About Our Fund & Team

Local Salsa is the operating arm and General Partner behind the Third Salt Venture Fund, a Delaware-based investment fund built to turn underappreciated markets into durable businesses.

Local Salsa’s track record spans destination real estate launches, consumer-product breakthroughs, and category-defining brand activations.

Third Salt Venture Fund provides the capital, governance, and investor alignment to scale these ventures, focusing on real assets and operating companies that generate real customers, real revenue, and real enterprise value.

Together, they build businesses meant to endure economic cycles—not chase speculation.

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Stu Hicks

Bend, OR

Brand Launch Envisioneer

Meet the Team: Leadership & Experience

Stu Hicks is an operator and launch specialist with a record of building revenue-producing businesses in real estate, consumer products, and technology. His experience includes leading the successful launch of the Lodge at Suncadia during the most adverse resort development cycle in decades, guiding Hydro Flask’s early brand architecture and market entry, and supporting G5’s first SaaS vertical expansion into institutional real estate. He applies disciplined underwriting, market clarity, and execution-driven governance to ventures at formative stages. Hicks now serves through Local Salsa, the General Partner of the Third Salt Venture Fund, where he focuses on assets and operating companies positioned to perform across market cycles.

Meet the Team: Pete Thomas

Pete Thomas

Real Estate Asset Management

Bend, OR

Pete is a Bend-based real estate executive with more than three decades of experience in land acquisition, entitlement, development, and asset management. He has led multiple corporate ventures and was appointed Western Regional Vice President at D.R. Horton, where he co-founded and scaled its first internally held land division. His track record spans residential master planned communities, commercial assets, hospitality conversions, and mixed-use projects across the Western United States, including notable developments in San Diego, Oceanside, and Solana Beach. Thomas remains active as managing member of Cascade Capital Asset Management, focused on disciplined growth, strategic partnerships, and capital-efficient project delivery.

Governance, Transparency & Investor Commitment

An accessible, multi-channel network is key to discovering hidden launch opportunities, while clear rules and predictable decision-making protect investor capital. The Fund is structured so that authority, accountability, and economics are transparent from the start.

LP Advisory Committee: The LPAC acts as a governance safeguard rather than an operational body.  Its scope includes: Reviewing conflicts of interest brought forward by the GP; approving valuation methodology for illiquid holdings; evaluating material amendments to governing documents; and providing non-binding input on key-man outcomes.
The LPAC functions as an investor oversight mechanism: structured, documented, and insulated from day-to-day operations.  It does not select investments, operate the Fund, or replace the GP.
Key-Man Replacement Mechanisms: The Fund includes a key-man provision tied to identified individuals whose continued involvement is essential. If a key-man event occurs (death, disability, resignation, or material breach,) operations pause, and no new investments are made until one of the following occurs: the Key-Person returns to active participation; the LPAC approves a replacement candidate; or LPs vote to continue operations under revised management. If none of the above occur, LPs may elect to wind down the Fund pursuant to the Operating Agreement. This prevents capital from being stranded under leadership the LPs did not underwrite.
Fees and Carry Logic: The Fund follows an institutional standard structure:
Management Fee: A fixed annual percentage applied to committed or invested capital, used solely for Fund operations, not a profit center.
Priority Return / Preferred Distribution: Limited Partners receive a stated annual preferred return before the GP participates in upside.
Carry: The GP earns carried interest only after LPs recover capital and receive their preferred return; no promotion is paid until hurdles are met.
Clawback: If carry is distributed prematurely and final results do not justify it, contractual clawback provisions apply.
There are no hidden fees, transaction spreads, or intercompany markups. Economics are aligned around creating real returns on deployed capital, not maximizing fee extraction.

Company Past Performance

The Lodge at Suncadia: Led the branding, sales architecture, go-to-market strategy, and value engineering that turned an undeveloped master-planned resort into a nationally recognized destination. Delivered the only successful resort real-estate launch of its cycle (2007 - '10), aligning architects, developers, and sales teams under a single execution plan.

Hydro Flask: Defined the early brand position, naming, manufacturing and fulfillment infrastructure for one of the most recognizable products in outdoor retail. Translated a simple insulated bottle concept into a scalable lifestyle identity that retailers and consumers immediately understood.
G5: Rebuilt a failed market expansion into a successful category entry by reframing the value proposition and repositioning the platform for enterprise buyers.  Elevated the company from a bootstrapped, niche SaaS provider to a national authority in the field, opening new verticals, resetting VC valuation, and catalyzing investor confidence.
D.R. Horton: Co-founded the Western Region Land Division and was instrumental in leading DR Horton’s expansion across seven states by restructuring acquisition systems and creating proprietary IRR modeling for long-term planning. Standardized entitlement and disposition procedures, aligned divisional presidents, and secured over 9,000 acres for future communities. Anticipated the 2007 market shift, guiding disciplined regional repositioning.

See Past Performance Metrics

Offering Status

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