Historically, the process of winning capital from limited partners has been opaque. However, in the last few years a few have started to use social media and become more transparent. I’ve collected the best guidelines here. If you have any other resources to add, please contact me.
First, I’ve written a number of essays on fundraising for an investment management firm:
- 15 Steps to Fundraising for Your New Venture Capital or Private Equity Fund
- How Influencers Can Legally Raise Capital for Funds and Companies
- 5 Innovative Fundraising Methods for Emerging Venture Capital and Private Equity Funds
- Should you give an anchor investor a stake in your fund’s management company?
- Should Small Emerging Managers Use Placement Agents?
- 11 Ideas to Organize an Event Family Offices Want to Attend
- An Investor’s Personal Social Media Tech Stack
- Limited partner due diligence on VC and private equity funds
- For emerging VC and private equity investors: Accelerators, Platforms, Communities, and Incubators (note especially the list of investor-focused conferences, some of which attract many LPs)
- VCs eating their own dog food: Using technology and analytics to make better investments in private companies
- Reading list for working in private equity/venture capital, including all of the major online communities for VCs and programs/degrees for people studying VC
- How to write a resume that wins investors
- my presentation on raising capital for tech companies
SELECT POTENTIAL LIMITED PARTNERS
I’ve collected numerous lists of limited partners focused on VC. You can get much more extensive lists in the major databases (Preqin, etc.)
- LP Navigator
- Muieen Cader list of institutional LPs with emerging manager programs
- Allvue list of emerging manager programs offered by pensions, endowments, and other sponsors
- Aggreg8r: LPs in Emerging Micro-VCs
- European institutional LPs investing in emerging VC managers, from Borys Musielak
- Enmeshment in Venture: list of some VCs systematically investing in other VCs
- A deep dive into the challenges of raising your first venture capital fund (includes LP landscape/list)
- Emerging Manager Monthly (paid)
- Sources of information on institutional investor searches:fin-searches, Venture Capital Journal, Preqin, Chief Investment Officer
These are helpful for identifying high net worth potential investors:
LIMITED PARTNERS’ PERSPECTIVE
Chris Douvos is almost certainly the LP who has been blogging the longest, at SuperLP.com. (Incidentally, as an indicator of how high the bar is for a GP, he says, “I dove into our fund log from the last couple of quarters and found that the mean IRR (among VCs listing one) was over 36%.”) Other LP bloggers include Blue Future Partners (BlueFP.com), Lindel Eakman (LDEakman), Trey Hart (LP2LP2VC.com), and Samir Kaji (VentureUnlocked).
Origins is a podcast about Limited Partners, created by VC Notation Capital. OpenLP.com centralizes other LPs’ perspectives.
At Invesco’s conference on Emerging GPs, one of the highlights was a presentation by Laurie Weir summarizing CALPERS’ selection criteria under their Private Equity Emerging Manager Program Review. Their Report gives granular detail on what they are looking for — and avoid — in fund managers.
Plexo Capital: The Economic Impact of Coronavirus: What GPs Need to Know
Foundry Ventures: The Hard Questions Venture Capital GPs Need to Be Prepared For
VCs have to fundraise too: “Inside SuperVenture: the bizarre conference where VCs flock to raise their next fund — and not all succeed.”
David Dana, Head of VC Investments, European Investment Fund
Samir Kaji: The Family Office perspective on venture fund allocations
Cambria Capita: Know Your Edge As A VC, Part One: Informational Edge
Sameer Jain, ActiveAllocator.com: Due Diligence Framework for Direct Investing
Denis Tse: Fund Management Craftsmanship: An LP’s Food for Thought for Emerging VC General Partners
Mesh Lakhani on his approach to angel and fund investing
Sapphire Ventures’ Top 10 tips for pitching an LP
Pantheon: “Private equity fund manager due diligence and selection“
Lindel Eakman on joining Foundry Group
Alex Bangash: “VC is all about access”
Katherine Barr: 500 Startups’ Premoney
Top Tier: ‘Straight Talk’ From a Leading LP: How LPs Evaluate New Managers
6 Common Pitfalls VCs Make With LPs
Some Advice On “First Calls” With Fund Managers You Might Be Evaluating
Successful Fundraiser’s Philosophy: How Micro VCs Get Off the Ground & Succeed . Here’s the Deck.
Tips to write a great venture fund pitch deck
Embracing Emergence: The Newsletter where LPs and Emerging Managers find convergence.
In this segment of the a16z Podcast, three investors (who are also limited partners in a16z) — Andy Golden of the Princeton University Investment Company, Ben Gomez of Pilothouse Associates, and Edwin Poston and Mel Williams of TrueBridge Capital Partners — share their thoughts on tech valuations, liquidity in the markets, and what some in Silicon Valley may have a tendency to overlook.
Matthew Craig-Greene of consultancy MJ Hudson points out, “Most public plans publish meeting minutes, and these can be a very interesting place to find information on manager selection. CALPERS and some others even archive videos of sessions.”
