Velaris Investment Partners

Every position we hold had to survive a room of people trying to talk us out of it.

Velaris started as an objection to how most student funds actually work. Someone pitches, the room nods, the position goes on, and nobody ever writes down what would have to be true for it to work out.

So here a position begins as a document — the business, the numbers, the valuation, and the part almost everyone skips: a straight account of what would make the whole thing wrong. It is presented to the chapter and taken apart. The analyst who wrote it answers the questions. Nothing goes in the book because the story was good.

What survives gets sized and tracked against its own thesis. What doesn’t survive gets written up anyway. A portfolio teaches you far less than an honest record of what you got wrong, and when.

We run this at Columbia, Cornell, Penn and SMU — independently, and then against each other. Some of those chapters are still in their first semester, and we would rather say so plainly than dress it up. What we can promise is the process, and that anyone who finishes a year here can build a model, write a thesis, and defend it in front of a room that would rather they couldn’t.