28 LP Meetings in 28 Days
What the shortest month taught me about the long journey of fundraising
I’ve spent the last month having conversations I wasn’t fully prepared for.
Not because I didn’t do the work. I had the deck, the thesis, the model, the data room. I’d read the books, listened to the podcasts, studied the GPs who came before me. I thought I knew what I was walking into.
But there’s a real gap between knowing about LP fundraising and actually sitting across from someone who manages billions of dollars and has to decide whether to trust you with a few hundred thousand of it. That gap is where everything important lives.
Over the past month, Joe and I held 28 LP meetings. Fund-of-funds, family offices, single-family offices, institutional platforms, and individual investors. Some were warm intros. Many were cold. Some were with people who have been investing in emerging managers for 20 years. A few were with former NFL and NBA players that had never written an LP check before.
“This is the part of the fundraising journey no one puts in their post-close announcement.”
Every single conversation taught me something. Most of those things, nobody warned me about.
The First Close Isn’t a Milestone. It’s the Product.
I understood intellectually that social proof matters in fundraising. I didn’t understand what that actually meant until the same idea came out of the mouths of a 1,800-family LP consortium, a $150B fund-of-funds, and an emerging manager platform in three separate conversations. This is the part of the fundraising journey no one puts in their post-close announcement.
Honestly, I went into this process naively (and stubbornly) thinking we could raise without having to “play the game.” I hated the idea of social proof. Everything about Daring Ventures, our backgrounds, our thesis, the founders we back, is built on the premise that the most valuable things are often overlooked by everyone else. Social proof felt like the opposite of that. But when you hear the same thing over and over again from the people you're asking to write checks, it stops being an opinion and starts being a rule. To win, you have to play the game. At least to some extent.
Every one of them said the same thing in different words: once you have your first close, the conversation is completely different.
Not a little different. Completely different.
Before first close, you’re selling a hypothesis about yourself. After first close, you’re selling evidence. The LPs who committed early become the evidence. Their willingness to wire money is the due diligence that every subsequent LP is actually relying on, whether they admit it or not.
That was the hardest thing to sit with. Because it means the fundraise doesn't start with the best pitch or the clearest thesis. Before we formally opened the fund, Joe and I had already been working to de-risk everything we could control. We built out the operations and fund infrastructure, made five angel investments in buyer-builders we believed in, and warehoused several of those into the fund. We thought showing up with real decisions, real deal flow, and a thesis with actual conviction behind it would move the needle more than it did. It helped. But it didn't change the fundamental dynamic the way I expected. The cold-start problem doesn't care how prepared you are. It cares who already trusts you.
A former university CIO gave me the most tactical piece of advice I got across all 28 meetings: use escrow commitments for your earliest LPs. Funds vest only when you hit your minimum viable fund size, which protects their capital. But you can show those contingent commitments to subsequent LPs as momentum before you hit the escrow threshold. You can say: “We have $X more, even if contingent.”
The cold-start problem is real. The solution isn’t a better pitch to institutional investors. It’s better mobilization of your personal network, paired with a structure that makes those early commitments feel safe. Charles Hudson built Precursor Ventures the same way, leaning heavily on relationships before institutional LPs were in the picture. That pattern repeats across nearly every Fund I that actually closes.
The Best Meetings Were the Kindest No’s
Something shifted for me around the eighth or ninth meeting. I started noticing that the most sophisticated investors, the ones managing the largest pools of capital with the most formalized processes, were also the most honest about why they couldn’t help me right now.
A managing director at one of the largest fund-of-funds in the world told me, with genuine warmth, that our fund size was too small for their check size to make mathematical sense. He stayed on the call for an extra twenty minutes talking through what we’d built. He asked to stay in touch. He offered to make introductions on the platform side.
A partner at an emerging manager-focused fund told me the probability was low for this fund cycle, but that she found our decision-making process genuinely compelling. She wanted to understand not just what we invested in, but why we passed on companies we didn’t.
A managing partner at a multi-generational wealth vehicle told me they’d love to follow along and reconnect when we had more fund history.
None of these were soft no’s dressed up as something polite. They were honest assessments of fit, timing, and mandate, given by people who understood that emerging managers have limited time and shouldn’t waste it on relationships that won’t convert.
