The Orchard is a two story affordable housing complex in Santa Ana, California. It serves the area’s chronically homeless residents and features a community garden, a commercial kitchen, and on-site parking. And for a small period of time in 2023 it was also the headquarters of OpenAI’s $175 million venture capital fund, according to documents filed with the California Secretary of State. These documents were first pointed out in the newsletter Non-Gaap Investing.
One document, filed in April of 2023, listed Jacob Thomas Vespers and Vespers Inc—a company formed the same day—as manager of the fund. A document filed a few weeks later registered the address of the company as unit 234, a small second-story apartment overlooking the courtyard at The Orchard.
Less than two months later on May 24, the company listed Sam Altman as the fund’s manger in a separate SEC filing.
But who was this mysterious person who briefly held the keys to one of the most highly-watched investment vehicles in Silicon Valley?
“Jacob Vespers does not exist to our knowledge,” said Madhav Dutt, a spokesperson for OpenAI. When asked how this individual came to listed as in control of the company’s Startup Fund, Dutt said that the documents filed with the California Secretary of State were faked.
“The document itself is not legitimate,” Dutt told Business Insider, “it’s completely fabricated.” Dutt declined to elaborate on how exactly fabricated documents came to be filed with the state of California, he would only say repeatedly that the documents were “illegitimate.”
Kayla Wood, another spokesperson for OpenAI said the company doesn’t know who filed the document, and that it wasn’t aware of the filing until July of 2023 when a journalist asked about it.
Wood said the company made an official filing with the California Secretary of State in August 2023, which doesn’t list anyone as the manager of the OpenAI Startup Fund. This is the document the public should rely on as the official status of this fund, the spokesperson said
According to the California Secretary of State, knowingly filing a false document with a public office in the state is a felony. When OpenAI was informed about the Vespers document by the journalist in July 2023, the company did not report the allegedly fabricated filing to any authorities, Wood said.
Corporations and LLCs file statements of information with the state of California with updated information on participants in a company or entity.
Paul Carroll, Chief Operating Officer of Integrity Housing, the company that owns and operates The Orchard, says he’s not aware of any businesses being run out of any of the units in the building.
“I don’t know anything about what it is you’re speaking of,” said Carroll. This despite the fact that unit 234 is nominally the headquarters of at least 7 different businesses according to corporate records. All of them are associated with Jacob Thomas Vespers, referred to in some documents as Jacob Thomas Redmond Messer or Jacob Thomas Redmond or Jacob Thomas Messer.
Coincidentally, two of the board members of Vespers Inc. happened to be named Redmond and Messer, according to the documents.
What little online presence exists of Vespers doesn’t clear things up. There’s a github post made under a profile name, Jacob Thomas Redmond, on May 19th, 2023 that bears some tell-tale signs of being AI generated.
“I’m new with version with GitHub and I apologize in advance if I did somewhere attached the wrong way,” he wrote in the post. Elsewhere he is referred to as a doctoral student working on “neuroimaging, brain computer interfaces and immersive environments” or as the developer of a ChatGPT “code evolver” tool.
