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Aspiring Fund Managers Playbook

Building a Conscious VC Fund

First Followers

Apr 30, 2022

We recently successfully launched a fellowship for aspiring women fund managers from South and Southeast Asia. We got an overwhelming response of around 100 women applying for the first cohort, and we are pleased to announce the first cohort of 32 fellows.

Huge thanks to the @Network Capital Team for coordinating all of this. We have done four sessions as of now with the following:

Amra Naidoo, Accelerating Asia (GP)
Soumya Rajan, Waterfield Advisors (LP/Fund of Funds)
Maya Chandrasekaran, Green Artha (GP)
Namita Dalmia, Enzia Ventures (GP)

In my pursuit to be an emerging manager myself, I wrote quite a several pieces in the last two years about being an emerging manager - what to look for, best practices, and curated resources like:

Fund Model Canvas - There are nine pieces to build a solid case for an impact venture fund, which include a process - fund & portfolio level, investment thesis, fund structure, fund economics, portfolio construction, team, profile- entrepreneurs and LPs, unfair advantage, and purpose & story.
Fund Model Canvas
Startup Support Ecosystems
5 reasons to back First-Time Fund Managers
10 resources for aspiring fund managers
The promise of Venture Studio
Contrarian Investor - value investing

Aligned to my vision of democratizing venture capital, I am sharing a curated learning resource pool that any emerging/aspiring manager can use to self-educate themselves.

Portfolio Construction
Limited Partners Perspectives
- Knowing Limited Partners [First Followers]
- Hard Questions by LPs to GPs [First Followers]
- Inside The Mind Of A Leading LP: How Lps Evaluate New Fund Managers
- The Framework LPs use to assess emerging managers, what concerns and excite LPs in Potential opportunities & the current state of seed today with Hunter Somerville, Partner @Greenspring Associates.
- LP Value Creation, Why DPI is King, and Secondaries as a Means of Exit (Sarah Anderson)
- Chaos Capital, the new Micro VC Movement and LPs Chasing Hype (Chris Douvos)
- The Limited Partner, Part 1 (Lindel Eakman)
- The Limited Partner, Part 1 (Lindel Eakman)
- The Limited Partner, Part 2 (Lindel Eakman)
- Lindel Eakman, Foundry Group Next
- LP Value Creation, Why DPI is King, and Secondaries as a Means of Exit (Sarah Anderson)
- Elizabeth Beezer Clarkson, Sapphire Ventures
- The LP Perspective And The OpenLP Reboot With Beezer Clarkson
- Michael Kim, Cendana Capital
- Lessons from 300+ Venture Capital Fund Pitches
- 20VC: Inside The Mind of A Leading LP: How LPs Evaluate New Fund Managers on Everything from First Meeting to Portfolio Construction To Fees and Carry with Lisa Edgar, Managing Director @ Top Tier Capital Partners
- Lo Toney, Plexo Capital: "Lo Toney is the founding managing partner of Plexo Capital, a new $42.5 million fund incubated inside of GV focused on making investments in seed-stage VC firms led by women or people of color." It is an exciting fund
- GP and LP Alignment, Challenges for Emerging Fund Managers, and How the Explosion in Seed Fund Volume Plays Out (Jaclyn Hester)
Fund Economics
How to fundraise for the first fund?
Portfolio Support / Portfolio Management
Branding
Terms and LPs Due Diligence on GPs

Thank you for reading this. If you find it useful, please do share!

"first followers" is founded by Sagar Tandon. You can reach out to me at sagar@firstfollowers.co.

The "first followers" is a monthly newsletter covering impact investing, venture capital, innovative financing instruments, and venture building.