Hello there,
Welcome to the best of the Altea Community.
Let’s go 🚀
Table of Contents
👋 New Members
Welcome to the 19 new members this week 👋
A few notable members..
🗃️ Jeff Talbert is the founder of Silo, building an institutional-grade vaulting and custody layer for physical collectibles, starting with factory-sealed trading-card cases.
The model treats sealed cases as fungible and keeps chain-of-custody clean without Silo ever taking ownership, aiming to be an institutional capital on-ramp for the category.
🇦🇺 Chez Spigelman leads go-to-market at Melodial, a Melbourne AI background-music startup, and has been reading Alts since the Substack days.
He jumped straight into the deep end with a first post arguing the real risks to music royalties are one-off settlement checks and a shrinking sync business, not AI cannibalizing streams.
🤖 New Space: AI-Managed Finance
The crazy folks letting AI manage their investments have outgrown the WhatsApp group.
Good stuff was getting buried and anyone new had zero context. So we moved it to Circle.
The space is for people actually building and running AI agents in their portfolios, and those who want to try.
Discussions are around agent prompts and configs, broker integrations (Public, Composer, Autopilot, custom builds), backtests, and troubleshooting when something breaks.
Two house rules:
- Share real results, not marketing
- If you post a strategy, say what the drawdowns looked like.
There’s already a starter post + resource roundup to get newcomers up to speed.
💬 New Discussions
Can you actually watermark AI writing?
Anthropic’s plan to watermark Claude’s text output led to a debate over how a statistical “fingerprint” might work, and whether a simple rewrite by another model defeats the whole thing.
“I’ll be interested if they monetize identifying watermarked text. It’s a nice business model. Basically selling a key to a lock you created.”
What happened to Canada?
Canada and the US were the same GDP-per-capita path until ~2015, then they diverged.
A discussion ensued over the causes: immigration-driven population growth, a commodity-price collapse, and the “international dollar” distortion baked into the data.
Brian Flaherty broke down the mechanics; Tigran K added a twist:
“The strange thing about Canadian oil is that almost all of it is sold to the U.S. and the majority of profits go to U.S. companies. I think only 30% of profits go to Canadian owners.”
⛩️ Whisky I: Our cask is official (distillery reveal coming)
The first proof of ownership just landed for Whisky I: Kiyokawa’s Iiyama Mountain Farm Distillery has issued a Certificate of Ownership for cask ML036
The selected Marsala cask is now registered and maturing nicely in the distillery’s warehouses high in the Japanese Alps.
As for the bottles themselves: the first bottling is taking a little longer than planned thanks to the Strait of Hormuz fiasco. So we’ve decided to turn the botting event turning something special.
Rather than a standard release, we’re planning to unveil and taste the very first physical bottles live at the Kiyokawa distillery while we’re all there for the October investor trip!
🔍 New Due Diligence
World Tree: Eco-Tree Program 2026
After a request for a four-point DD list at the World Tree Eco-Tree deal, sponsor Tom Rocco came back with a breakdown in this thread.
- Cohort-by-cohort tree survival rates (from 9% in the 2016 vintage up to 92% in 2023)
- Farmer-compliance numbers
- Realized-yield caveats
“Blended across all vintages, including a discontinued predecessor program and departed farms, survival is 51.5%.”
🥂 Altea Events
🦞 Boston: 4 new spots just opened (Sep 14)
Good news for our first-ever Boston meetup — we’ve booked a restaurant with more room,
We’ll be at Mamma Maria in the North End (an upscale Northern Italian spot known for seasonal regional dishes), in the Terrace Room, which holds up to 16.
We’ve got 12 RSVPs so far, and this place is bigger. So 4 more spots are now open.
- Date: Monday, September 14, 2026
- Time: 6:00–9:00pm
- Location: Mamma Maria, North End
- Price: Free for Altea Paid members · $50 for everyone else (includes all food & drinks)
- NEW CAPACITY: 16 ppl
12 SPOTS TAKEN | 4 SPOTS LEFT
🎬 Altea Film Night: Private Screening in Williamsburg (Sep 15)
On Sep 15, we’re taking over Nitehawk cinema in Williamsburg for a private film screening, drinks, and dinner.
I’ll be there along with Stefan and Chris Daniels from Launch Film Finance.
