#greenscreen raising money for a vc firm broken down #venturecapital ...

So you want to raise a venture capital fund. I just recently announced my third fund, which is a $50 million fund for early-stage investments. I have never seen a VC do this, so get out your pen and take some notes. LP construction, your limited partners are your investors in the fund, and the type of LP really matters in terms of going to market. And fund one, my $5 million fund, I was super focused on family offices because I learned pretty quickly that if you're raising, let's say, sub $30 million, there's a sweet spot for the type of LP that's going to be interested in your product. Super big limited partners like endowments or pension funds or any foundations have a lot of money to deploy, so writing a $1 million check or even a $2 to $5 million check is very small and not really worth their time. When you're just getting started, family offices are amazing. Don't waste any time. Go to your network. Try to raise from friends and family, other general partners of funds that might want to write 10K checks and also family offices, either multifamily offices but largely probably single-family offices. I think I had 32 LPs in fund one to make up the $5 million. You can see the breakdown. And then in fund two, we shifted gears a little bit. Fund-to-funds are fantastic. They can likely scale with you. I had one fund-to-funds that's anchored all three of my funds to date. You notice that that number got a lot larger, but even for my $20 million second fund, which I had 31 limited partners in, I didn't have any institutions yet, again, too small for their check size. Fund three announced in Forbes last week for the $50 million fund. I had 28 LPs, and the crazy part is about 38.5 million of the 50 million, so most of it was from six LPs. My anchor check was 15 million, so 30% of the fund came from one investor. Family offices still bring in the heat. Some of these single-family offices have billions and billions of dollars, and so they are able to write five $7 million checks. Fund-to-funds, I guess you can consider them institutions. I got some feedback on that, so that was about 27 million of the fund. And we closed our first foundation, so Children's of Texas was our first one to come in, and then we closed Churchill Asset Management also as our second for this fund. More on how I ran the process later. For anyone that is interested, it is definitely an art and not a science, but LP construction matters and making sure that who you focus on fits your fund size. Again, family offices for anything probably sub-30, and then you want to start building relationships with folks over time, so certainly meet them, but assume that 50 is probably that minimum fund size for you to start getting the larger checks and the more institutional partners around the table.