One of the best business models ever is creating a marketplace between investors and investment opportunities. However, the challenge with this two-sided market is: how do you get the investors to show up? It’s hard enough to get the retail investors, but the family offices and other large check writers are even more challenging. I’ve...
[Continue Reading]11 Ideas to Organize an Event Family Offices Want to Attend
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...
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