I came to see those meetings as an investment. Not in this fund. In the next one. These LPs are doing their Fund II diligence right now. When I send an update that one of our portfolio companies raised a significant seed round at a strong markup, I’m not sending it into a void. I’m adding another data point to a relationship that started the day they took the meeting.
Knowing that institutional LPs are typically Fund II targets wasn’t new information for me. What I didn’t fully anticipate was how tricky it is to juggle those early Fund II relationship-building conversations while actively trying to close Fund I. You’re always playing two timelines at once, and you have to be intentional about which one you’re in on any given call.
Stay in the market even when you get a no. Especially when you get a no from someone worth knowing.
“Generalist” Is a Liability. But a Specific Lens Is Investable.
Early in the process, an advisor who had spent decades on the LP side told me something that stuck: “Generalist is a dirty word.”
He wasn’t wrong. But the insight is more subtle than it sounds.
The problem isn’t being sector-agnostic. Plenty of excellent funds don’t pick a sector. Benchmark has been sector-agnostic since day one and it’s one of the best-performing venture funds in history. The problem is having no specific answer to the question: why do you see things that other investors miss?
Our answer, the one Joe and I landed on after a lot of iterations, is that we back buyer-builders. People who spent years inside regulated, physical, or knowledge industries as buyers, not as outsiders. They evaluated tools that almost worked, filed tickets that went nowhere, and explained their workflow to product managers who didn’t get it. Then the tools to build got easy enough to use that explaining the problem became harder than building the fix.
They didn’t set out to start a company. They just stopped being customers.
What makes them different from a generalist founder who “decided to build in healthcare” after reading a market report? The buyer-builder already has the distribution. A decade of conferences, group chats, and knowing which buyers are real and which ones only forward emails. They’re not selling into a software budget. They’re selling against labor costs, compliance overhead, and the operational drag that turns skilled people into human middleware. Those don’t deflate the way hype does.
That framing is sector-agnostic. It applies to healthcare, construction, logistics, agriculture, and financial services. But it’s not generalist, because most companies don’t qualify. The compliance officer who got tired of the workaround, the ops lead who finally snapped, the account manager who knew exactly which workflow was bleeding money. That’s who we’re looking for.
A partner at one of the institutional platforms I met with put it simply: “The product I’m purchasing is the decision-making product.” She wasn’t asking me to predict outcomes. She was asking me to show her the filter. The specific, repeatable judgment framework that explained why certain founders got a yes and others got a no.
Build the filter. Make it specific. Make it yours. The label you put on the sector matters a lot less than the clarity of the lens.
The People You Didn’t Expect to Call You Back
I want to say something about athlete investors, because this surprised me more than almost anything else in this process.
When Joe and I started building this fund, professional athletes were not on our LP target list. It didn’t fit the mental model I had of what an LP looked like. Institutional endowment. Family office. Fund-of-funds. Not a former NFL running back.
Then the running back took a meeting, asked thoughtful questions not just about our thesis, but what values drive us. Then he asked for the data room immediately.
Here’s what I came to understand. Most athletes who are thinking seriously about life after their playing career gravitate toward the most familiar paths: brand deals, CPG, wealth management, and real estate. Those industries make sense because they’re visible and the entry points are well-worn. Venture capital and angel investing are rarely explained to them in a way that’s accessible or relevant. And when athletes do get introduced to VC, it’s usually through the lens of sports tech or through other athletes they trust, which is a narrow slice of what the asset class actually looks like.
There’s also something more uncomfortable underneath that. A lot of athletes have been burned before by investors who wanted their name and their network, not their perspective or their judgment. The brand is the pitch, not the person. That leaves a mark.
What Joe and I found is that athletes respond completely differently when the conversation isn’t about using them. They respond to GPs who built their way in from the outside. To funds where the thesis is about access, community, and building something real, not just a logo on a deck.
And more than that, the athlete journey has a lot in common with the founder journey. High-stakes performance environments. Working within systems that don’t always reward the best player. Having to earn everything. Joe’s path is a version of that story too: three-time community college dropout who eventually earned his way to Columbia, then to Lazard doing M&A, then went back to mentor community college students trying to do the same thing. That story lands differently with athletes who have navigated adversity and institutions that weren’t built for them.
