Pershing Square’s Venture Fund: A Pre-Industrial Relic in a Post-Blockchain World

Bill Ackman is launching a venture fund. The structure is evergreen. The initial portfolio comes from his family office. The pitch is a letter to limited partners. No smart contracts. No on-chain governance. No transparency beyond what the SEC demands. In a world where DeFi has proven that capital can be deployed programmatically, this feels like a step backward. Math doesn’t care about your brand. It cares about verifiable execution. Pershing Square Ventures has none. Context: The fund is called Pershing Square Ventures Ltd. The “Ltd.” structure hints at an offshore jurisdiction—likely Cayman or Bermuda. The evergreen design means it never has to liquidate. It can hold post-IPO shares indefinitely. The initial portfolio includes several private companies already backed by Ackman’s family office. The fund is a direct competitor to growth-stage VCs like Sequoia Growth, Coatue, and Tiger Global. But it’s also a test of whether traditional finance can adapt to a world where code is law. Core: The business model is straightforward—two-layer fees: management fee on AUM plus carried interest. The evergreen structure turns management fees into a near-perpetual annuity. That’s a financial innovation, not a technological one. The real question is how this fund handles information asymmetry. Ackman’s track record in public markets is built on activist campaigns and detailed research. But venture capital requires a different kind of diligence: technical due diligence, code audits, and understanding protocol-level risks. Pershing Square has no disclosed team for this. The fund’s competitive advantage is Ackman’s brand—startups might accept lower valuations just to get his name on their cap table. That’s a fragile moat. Smart contracts execute. They don’t negotiate. If a startup’s smart contract has a bug, Ackman’s name won’t save it. I’ve spent years auditing zero-knowledge proofs and reverse-engineering DeFi liquidation engines. When I analyzed Aave V2’s liquidationCall function, I found a vector that could drain liquidity pools via flash loans. The fix required a code change. No amount of brand equity could have prevented the exploit. Pershing Square’s fund is a black box. LPs will never see the code underlying the startups they back unless the startups themselves are transparent. But the fund’s structure itself is opaque. The transfer of family office assets into the fund creates a classic conflict of interest. The valuation of those assets is not on-chain. The terms are not in a smart contract. They are in a private agreement. Community governance is messy, but it’s more resilient than a single point of failure. Here, the single point is Ackman. Contrarian: Some will argue that this fund is more efficient than a crypto-native alternative. No gas fees. No smart contract audits. No governance token drama. Just a GP making decisions. In a bear market, that speed might seem attractive. But liquidity is an illusion until it’s on-chain. The FTX collapse taught us that off-chain complexity is a systemic risk. FTX had a balance sheet, audits, and a brand. It also had a backdoor in its accounting. Pershing Square’s fund has no on-chain record of its assets or liabilities. The evergreen structure means it can hold illiquid private positions for years. What happens when LPs want to redeem? There is no smart contract to enforce redemption rules. There is only the GP’s discretion. That worked for traditional venture for decades. But the crypto market has shown that trust must be verifiable, not assumed. Takeaway: Pershing Square Ventures will likely raise capital because Ackman’s brand still carries weight. But the fund’s lack of technological innovation will be exposed when the next bull market brings on-chain competition. The question is not whether they can raise funds, but whether they can survive the next market downturn without the transparency that on-chain funds provide. When the music stops, LPs will want to see code. They will want to audit the fund itself. And Pershing Square will have nothing to show.