Peer-to-peer communities compound when everyone is working from the same reference points, including shared context on what reports peers are reading and what patterns are emerging.

Sydecar’s 2025 SPV Year-in-Review summarizes platform data from SPVs closed in 2025, including how activity accelerated and where secondaries showed up.

What’s inside:

Access the full 2025 SPV Year-in-Review here.

Before you bother reading my thoughts on community building in Venture Capital, let me share why I believe community building is worth the time and effort in the first place.

It won’t be a revelation to anyone reading this, that Venture Capital is an industry that is heavily depends on people and your access to the right people at the right time. In short, Venture Capital is equally dependent upon your competency as it is on your intentions.

Intention here representing your ability to form relationships in such a way where they are not perceived as extractive or disingenuous. You need to be able to approach relationships with such intention so that the counterpart will want to interact with you repeatedly, not just for you to come away with a one-time win. This virtue is what the philosophers call “play” (read a different writing of mine on this here).

It’s being on the playground and inviting someone to play “house” with you. You want to invite them to play with you in such a way where you don’t just tell them: we are going to play house, you will be the mom, stand over here, and I will come approach you and we will play. It’s more so: do you want to play house with me? What role would you like to play? Where do you think we should play?

And then you have to play in such a way, where they want to play with you again tomorrow.

This sounds trivial. But if you are good at this, Venture Capital will become a land of endless opportunity.

And competency is just as important as intention. This is where art meets the science. You have to be a master of your craft and industry. People alone will only get you this far.

Now think of a community in Venture as such described playground, while it is also a marketplace for competency training and exchange. A place where you get to meet people who want to play. Find the right playmates, play repeatedly, create win-win scenarios for your playmates and yourself. While also learning and exchanging competencies.

Additionally, good communities and cultures have the benefit of more predictable access to the right people at the right time. Timing is critical in Venture where things need to happen quickly. A community can shortcut these timing loops to meet the right people.

I have been shepherding communities in Venture Capital for the last 5 years. It has become something that is second nature to me. Gathering people, creating spaces for genuine connection and exploration, and finding alignment between people is something that also manifests in Embracing Emergence.

One of the key questions that communities in Venture need to ask is: how can you win without being transactional?

How can you create an opportunity for advantages through your community, without the community simply serving the purpose of the advantages themselves?

Hence, community building in Venture Capital, in many industries for that sake, comes down to culture and incentive alignment.

Here is how I think about culture:

Culture is the manifestation of your credo. Hence, you cannot have a strong culture without strong beliefs. You must believe something in order to create a culture. And you must let everyone who joins your community know what it is that you believe in.

One side effect of a strong credo is that not everyone will agree with your approach. But you cannot be afraid of rejection. Actually, if everyone wants to join your community without people disagreeing, you might need to form stronger beliefs. Not that you should pursue rejection or controversy for the sake of it. But a lack thereof might make you reflect.

I think that is one of the oftentimes misunderstood aspects of culture. Culture is not something that is formulated over a cup of coffee and then passed down through knowledge transfer. This applies to the credo, which is more foundational than culture.

The Credo is the part you write and formulate, culture is the actionable expression of your credo.

Over the last years I have built two core communities in Venture and both have been peer-to-peer communities. One was The Associates Network, which was exclusively for VC Associates. The value was to connect 1:1 with peers who have a similar investment focus as you in order to share deal flow. Benefits were more efficient deal sourcing, building relationships that would increase exponentially in value as peers would be promoted to higher levels in firms, and exchange learnings. In 2023, I made close to 1,000 personalized 1:1 introductions between members, based on a unique matching algorithm.

And since I started Embracing Emergence, I have started to gather actively deploying Limited Partners in a group to exchange learnings, different investment approaches, and transparent feedback in an asset class that oftentimes hides behind a veil.

Now, I am also starting a community for Emerging Managers who participate in the upcoming cohort of The Circle.

But why are they all peer-to-peer communities?

There are several reason why I believe communities in Venture benefit nowadays by creating a space for peers to meet vs. crossmatching capital sources to funds:

The most obvious one is because nobody needs more deal flow nowadays. I feel very strongly about platforms or communities that match GPs with LPs. I dislike it. It’s extractive. It solves a problem in such a way, where if this is a problem that needs to be solved for you, you shouldn’t be doing Venture in the first place.

Also, we’re not in vintage years anymore where we need more deal flow, we need better deal flow. Better deals come from the inside of the ecosystem, peers.

People, especially LPs, have also become more hesitant about their own conclusions are not incentivized to take risks on investments that have the potential to loose money. That’s how you loose your job. I’m not weighing this, it just is what it is.

But LPs are incentivized to learn from other LPs on how they are approaching the asset class. What reports they are reading, what funds they follow, how they do due diligence, how they manage their portfolio across different asset classes, etc.

And it’s much easier to trust peers and bond over shared experiences.

The mentioned trust is a key factor of why peer-to-peer communities in Venture are much more effective. Peers can admit what they don’t know without risking their reputation or deal flow. They can admit not to know everything without losing reputation, potential dollars, or deals.

With this vulnerability, you create actual learning rather than pretended performance.

As I mentioned earlier, aligning incentives is as crucial as your culture when shepherding a community. And here is the deal: you have to let people have incentives. I have seen communities in Venture where there are rules such as: you cannot share deals that benefit you, etc.

That does not work for very long without losing engagement. That is culture that you set before letting people join the group. I always tell LPs: this is a group where it’s expected that you can share things that benefit you, but you ultimately have to be a net positive value to the community.

And for matchmaking platforms: when you mix capital sources with capital seekers, every interaction carries transactional subtext. Constantly having to calculate for incentives is exhausting and will make community members stop engaging.

Emerging Managers and LPs have asymmetric information by design. But peer-to-peer exchange creates a different kind of compounding: almost like a collective algorithm for pattern recognition in our industry.

Peer relationships don’t have built in expiration rates or are not dependent on heating up seasons, i.e. fundraises. They are slow and steady and can grow across decades as careers can evolve in parallels.

Here is something people oftentimes underestimate: the best in Venture keep track of generosity. Generosity meaning doing something for someone else without a direct benefit to yourself.

People who show up consistently in peer communities when there’s no immediate capital at stake tend to be people that are worth knowing. The peer-to-peer format itself helps members sort for these people.

There are several great peer-to-peer communities in the Emerging Manager / LP space:

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