My own D1 background at Rice wasn’t just a conversation topic. It was a trust signal.
What athlete LPs actually offer isn’t a name. It’s a perspective that most venture-backed software companies have never had access to. They understand performance systems, team dynamics, and high-pressure decision-making in ways that most operators don’t. And many of them are looking to diversify into something genuinely new, not just park capital somewhere familiar. Vertical SaaS is a completely different world from sports tech or real estate, and for the right athlete, that’s exciting, not intimidating.
Don’t overlook the people who have never written an LP check before. Sometimes they’re the most motivated to start.
You Are the Product
The most important thing a former CIO told me, after all the tactical advice about escrow, fund construction, and LP segmentation, was the simplest.
“For fund one, you are the product.”
Not the thesis. Not the portfolio. Not the model. You.
LPs who invest in Fund Is are making a bet on people. It’s the same logic as pre-seed investing: there’s no revenue, no team track record, no product-market fit yet. You’re betting on the person in front of you. StepStone’s research shows that Fund Is outperform the median roughly 60% of the time, and a big part of that is alignment. Early-fund managers have everything at stake. They’re not collecting management fees. They’re proving something.
What LPs are actually looking for is evidence of character: judgment, resilience, self-awareness, and the specific combination of experiences that explains why you can do this difficult thing. That’s the track record when the track record doesn’t exist yet. Arlan Hamilton raised the first Backstage Capital fund on exactly that, no institutional backing, just a story and a thesis that was undeniably hers.
Which means the most important work you can do for a first fund raise isn’t polishing your deck. It’s knowing your own story well enough to tell it honestly. Why did you end up here? What did you see that made you believe this was the right thing to build? What specifically in your background explains why you can see buyer-builders that other investors walk past?
Joe grew up in circumstances that most venture investors didn’t. He dropped out of community college three times before he eventually made it to Columbia and then to Lazard doing M&A. Then he went back and mentored community college students trying to follow the same path. He built proximity to people that institutional pathways were ignoring, and he learned how to turn that into real access and real community. That’s not a nice anecdote. It’s evidence of pattern recognition, relationship building, and the specific kind of hustle that pre-seed investing requires.
Tell the true story. The one that only you could tell. That’s the track record when the track record doesn’t exist yet.
What I’d Tell Someone Starting This Process
Institutional LPs are typically Fund II+ conversations. Most will tell you this themselves, kindly and directly. Still take the meetings, but understand the goal is building relationships, not asking for a commitment. What’s trickier than knowing that is actually managing both timelines at once, keeping those Fund II seeds warm while staying focused on closing Fund I.
The data room is a trust signal, not just a file repository. A well-organized data room with IC memos, pass decisions, GP bios, portfolio updates, and legal docs signals that you run this like a business. It’s often the first thing an LP uses to decide whether to go deeper.
Prepare to answer “What if the AI bubble pops?” For any fund with an AI angle, this question is coming. Have a genuine answer, one grounded in the structural dynamics of your specific thesis, not just optimism about the category. The best answer Joe and I found: we back founders who are selling against labor costs. Those don’t deflate the way hype does.
Pass decisions are as important as investment decisions. Multiple LPs asked to see memos on companies we decided not to fund. They want to know you can say no, and why. That’s the judgment they’re actually buying.
Be transparent when things are hard. The calls where I said something difficult, about a team change, about a portfolio company that was struggling, about the fundraising environment being harder than expected, were almost always the calls where the relationship deepened. People invest in people who tell them the truth.
I don’t know exactly how this fund story ends yet. But I know the 28 conversations Joe and I have had are some of the most useful hours we’ve spent building this business. Not because they all went well, but because each one forced us to articulate something more clearly than we had before.
That clarity is the work. The checks are the result.
Playing the long game and short game when working through fund 1 and fund 2 will be a very similar experience for many founders who are talking with large enterprises well before they will be in a position to sign them up as a customer. It's very very comparable!
This is an incredible inside view into raising as an emerging manager. Thank you for taking us there.