institutional capital in a deal, doing the hard work of sourcing, underwriting, and monitoring investments that most firms consider too small or too complex to bother with. Paul traced his path through royalties as a case study of that approach. The metaphor he returned to throughout the discussion was ​“fishing holes.” Every niche the firm has entered, from merchant cash advance to mobile gaming to non-vocal music royalties, began as an underfished pond and eventually became crowded as more capital entered the space. Each time a niche or ​“fishing hole” attracted too much capital and returns compressed, they moved on in search of the next opportunity. His firm uses management fees to run the business rather than to generate profit, which keeps them disciplined about doing work that others will not.

The conversation then zoomed out to what Paul’s ground-level investing is telling him about the broader economy. He sees the U.S. as an E‑shaped economy with upper, middle, and working classes each living in fundamentally different financial realities. His portfolio data on consumer debt suggests that the middle class is under more strain than most realize. This shapes his decision-making about where he invests. He is actively looking at housing affordability, healthcare tied to social determinants, workforce retraining, and even a bowling alley roll-up as ways to find durable cash flows in a challenging environment. His outlook is that investors willing to do the work of understanding each part of the E will find the greatest opportunities.

The Infrastructure of Intelligent Markets

Jason Warner, Co-Founder and CEO of Poolside, spoke with S2G’s Chuck Templeton about how AI is reshaping the foundations of economic value creation. Jason highlighted that, for the first time in history, economic output is being divorced from human labor at scale. We are building systems that produce the functional equivalent of human work, and in his view, the critical infrastructure that matters over the next ten years is the three layers this runs on: power, chips, and intelligence. 

According to Jason, when it comes to data, the content doesn’t matter as much as the context. In other words, a proprietary dataset is not as defensible as one that has captured an organization’s decision-making processes and recorded which choices led to which outcomes. Jason also spoke about how Poolside operates as two separate companies because the capital requirements and pricing logic for data center infrastructure and for tokens are fundamentally different. Tokens, in his view, are likely to become the most valuable asset on the planet. In his framing, only a fraction of companies on the bits side of the economy will matter at terminal value over the next decade. Jason’s parting advice for founders was blunt. Stop asking how AI can unlock your existing systems. Start asking what your organization does uniquely, and how to protect it.

The Concrete and Clay of Beta

The closing conversation brought together three investors working at the intersection of natural systems, agriculture, and systems-level capital. Howard Buffett, Professor, Board Director, and Author, described what he considers one of the most disruptive technologies he has encountered in agriculture. It’s a nature-based platform that asks farmers to commit to a decade of soil health improvement and reduced fertilizer dependence, then measures and verifies outcomes at the field level. That data gets converted into credible sustainability assets, and fit-for-purpose capital is pooled to de-risk the transition, with corporate buyers on the other end willing to pay for verified results.

Lukas Walton, Executive Chairman and Founder of Builders Vision, pointed to S2G portfolio company Clear Frontier as an example of how systems investing works in practice. Organic demand was outpacing acreage, but the obstacles farmers faced in transitioning were preventing supply from catching up. Standard farmland leases ran one year. The organic certification window ran three. The math did not work. The opportunity was visible, but capturing it required understanding the full system. He also spoke about how the tax-advantaged nature of philanthropic capital lets it go places commercial capital cannot, and when deployed well, it answers broader public-good questions that unlock the opportunity for everyone else. 

Geoff Davis, multi-time founder and CEO, impact investor, and advisor, brought the conversation back to portfolio construction, drawing on his work scaling microfinance from a philanthropic curiosity into a multi-billion-dollar commercial asset class. He argued that thinking about a portfolio as a systems design exercise means identifying the real leverage points, matching the right type of capital to each, and staying honest about the larger outcome you are actually trying to achieve. 

All three agreed on the animating challenge. Externalities hidden off-balance-sheet for decades are beginning to land on balance sheets, and the investors who can anticipate second- and third-order consequences will define the next generation of returns.

Building Into the Moment

Day one made clear that the next reset is already underway, and the people building the capital and market structures for it are already at work. Across sectors and disciplines, the conversations throughout the day reflected a shared recognition that many of the systems shaping the next era of growth are still being built, and that the gap between where value is emerging and where capital is flowing remains one of the defining opportunities of this moment.

We are grateful to everyone who brought their ideas, creativity, curiosity, and openness into the room, and we look forward to continuing these conversations today, tomorrow, and in the years ahead. 

Sanjeev closed day one holding the cap of a Just Ice Tea bottle, one of our portfolio companies founded by Seth Goldman. Printed inside was the phrase: ​“life is not anything but an opportunity for something.” It felt like the right note to end on, not just for the day, but for the moment we are all building into.

Photo credit: Dietz Studio