Keep pulling the thread on John Ja-wook Chi.
Very few limited partners in the alternatives business are directly compensated based on the returns generated by the general partners they invest with.
A partner at Benchmark stated that the firm's fundraising process involves sending an email on a Tuesday night and having the fund closed by Wednesday morning.
Many of the same venture capital firms that pledged not to invest in weapons in 2019 are now leading investment rounds in the defense technology sector.
The most expensive capital a founder can raise is from friends and family because a failure to repay the money can ruin the friendship.
A fund's final size is typically limited to approximately double its first close amount.
The most important metric to track in a fundraising campaign is the conversion ratio of meetings to investments.
The total amount of capital raised in a fund is a function of the pipeline of potential investors multiplied by the conversion ratio and the average investment size.
The most common mistake in fundraising is over-indexing on logic and returns, while failing to address the investor's emotional state and fear.
The 10-year lifecycle of alternative investment funds creates a misalignment of interest for limited partners who might be compensated on IRR, as general partners can use tools to artificially inflate IRR figures.
Large institutional investors with committee-based decision-making processes, such as state pension plans and sovereign wealth funds, rarely make contrarian bets unless the group is specifically designed for it.
General Catalyst intentionally built consensus among institutional investors fund-by-fund to establish itself as a top-tier venture capital firm.
As venture capital firms scale and become consensus picks, they must have the courage to lose their early, contrarian-focused investors like family offices and small fund of funds.