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Volume #20 TL;DR:

• If the Emerging Manager is worried about the reputation first, the personal brand will inevitably follow.

• The top 1% of Emerging Managers are commercially minded.

• The personal brand has been lifted up onto a pedestal to a point where it has been transformed from a means to and end to the end itself.

Table of Contents

• The “LP Map”

• Personal Branding Disguised as a Shortcut

• Cicero’s Treatise on Friendship & How We Can Build …

• Why Managers Who Build a Reputation vs. a Personal …

The “LP Map”

I recently started putting together a global interactive map showing LPs who actively invest in Emerging Managers.

Many of the LPs who are listed are members of our exclusive LP community. We all chat in a group chat, exchange insights, the best Emerging Funds, reference checks, reports, etc. And no… it doesn’t cost $ 🙂 

If you are a LP who would like to get listed, please respond to this email and I will get you listed! All you share is the name of your institution, website, and city - no direct way to contact you.

Here is the interactive live view of the map. Please share this with your network, so we can create more transparency around our LP ecosystem.

Personal Branding Disguised as a Shortcut

I was catching up with Michael Ströck, the co-founder of Allocator One, the other day. Speaking with Michael is always highly insightful because Allocator One backs first-time venture funds with a high-conviction strategy. And I am intentionally using the word “strategy” and not “approach”, because there is a difference there.

Having convictions means to have opinions founded on thoughtful reflection and research. And having convictions means to have more edges and disagreeable. And it is always beneficial to speak with people in Venture, who have convictions and invest/operate in accordance with their convictions.

Let me give more color to the kind of conviction Allocator One follows - this is their Anchor Deal:

“We provide the first money as an anchor investment for your new venture capital fund.



• €1m to €3m anchor investment for your fund

• 1% management fee for you on our commitment

• 10% carried interest for you on our commitment”

And as I was speaking with Michael, something in our conversation re-surfaced that I wanted to write a volume about a couple months ago: the importance of building a firm vs. building a personal brand.

Michael formulates very clearly, that the top 1% of Emerging Managers are commercially minded. There are of course various other aspects to identifying a top 1% GP, but being commercially minded, and operating with the clear intent of building a firm, is a marker of being part of the best.

For me, there is a difference between building a reputation vs. a personal brand. And yes, many people will say that building a personal brand is just a means to building a firm - but is it though?

There is nothing intrinsically wrong with building a personal brand. But the way I understand the personal brand is that it is merely disguised as a shortcut to long-term success. But things that look like shortcuts are often detours. Or as a great quote says: “A shortcut is the greatest distance between two points.”

Personal brands can be helpful to achieve an over-all goal. But the personal brand has transformed into a short-term tool for more fundraising. The personal brand should be the result of a successful fund - we have put the cart before the horse. We have put the The personal brand has been lifted up onto a pedestal to a point where it has been transformed from a means to and end to the end itself.

Here is how the reputation differs from a personal brand. The Miriam Webster definition of “reputation” states:

A reputation is something that is tied to your character - to something that you stand for and that people repeatedly recognize you for and associate you with.

A reputation pierces more deeply than a personal brand does. A personal brand is a veil that we can hide more behind than our reputation.

Over the long-term a personal brand is more fragile, a reputation will only grow in stability.

That is why I would say that a reputation is more aligned with the goal of building a firm. A firm is a long-term goal, not a short-term goal. A reputation is built over years. A personal brand is built through virality and can be built within days or weeks - that might not always be the case, but a reputation is never built over days.

Cicero’s Treatise on Friendship & How We Can Build A Reputation

I often share my love for old books with others. Every month I host a book club with my wife where we read books that are at least 400 years old.

One of the great books we read was Cicero’s Treatise on Friendship & Old Age. It’s a book I would recommend to anybody who is looking thoughtful inputs on building meaningful relationships.

And since one’s reputation is correlated to one’s character, one’s repututation is also correlated to how we cultivate and steward relationships.

Thinking about our reputation makes us ask the question: What do we want to be known for? Or an Emerging Manager might ask themselves: What am I trying to proof to others and how will I do it?

Cicero doesn’t directly define what reputation means, but here is a quote from his book that sums the result of a good reputation up:

The best result of a good reputation is that people are honest with you. And building a personal brand doesn’t mean that you can’t be honest, but you will be more effective building your personal brand if you are not brutally honest.

Building a personal brand is being on the cover of the Forbes 30u30 - and we all know how that cover spot relates to honesty.

Here are some other points for reflection upon how we go about building our firm:

• “The man to open his ears widest to flatterers is he who first flatters himself and is fondest of himself.”

• “You can never trust a character which is intricate and tortuous. Nor, indeed, is it possible for one to be trustworthy and firm who is unsympathetic by nature and unmoved by what affects ourselves.”

• “And the result is, what I started by saying, that friendship is only possible between good men.”

Bottom line: building a reputation with people will get your pretty far.

Why Managers Who Build a Reputation vs. a Personal Brand Win

First of all, by winning I mean: building a sustainable business that creates outlier returns across several different funds. I know… sustainable and venture fund doesn’t always go together, but it should.

What is not winning is raising a fund based on hype and not executing.

What is also not winning is building a firm that generates median returns across several funds.

Being average in venture is not winning.

Being an Emerging Manager is an impossibly difficult job. It requires an enormous amount of sacrifice. A unbelievably talented person. And a good character.

Here is why managers who build a reputation vs. a personal brand win: LPs voucing to other LPs is one of the key factors for a “Yes”.

If you have a reputation that is so good that a Limited Partner will introduce you to another Limited Partner it will drastically change the outlook of your fundraising process.

One of the most overlooked factors for an LP, especially a family office, in their decision making, is the trust towards another LP who is also investing. Getting signals from a peer is an incredibly strong investment factor - especially since Emerging Managers are a specific asset class in which the LP has to rely on their ability to invest in people much more than in other asset classes.

Emerging Managers who build a reputation will also win, because they will focus on the foundational elements of building a firm over a long period of time:

• Doing business the right way.

• Creating outlier returns repeatedly.

• Representing their firm first, not their firm representing them.

• Paying the bills.

If we look at any of the tier 1 players today in Venture Capital they all have in common that the name of the firm is bigger than the name of any individual representing the firm. That is culture.

If the Emerging Manager is worried about the reputation first, the personal brand will inevitably follow.