GENERAL PARTNERS’ PERSPECTIVE
Weekend Fund: How to raise from LPs–All about sourcing, building relationships with, and closing LPs
DocSend: Looking behind the Curtain: How VCs raise their early funds
Yohei Nakajima: Metrics it took to get to our final close. Number of meetings, new relationships, conversion rate, referral sources, etc.
Ha Duong: How Emerging Venture Capital Fund Managers Should Think About Their LP Fundraising Strategies
Dan Abelon: A Quiz on First-Time VC Funds
Arjun Dev Arora: Emerging Manager ‘Must-Dos’: The Path to Your First Fund
Brad Feld: raising a $150m fund
Physics Ventures: Why LPs Invested in Our First Fund
SAASTR: On raising a $180m fund
Elizabeth Yin, Hustle Fund: How I Raised a First-Time VC VC fund and How we tripled our first VC fund to raise a $33.6M Fund 2
Jonathan Struhl: On raising a VC Fund
Quora responses on: raising a first VC fund
Kirk Coburn: Raising a VC fund in Houston
Lightspeed: VC Firms — How to Build an LP Base for the Long-term
Earnest Capital: Why you should send monthly advisor and investor updates
Charlie O’Donnell: Lessons learned from raising a first-time VC fund
Five Questions for Vetting an Investment in a New or Emerging VC Fund
Hunterwalk.com: Homebrew’s Second Annual LP Meeting: Why We Do Them
Mahendra Ramsinghani: How LPs conduct DD
A look into fundraising for aspiring venture capitalists
VC Lab: The Ultimate Guide to Get Limited Partners
From an Accel alum: Learnings from a failed attempt at raising a (India-focused) VC Fund
How many LPs emerging managers had to meet for their fund I.
TECHNOLOGY PERSPECTIVE
How to find new LP investors for your fund at scale (+ list of top 46 LPs in German VC funds)
CLOSE RATES
A few VCs have shared their percentage close rates with LPs:
Homebrew: 100 Days of Fundraising
Confessions Of A VC Who Raised Money During Financial Armageddon
PLACEMENT AGENTS’ PERSPECTIVE
Evan Katz, Crawford Ventures: 44 Tips for Hedge Fund fundraising (but also applicable to VC/PE)
SAMPLE VENTURE CAPITALISTS’ DECKS FOR LIMITED PARTNERS
Video: “Harlem Capital partners pitch real estate magnate Ron Moelis on their mission to “do well and do good” as a diversity focused VC fund.”
You can see many sample decks in the online platforms for limited partners to allocate to funds, e.g., Artivest, CEPRES, iCapital Network, Palico, and to a lesser extent OurCrowd and AngelList.
Venture Capital Pitch Deck: What VCs raised with to get capital to invest in startups
Alpha Bridge: Deck review by Chris Douvos
Tribe Capital: How investors approach fundraising from LPs (free VC fund deck template)
Collected Venture Capital Pitch Decks: What VCs raised with to get capital to invest in startups
Nick Chirls and Alex Lines of Notation Capital in Brooklyn reveal the pitch deck they used to raise their $8 million ‘pre-seed investment fund’ in “VC/Firm Fit”
Alternative Protein Fund deck
Venture capital LP one-pager for fundraising from Limited Partners
SURGE Ventures Series Seed & “A” Fund Pitch Deck
Work Life
WHY INVEST IN EMERGING MANAGERS?
LPs’ analysis:
Greenspring Associates: VC’s Access Myth
Cyan Capital: A Strategic Allocation to Newer GPs
Different Funds: Outperformance Indicators for VC
Cambridge Associates: Venture Capital Positively Disrupts Intergenerational Investing
Others’ analysis:
1839 VC: Why Should Investors Consider Investing in Emerging Fund Managers?
Law of VC: Emerging Fund Managers Outperform Established VCs
Preqin: The Performance of Emerging Manager Funds
Pitchbook: LPs bend their own rules in a bid to bet on emerging fund managers
WHY INVEST IN SPECIALIST MANAGERS?
The Outperformance of Early-Stage Specialist Firms: A Data-driven Analysis
OTHER RESOURCES
List of placement agents and their fees, and other GP resources
Six tips to make your PE pitch book stand out
PEI book on Private Market Fundraising (213 pages)
SELECT CONSULTANTS WHO ADVISE ON FUNDRAISING
(Note these are mostly not placement agents. A number of these firms have rich resources on their websites.)
MJ Hudson
HI DAVID, HAS BEEN A LONG TIME SINCE WE LAST SPOKE. gREAT COLLECTION OF RESOURCES. MOST PUBLIC PLANS PUBLISH MEETING MINUTES AND THESE CAN BE A VERY INTERESTING PLACE TO FIND INFORMATION ON MANAGER SELECTION. calperS AND SOME OTHERS EVEN ARCHIVE VIDEOS OF SESSIONS. MY TEAM AT mj HUDSON PERFORMS A SIMILAR SERVICE TO THOSE YOU MENTION ABOVE AND THOUGHT YOU MIGHT WANT TO INCLUDE FOR COMPLETENESS. MOST OF OUR CLIENTS ARE IN eUROPE, AT THE MOMENT, BUT MOST RAISE GLOBALLY. https://www.mjhudson.com/expertise/ir-marketing/