LP fundraising is a sales motion. Treat it like one.
Why This Matters (Even Before You Launch a Fund)
Whether you plan to launch a fund or get hired in venture capital, your ability to engage with capital is increasingly valuable. As AI compresses traditional analyst work, humans differentiate through relationship-building, judgment, closing behavior, and credibility in a market.
Understanding how LP fundraising works, even if you’re years away from launching a fund, gives you structural advantages:
You start building your LP pipeline and relationships
You understand what fund managers are optimizing for
You can contribute meaningfully to LP conversations at firms where you work
You develop the pipeline discipline that translates to deal sourcing
This builds directly on the foundational concepts from earlier articles.…
Author: Myrto Lalacos
The highest-leverage role you can play, even before you have a fund
Why Connection Is a Venture Skill
In venture capital, relationships are infrastructure. The best investors move information, opportunities, and trust between the right people at the right time. This creates a structural advantage that compounds over the years.
For aspiring VCs, becoming a strong connector is one of the fastest ways to build a network and a credible edge because it creates measurable outcomes:
Founders get introductions that help their startups grow
Investors get deals that fit their thesis
LPs get access to the VC asset class through relevant managers
You become known as a high-signal node in a specific ecosystem
This connects directly to the foundational concepts covered in the earlier articles.…
Demo Day Intro
For up-and-coming VCs, doing real deal scouting is very difficult. Without an established investment track record, their dealflow is considered unqualified and few VCs or Limited Partners (LPs) will pay attention to their dealflow.
Venture Institute offers participants a chance to overcome that barrier through Demo Day.
What is Demo Day
Demo Day is an optional deal scouting exercise where Venture Institute participants present real, founder-consented fundraising deals to a curated group of active VC firms. It is designed to highlight Venture Institute participants’ ability to source strong opportunities and communicate them at a professional standard.
Demo Day is a live session where selected Venture Institute participants briefly present a startup and take Q&A from a panel of investing VCs.…
A self-assessment framework to identify your starting point, plus a deep dive on the fastest paths to credible edge
Start With an Honest Audit
Before you can build secret sauce, you need to know where you’re starting from. Most aspiring VCs skip this step and jump straight into activity: attending events, taking coffee meetings, reading newsletters. Then they wonder why, two years later, they still can’t articulate a credible edge.
The Secret Sauce Audit forces you to confront reality.
Your Background Inventory
What industries have you worked in? For how long? At what level? What founders, operators, or executives do you already know, and in which sectors? What communities or ecosystems are you already embedded in? Have you made any angel investments, and what were the outcomes?…
In venture capital, the investment thesis is foundational. Whether you intend to raise a fund or build a career in venture, your thesis is a clear and concise statement which defines what you invest in and why you are the best person to do it. It is the basis for how you source opportunities, how you are perceived by founders, other investors and Limited Partners. In other words, your investment thesis will tell you where you should invest your limited time and attention.
What Is an Investment Thesis?
At its core, an investment thesis explains:
What your investment focus is (sector / geography / stage)
Why you are uniquely positioned to invest in that successfully
That positioning might come from expertise, network, experience, or data — but it must be grounded in credibility rather than preference or curiosity.…
Venture capital is a tough business. It’s not enough to be right. For a venture capitalist to win big they have to be both right and non-consensus.
So when we saw the results for this year’s Venture Trends Survey and Event at Decile Group, we saw what could be a red flag for groupthink in the industry. At the very least, it’s a warning that there’s a little too much consensus around one of the hottest investment categories right now.
In fact, it’s a historic amount of consensus. We have never seen this much consensus since we started conducting this annual survey of our ecosystem, which includes VCs within our program and the broader venture community.
When asked to name the hottest sector in the upcoming quarter, for the first time ever, over 50% of respondents all pointed in the same direction: artificial intelligence. …
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VC Lab Cohort 18
Announcing VC Lab Cohort 18
Build a venture fund that shapes humanity’s beautiful future with VC Lab Cohort 18. Join specialized tracks in supply chain, deeptech, govtech, space, and ethics to connect with other top managers, while our AI-powered platform and LP network accelerate your path from concept to close.
Beautiful Future
We are excited to announce VC Lab Cohort 18, the visionary program to launch venture capital funds that will shape humanity’s beautiful future. In this period of rapid change—marked by shifting geopolitical landscapes and economic transformations—the first half of 2025 presents a pivotal moment in venture capital history. It is an ideal time to launch a fund investing in startups producing meaningful innovation and which will shape our collective future.…
VC Lab is a global accelerator that helps new and emerging venture capitalists launch and grow their firms. As the leading program for new managers, VC Lab has a competitive admissions process and an even higher bar for successful completion, with rigorous requirements that reflect the difficulty of starting a fund.
To help managers take the first steps of launching a fund, VC Lab offers the Pre-Curriculum, a guided Sprint designed to support the early, foundational work needed for a successful fund launch. The Pre-Curriculum also provides managers with access to free specialized tools for building a strong investment thesis, identifying aligned LPs, and securing early commitments.
For those committed to completing the Pre-Curriculum with strong results, it may also serve as a pathway to VC Lab admission, offering a tangible advantage in the competitive selection process.…
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VC Lab Cohort 17
We are excited to launch VC Lab Cohort 17, the most powerful platform to launch a VC fund to date.
APPLY TO COHORT 17
VC Lab Cohort 17 is the leading accelerator to launch top performing venture capital funds. We have a number of enhancements coming across the program, technology, and focus areas.
The end of 2024 is a unique moment in the history of venture capital and an ideal time to start a fund.
First, there are exceptional investment opportunities at reasonable valuations as a result of positive trends, like AI, space exploration, decentralized finance, and longevity, as well as global challenges, such as climate change, immigration, and conflict.
Next, there is a growing class of emerging limited partners that are eager to invest in emerging managers, allocating tens of billions of dollars into the asset class over the next 12 to 18 months, and they are not on the radar of established firms. …