Nicholas
von Bodungen
California
pentamerus
Born in
Washington DC.
Biography
I’ve been visually creative all my life. Cameras came early and never left, and long before I knew the vocabulary I was already thinking in shots, cuts, and the way a story lands on screen. Those years are what led me to the creative role I have now at Whim.
The other half has always been financial. I started building at thirteen, and by high school several of those projects were revenue generating. Running them put me closer to how markets actually behave than anything I could have read online. But the real edge, I came to believe, was never in the numbers alone. The thesis I landed on is that AI compounds good investors. Pentamerus is the experiment built around that idea, working to build the next generation of leading hedge funds, ones that amplify human expertise.
If they don’t have what you want, don’t listen to what they say. There is no greater waste of time than justifying your actions to people who have a life that you don’t want.
Hormozi
Whim
I’m the Creative Director at Whim, where we help consumer brands turn their hardware into something people can subscribe to instead of buy outright. The financing, the capital, and the operational machinery underneath it is what we build. My job is everything on the surface. How the company looks, how it sounds, and how it reads to the brands deciding whether to trust us with the way their products reach the world.
That means brand, film, and the visual language that holds it together. I came into this from years of shooting rather than from film school, which shapes how I approach it. I think about pacing and feeling before I think about systems, and I care most about the moment someone encounters us for the first time and decides, without articulating it, that we are serious.
Pentamerus
Pentamerus is a proprietary trading firm native to AI. We trade equities through a system of autonomous research agents that handle the work an entire research desk would otherwise carry. The thesis is simple. The leading firms of the next decade will be AI-native, and we’re working to prove it.
The core belief is that AI compounds good investors rather than replacing them. Human conviction sits at the center of every decision, and the agents do the legwork underneath it. The result is a firm that operates with the scope of a much larger team while keeping judgment where it belongs, with the people making the calls.
I write early checks.
I back founders at the earliest stage, often before there’s a deck or a name. What I look for is taste, obsession, and a point of view the market hasn’t priced in yet.
Reading markets and shaping how companies are seen are what I do every day, and early investing sits exactly where the two meet. It comes down to conviction about people before the rest of the world catches on.
Small checks, high conviction, and real help with the story when it matters most.
“Your life isn’t really yours if you make it about what other people think.”
Anonymous
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