Eva Ados, ERShares

Eva Ados did something this year that fund companies almost never do in public. The week before an IPO event, her firm closed the door on more than a billion dollars of incoming money and put a 2 percent fee on large institutional creation orders. Turning away flow is turning away revenue. She did it anyway, because the money showing up that week was there to take the gain and leave, and the people who would have paid for it were the retail shareholders who had been holding the whole time.

Eva is Partner, Chief Operating Officer, and Chief Investment Strategist at ERShares. She joined me on Behind the Ticker to walk through that call and the structure that made it possible.

The VC Lens

ERShares was built on research by founder Dr. Joel Schulman, a tenured professor who spent decades studying how venture capitalists pick winners and then tried to run that process on public companies. The result is an 18 attribute framework the firm calls the entrepreneur factor. Some of it is quantitative. A lot of it is not. Leadership, culture, competitive position, all converted into numbers. Schulman used it to buy Nvidia in 2005, when it was a five dollar stock making chips for car cameras, and got into most of what later became the Magnificent Seven early.

That premise is the entire firm. By the time a company is a household name, most of the value creation already happened. Find them before that.

The Problem That Created the Fund

Run a VC screen on public markets long enough and you walk into an uncomfortable fact. The value is not in public markets anymore, or at least not as much of it. Companies stay private far longer than they used to, and if you are not accredited you cannot touch any of it. Eva's point is that the existing workarounds do not really solve this for a normal investor. Closed end funds, interval funds, high minimums, lockups, shares that do not trade near NAV. None of that works for someone putting in a few hundred dollars.

XOVR was the answer. Roughly 85 percent public equities following the firm's entrepreneur index, and a sleeve of private company holdings alongside it. Today that sleeve is SpaceX and Rocket Lab, and the team is actively hunting the next one.

The Plumbing Nobody Asks About

I have launched ETFs and never had to think about most of what Eva described. She was candid that none of it was planned. Each piece came out of a problem.

The first version used an SPV that charged real fees and was not especially transparent, so they moved to a zero zero structure with no management fee and no carry. That change did more than cut cost. It let them reprice the private position quickly and repeatedly. Then conviction on the private side outgrew the standard 15 percent illiquidity cap, so they built a board approved liquidity arrangement to go past it safely.

The shareholder protection plan came last, and it came from getting burned. In January, arbitrage money came in right before a repricing and diluted existing holders. Eva was direct about it. They were not expecting it. What they built afterward is what they reached for the next time large flow showed up: reprice often, close the door when the money is opportunistic, and make the institutional creation order expensive enough that the trade stops being worth doing.

What She Is Watching in AI

Eva also has a clean way to separate companies actually monetizing AI from companies that just talk about it. Her tell is revenue per employee. Nvidia sits around 5.5 million per employee. The S&P 500 average is roughly 650,000. That is close to ten times. Astera Labs, which the firm owned before it joined the Nasdaq 100, runs near 6 million.

With hyperscaler capital spending going from roughly 410 billion in 2025 toward 700 to 750 billion this year, the obvious question is where the return on all that shows up. Her answer was the most useful line in the conversation. Not in an index. Some companies capture that spend on the front end, some on the back end, and most do not capture it at all. Buying the theme buys you all three.

Worth a listen, especially the part about turning down the billion. Ask yourself how many managers would.