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 you give an anchor investor a stake in your fund’s management company?
Raising capital for a new fund is always hard. Should you give preferential economics or other benefits to a seed anchor investor, who makes a material commitment to the fund? These “VCs for investment management companies” are also known as GP seeders or fund platforms. They often also are active in the GP stakes business,...
[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]Launching a Portfolio Acceleration Platform at a Venture Capital or Private Equity Fund
I’ve recently advised a number of emerging private equity and VC funds who are wrestling with the question: What are the highest impact steps they can take to support their portfolio companies? Almost every private equity and venture capital investor now advertises that they have a platform to support their portfolio companies. The popularity of...
[Continue Reading]Does Your VC have an Investment Thesis, or a Hypothesis?
(co-written with Stephane Nasser, co-founder of OpenVC, an open-source initiative to collect and analyze all VC theses.) VCs love to talk investment theses: on Twitter, Medium, Clubhouse, at conferences. And yet, when you take a closer look, theses are often meaningless and/or misleading. OpenVC is a new, open-source initiative to collect and analyze all publicly...
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