We’ll watch an actual film that Launch has funded:The Dutchman (2026) featuring Kata Mara and Andre Holland.
📍 Details
- Date: Tuesday, September 15, 2026
- Time: 4:30pm – 9:00pm ET
- Location: Nitehawk Cinema Williamsburg, 136 Metropolitan Ave, Brooklyn
- Capacity: Space is capped at 32
- Price: Free for Altea Paid members. $99 for everyone else. Includes film + all food and drinks.
20 SPOTS TAKEN | 12 SPOTS LEFT
🎬 LA Event: Creative Financing in the Creator Economy (Oct 6)
Creators are building real businesses now, with real revenue, real audiences, and predictable revenue streams.
And a whole new private financing layer is emerging to fund them: advances, revenue-share deals, credit lines, catalog loans, film gap financing.
We’re bringing some of the most active lenders and investors in the creator economy:
📍 Details
- Date: Tuesday, October 6, 2026
- Time: Late afternoon into the evening (exact timing to come)
- Location: Los Angeles — venue being finalized (exact address to confirmed guests)
- Price: Free for paying Altea members (use code ALTEA), $50 for guests and everyone else. Includes catered food & drinks.
- Capacity: 20 people max
18 SPOTS TAKEN | 2 SPOTS LEFT
If you’re in LA and interested in creator economy financing and investing, you don’t want to miss this.
⚠️ Heads-up: unfamiliar outreach
We’ve been getting reports from members someone has been impersonating Stefan on WhatsApp.
(Does that mean we’ve arrived? Hooray! Ugh.)
Anyways, the guy is using a Business Account, which is an immediate red flag. Stefan uses a personal account.
Also, another member was cold-contacted about a tequila “investment” by a firm no one here recognized.
Just a good reminder to vet unfamiliar outreach carefully before engaging. If something seems weird, it probably is.
🙏 Asks & Offers
Who knows the sports-memorabilia market?
Adriana Crovetto islooking to understand better the market of sport memorabilia and collectibles and would love to understand better this market trends and the best platforms to find interesting scarce assets in this space. Let her know if you’d be open to exchanging notes!
🤝 New Public Deal
🔋 Sphere Power: de-risked battery storage
Long-time reader Shidan Gouran shared his own venture, Sphere Power, in the deals space.
They pre-develop 5 MW battery-storage (BESS) sites on underused commercial land.
- Secure long term ground leases, typically 25 to 30 years
- Then advance each project through site control, interconnection, permitting, and Notice to Proceed (NTP).
- Once fully permitted and de-risked, they sell the projects to experienced developers who construct, own, and operate them.
- Each system charges during off peak periods and discharges during peak demand
The founders carry the résumé: the CEO previously co-founded a billion-dollar-volume quant trading firm and Viridian Spirits, and the chairman co-founded and took GameSquare Esports public on Nasdaq.
This is a member’s own early-stage venture, shared by its founder. It is not an Altea SPV or a vetted third-party offering.
⛩️ Japan trip: Standard pricing ends today
Today is the last day of standard pricing.
Tomorrow it moves to Final Call ($4,499) tomorrow.
Three nights in Tokyo and one night up at Kiyokawa Distillery in the Nagano highlands, where our Whisky I casks are aging right now.
A few of the things packed into the five days:
- 🤼 A live sumo match — you can actually step into the ring with a pro
- 🌳 A full Bonsai Day led by community member Hayato Takahashi at Tokyo’s Shunkaen Bonsai Museum
- 📈 Deep-value Japanese small-cap activism with Jamie Halse & Toby Umezaki (Senjin Capital), plus Terrie Lloyd on Japan’s nine million vacant homes
- 🐒 The snow monkeys of Jigokudani
Everything’s covered except your flight. Four nights of hotels, all meals and drinks, all in-country transport (including the shinkansen up to Nagano), and every activity and speaker session.
Pricing:
- Standard (ends today): $3,999
- Final Call (Sept 1+): $4,499
- Bring a guest +$2,999
📖 Last but not least: The Alts story
Ever wondered how we got here?
We just published a new About Us page, which our story laid out on a nice timeline, from the early days to Altea today. Have a look.
That’s it for today!
See you next week, Wyatt & Stefan
