Last week Graph Advisors hosted a session on how to go from fund to firm, focused on helping emerging venture capital managers think about how to go from running their first fund to building an enduring firm that can manage multiple funds. Watch the replay below:
Graph Advisors summed up the takeaways from the session, highlighting the key components of the roadmap to building a firm:
Relationships - This is all about your relationship management, connections, and outreach. Again, its not about the software you choose its about communication, references, and asks from LPs, founders, and advisors. ...
The Pitch - The story behind what you are doing is essential. Being able to distill down your thesis into a few sentences or a few words make the word-of-mouth narrative easy to pass along to investment committees, partners, and anyone else who needs a brief summary.
The Team - Who brought you here may not be who can bring you there. It’s time to review, measure, and negotiate what your firm needs today. This means looking at full time employees and service providers.
The Execution Plan - This is about building the machine to bring everything together. When do you want to do your 2nd first close. When are you going to work on this (your calendar is the best indicator). Who can help you do it. Why is this a priority. What does your 2nd first close look like?
Read the full recap on Graph Advisor's blog. 👉
To me, the question for emerging managers is how do you take the excitement of a new fund - in yourself, from your investors, partners, and founders - into building more than just a fund, but an approach and system that can raise, deploy, manage, and deliver returns over multiple funds. What I'm most excited about is the new range of tools, information, resources, and support for venture fund management that we've seen emerge over the last five plus years to help new managers professionalize their investing approaches and practices. Onwards and upwards.