Lots of event planners and anyone raising capital want to attract family offices. But how? I’ve identified a range of best practices that I’ve seen other organizations use in serving the family office community, in roughly declining order of impact: 1. Advertise that the event is strictly gated to family offices, and detail how you...
[Continue Reading]Should Small Emerging Managers Use Placement Agents?
The pros and cons of choosing a placement agent for small funds It would make life a lot easier for emerging managers if they could outsource the entire fundraising process. But can you? Empirically, few small emerging investment managers hire placement agents, particularly in venture capital. And even the firms that hire a placement agent...
[Continue Reading]Cheat Codes for Raising Capital from Venture Capitalists
We love founder(s) who can say any of the following: Mindset “Not sure, but we’ll get back to you shortly” “We studied all of the past players who worked in this space, and here’s what we learned…” “We accomplished something difficult that most people couldn’t.” Even if it’s not in a business arena–e.g., you ran...
[Continue Reading]The iconic VC-Backed founders are all White & Asian men. So why invest in diversity?
(co-written with Katherine Boe Heuck, a MBA candidate at MIT Sloan (class of 2022) and a past intern of ours, Metaprop NYC, and InQTel.) What can we learn from the best venture capital investments of all time? Well, we learn to invest exclusively in men, preferably white or Asian. A year ago, we reviewed CB...
[Continue Reading]How to find the right online communities
The user experience in the big, ungated social networks is getting steadily worse: spam, bots, fake news. There are three main solutions: technology (i.e., anti-bot tools, but that’s an endless battle); gating; and/or curation/moderation. One result: I think we’ll see people spending more and more time in gated online communities. Particularly in a time of...
[Continue Reading]How business leaders can promote wearing masks and stop COVID-19
The overwhelming consensus of medical opinion is that in order to mitigate COVID-19 as effectively as some other countries have, America needs to make mask-wearing normative. How can you help? Some ideas: Incorporate masks into your visual communications. In your advertising, brochures, website, etc., incorporating masks will help change social norms. By analogy, very few...
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