Running a fund with friends

Nobody sets out to run a fund alone. The first thing most people do after taking a seat is show somebody. What follows is how that actually goes, and the two shapes it settles into.

The table

One person opens the fund. They hold the wallet and the keys, which is what the Chairman seat means, and they answer for it the way an Emissary answers for whoever they let in. Friends send USDC to that wallet and the fund gets bigger. Everyone reads the same morning memo and argues about the same market.

This is the version groups reach for first, because there is nothing to set up. It is one fund that happens to have four people looking at it. The CEO does not treat you as one person: ask it something and it answers you, and when two of you want opposite things it says so instead of picking a side.

What makes it work is that the argument happens before the position. You agree the mandate together, and after that the rules do the arbitrating.

The group

The other shape is a fund each. Your own CEO, your own rules, your own wallet. What gets shared is everything except the money: a mandate that turned out well, a category your CEO reads badly, a market one of you spotted early.

It takes longer to get going and it lasts much longer, because nobody is waiting on anybody. And your funds sit side by side on the floor, ranked on what they made rather than how much they traded, which tends to sharpen the conversation considerably.

Groups usually arrive here from the table. Somebody gets tired of asking, takes their own seat, and within a month everyone has one.

Who holds what

Worth being blunt about, because it is the part people skip. A non-custodial wallet has one set of keys. In a shared fund, the Chairman holds them. If you put USDC into someone else's fund you are relying on them, and neither Opusfund nor anyone else can get it back for you, because it was never ours to hold.

That is not a flaw in the design, it is the design. The same property that stops us touching your money stops us retrieving it. If that arrangement sits badly with your group, run a fund each instead. Same conversation, nobody holding anybody's capital.

What friends actually argue about

Not the trades. The reasoning.

The useful disagreements are about the mandate: how much any one call can risk, which categories are off the table, how sure the CEO has to be before it commits. Two friends will disagree about whether to touch soccer markets at all, and that argument is worth more than either default.

After that it is the memos. Somebody screenshots the morning memo into the group chat because the CEO said something sharp, or wrong, or both. Two CEOs reading the same market differently is a better conversation than either of them alone, and it is where most people actually learn how a price works as a probability.

Starting one

Access is by invitation code, so it begins with one person getting in. After that they can bring others to the table, or hand out codes so everyone takes their own seat.

If you are choosing, start at the table. It costs nothing to try, the whole group sees what a CEO actually does within a day, and the ones who want their own fund will say so quickly enough.