Tips for Fundraising in the New Market: A Thread

This market continues to raise Qs about VC fundraising. Samir Kaji offers many great tips to fund managers to understand and adapt to the market. ...

Venture Unlocked: The Family Office as an LP

Limited partners come in a few different varieties, one of the largest, but also most opaque groups is that of the Family Offices. On this episode of the Venture Unlocked podcast, Jamie Rhode, CFA, Vi...

Building the “YC for Fund Managers” and Tips for Launching a Firm

As the Emerging Manager world continues to grow, so does the importance of providing these managers with key education, resources, and community. Enter Oper8r, founded by Welly Sculley and Winter ...

Discovering the Next-Gen of Top Venture Investors

On this episode of the Venture Unlocked podcast, Samir Kaji chats with Apurva Mehta, Managing Partner at Summit Peak Investments....

Deena Shakir from Lux Capital speaks about firm culture, solving the diversity issue, and how portfolio management is a team sport

Deena Shakir is a General Partner at Lux Capital, a firm founded in 2000 and has since raised $2.5 billion. Lux invests in emerging science and deep technology startups such as Auris Health, Cerulea...

How LPs should really think about GP commits in Emerging Managers

Limited Partners (LPs) use various filters and metrics to assess how investable a venture fund is. One of the more heuristic measures is assessing the GP’s alignment with them through the percentage...

Should LP’s care about GP commits?

Limited Partners (LPs) use various filters and metrics to assess how investable a venture fund is. One of the more heuristic measures is assessing the GP’s alignment with them through the percentage...

Jon Sakoda: Build Your Fund With Founders By Your Side

Hear how Jon, who describes himself as a “recovering entrepreneur,” started his first company, Imlogic, Inc. which was eventually acquired by Symantec, and then joined New Enterprise Associates (N...

Why Alignment With Partners, LPs, and Companies is Powerful

Jodi Sherman Jahic is a managing partner of Aligned Partners, a Silicon Valley-based venture fund investing in early-stage, enterprise technology companies that are have a lean toward capital efficie...

Roger Ehrenberg, IA Ventures: The craft of building a top-decile firm

Roger Ehrenberg is the founder and Managing Partner of IA Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in New York City. In this episode, Roger gives a master class on all aspects of starting a...

My thoughts on the Rolling Fund product

Recently, AngelList's Rolling Fund product has been a frequent topic of discussion within early-stage investing circles. Over the last few weeks, I've had dozens of conversations with LP's and GP's to...

The use of placement agents for Emerging fund managers

For emerging managers, the actual capital raise of a fund represents the most significant friction point for getting off the ground (and early on, scaling a firm). This issue has prevented many aspiri...

What are Limited Partners thinking about the venture capital sector?

To understand the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on the venture capital sector, we recently conducted a survey of limited partners to gauge their sentiment on venture fund investing, plans for 2020 ...

Use of Capital call lines for Emerging Managers during economic downturns

The use of capital call lines by venture capital funds has seen a dramatic increase over the last few decades --- Today >50% of VC funds that qualify are using these lines....

COVID-19 Edition: What is venture sentiment today?

To understand the effects of the COVID-19 outbreak on the venture capital sector, we recently conducted a survey of venture firms to gauge investor sentiment on investment activity and fundraising....

Emerging Manager Q&A mailbag

I’ve spent a considerable amount of my shelter in place time having discussions with some very smart people in the market about what this economic dislocation might mean for the emerging venture fun...

What I’m hearing about venture right now

Over the last few weeks, our daily routines have been disrupted by the continued spread of the novel Coronavirus, and many of us may contract or have loved ones contract the virus. Please stay safe, a...

Micro VC fundraising and COVID-19

As we move into month three of the COVID-19 outbreak, the impact on the global economy has been unmistakable, and arguably the most significant since the US came out of the last recession. Conferences...

The Master list of US Micro-VC’s

When we launched our emerging manager focused effort in 2012, only a small coterie of sub-$100MM venture funds existed (<100). Our thesis was that this segment of the market would represent one of ...

The Family Office perspective on venture fund allocations

Understanding the family office perspective on venture fund investing Having covered the emerging venture landscape for nearly a decade now (stay tuned for our updated Micro-VC database, which we wil...

A data driven view on what Emerging Manager LPs are thinking today

Last week during the 4th annual emerging manager RAISE conference, my colleague Hana Yang gave a great presentation covering the results of a LP survey that was conducted to assess LP temperament h...

Do Institutional Limited Partners Back First time Venture Funds?

I recently posted this Twitter thread about the role institutional LP’s play within the emerging VC fund market (Side bar: I’m likely going to push more content through Twitter threads this year, ...

A data driven view of Emerging VC

Recently, we surveyed a group of US emerging manager venture firms to assess a variety of metrics including performance, fundraising experiences, and portfolio construction strategies....

Going from a proof of concept fund to an “institutional” venture fund

Over the past several years, we’ve spent considerable time studying and writing about the rapidly evolving emerging manager venture landscape. As illustrated by the chart below (data courtesy of ...

Raising A Fund? 9 Questions That Help Get You To GP/LP Fit

This post serves a part two of a two part series that samir kaji and I are co-authoring to help VC’s navigate through fundraising cycles and engender better and more relevant relationships with LP�...

LP survey results: What LP’s are saying about emerging venture manager funds

This post serves a part one of a two part series that Beezer Clarkson at Sapphire Ventures and I are co-authoring to help VC’s (specifically emerging managers) navigate through fundraising cycles an...

Realistic Fundraising Targets For Emerging Venture Funds

of early stage venture and start-ups. The recent article I posted about the current fundraising environment focused primarily on the macro conditions driving limited partner appetite into emerging ...

Micro-VC, Strictly By The Numbers

In my last post, I described the icy fundraising market as it relates to emerging venture fund managers that are seeking capital for the first time. While I recognized that the post was particularly d...

Why A Fundraising Winter Is Coming For Micro-VC’s

Earlier in the week, I received an email from a seed fund manager inquiring about current Limited Partner appetite for investing in new seed fund managers. The query was in response to a declaration m...

What You Need To Think About Before Starting A Venture Firm

Along with the reasons I’ve previously discussed, this list and chart below clearly suggest that becoming a venture investor (or more specifically a seed stage VC) is easier than it’s ever been. Y...

What You Need To Know Before Raising A Micro-VC Fund Today

Although I’ve never raised a venture fund myself, I can claim having worked closely with managers on nearly 200 fund raises over the past 5+ years. These raises, coinciding with the incredible growt...

What Do LP’s Think About Micro-VC?

A little over a year ago, we participated in the inaugural RAISE summit, an event conceived by Akkadian Ventures, Top Tier Capital, Weathergage Capital, and Core Ventures Group and primarily developed...