Volume #24 TL;DR:

• This is the telos of repetition: to refine our perception to be more accurate and quick.

• The reason why repetition is so important is that it grows both your access and your ability to pick.

• If you want to be a half-decent LP, you need to see/speak with at least 500+ funds annually.

• As a Limited Partner I not only have to be incredibly well versed in the mastery of understanding who people are, I also need to invest in the person, who has mastered their understanding of people.

Table of Contents

• Reviewing Pitch Decks

• Claude Monet as a Teacher for Venture Capital

• Upcoming Partner Webinar: Operationalizing a Fund …

• Why Repetition Is Important for Venture Capital

• The Repetition that Matters most for GPs and LPs

Reviewing Pitch Decks

A few days ago I offered to review 5 pitch decks. I sent a few Emerging Managers in-depth and honest LP feedback on their pitch deck. I received close to 40 pitch decks within 24h and looked at all of them.

It underlines how difficult it is for Emerging Managers to stand out. Put yourself into the shoes of an LP looking at 40 pitch decks over a short period amount of time. The pitch decks start to blend together very quickly.

The one’s I got to write a review on, I gave practical advice on how to stand out more and how to tell their story in a more compelling way to LPs.

Since I can’t review 30+ pitch decks in my “free time”, but with the demand I saw from my short post, I wanted to give this community an exclusive link to submit their pitch deck to me. There is a $100 fee to receive the feedback, which is the lowest fee I can justify to my calendar, commitments, and time.

You can get the link here: https://www.embracingemergence.com/exclusivereview

Claude Monet as a Teacher for Venture Capital

Claude Monet was the founder of the Impressionist Movement. His method of painting was shaped by him painting the same scene so many times that his sequence of paintings would start to highlight differences in lighting, shades, or the growth of a single lily pad.

In 1899, Monet began to paint the famous water lilies in his garden and dedicated the last 20 years of his life to painting this perspective over and over and over and over again.

As Monet started to sit in his garden and be inspired by the nature around him, Monet’s paintings were reflecting the broader scenery. He was painting views of the landscape, including the Japanese bridge, weeping willows, water lilies, the horizon, and other beautiful elements that were surrounding him.

In the later years his paintings evolved and were becoming increasingly more focused. He ended up painting single water lilies or even just fragments of a lily pad. A partial factor was his decline in eyesight, but an even deeper factor was his growing perception and familiarity with his surrounding and his artistic evolution.

The evolution of Monet’s paintings give us a good image of the importance of active repetition. As we become more familiar with broad landscapes, we grow in our capacity to perceive details, and even more importantly: perceive details and nuances quickly and accurately.

This is the telos of repetition: to refine our perception to be more accurate and quick.

Upcoming Partner Webinar: Operationalizing a Fund LPs Can Trust

Just like Monet refined his perspective by painting the same scene over and over, emerging managers refine their own approach—through people, patterns, and repetition. But in addition to building relationships, GPs also need to build credibility through how their fund is structured and managed.

On Thursday, April 17 at 4 PM ET, our partner, Sydecar, is hosting a live webinar featuring Bonita Stewart (BAG Ventures), Ed Zimmerman (Lowenstein Sandler, First Close Partners), and Vincent Timoney (Senior Managing Director, Citizens Private Bank) on what it means to operationalize a venture fund that earns LP trust and is set up for long-term success.

The session will cover:

• What LPs look for during fund diligence

• Best practices for fund structure and management

• Financing the GP commit

Register here 

Why Repetition Is Important for Venture Capital

Now, you might think that this I am “over-philosophizing” Venture Capital, so let me explain why I believe repetition is important for our industry.

Venture Capital is an industry of access and picking. You can be a great picker, but without the right ratio of access, you can’t exercise your picking capabilities on a sufficient amount of companies. You can have the greatest access, but if you have not mastered the craft of picking the best companies, all you’re left with is a bunch of open doors without knowing which one to go through.

The reason why repetition is so important is that it grows both your access and your ability to pick. The more you talk to founders, the more introductions to more founders you will make/get. The more you talk to founders, the more you refine which one’s you need to be talking with more.

I will make the same argument for being a Limited Partner. I remember when we started from almost 0 a couple years ago within a Family Office where I helped stand up our Emerging Manager strategy. I had endless days of 10+ 30min Zoom session a day. Call after call after call.

I spent hours in PitchBook reverse-engineering what funds I should be speaking with. I even ran email drip campaigns to Venture Funds (which was easy, since I am representing a LP). I had to start with generating access. And generating access as a Limited Partner is more work than the public narrative gives credit to.

If you want to be a half-decent LP, you need to see/speak with at least 500+ funds annually.

The way I often describe the journey is: you first taste several types of drinks next to each other and learn to identify “what is coffee”, “what is wine”, and “what is water”. And once you figure out what wine tastes like, you can actually start tasting the different types of wines next to each other, and develop a taste for what is good.

So, as repetition grows, so does access and picking.

But there is a certain kind of repetition, which is crucial for the Emerging Manager - Limited Partner landscape.

The Repetition that Matters most for GPs and LPs

To pick the them of Monet’s garden pack up: the scenery which Emerging Managers and Limited Partners spend their time in the most is people. We spend our days, years, decades in a garden of people.

We meet the people who build companies that change how we live, how move from point A to B, how we work, how we raise our children, how we manage our finances, etc. We spend time with the people who invest in us, both their time and/or money.

And as we spend time, sitting on our bench in our garden of people, day in and day out, we start to perceive the broad landscape in which we live. And over time, we start to grow in our capacity to perceive the details about the different people in our garden.

We start to notice habits, we start to decode certain words people use and how the use them, we start to read their body language, we start to measure response times, we start to learn how to understand people’s motivations, we start to understand their talents, etc.

As a Limited Partner I not only have to be incredibly well versed in the mastery of understanding who people are, I also need to invest in the person, who has mastered their understanding of people.

The only way we can become good readers and painters of people in our garden is through an immense amount of repetition. And it requires a repetition that is engaged in reflection, in active perception of the scenery, and in documenting what we have perceived.

We are all on the pathway of being the Claude Monet of people in Venture Capital.