We analyzed twenty emerging manager VC fundraises in 2023-2024 - ten successful, ten failed.
One finding towers above everything else:
70% of successful funds had a named anchor LP before they formally launched.
0% of failed funds had an anchor.
Not 10%. Not 20%. Zero.
If you're starting your fundraise by reaching out to new institutional LPs hoping to build momentum from scratch, the data says you've already lost. The raise is over. You don't want it to go that way.
In a risk-off market, you cannot generate institutional commitment from a standing start.
The funds that closed had their lead LP committed before they went broad. You read that correctly. They nailed the anchor first.
They spent 6-12 months building that anchor relationship before announcing.
Then they used that momentum to close the rest of the LP base in 90-120 days.
The funds that failed were trying to source anchor commitments during the raise. By the time they realized they needed a lead, the market had moved on.
At LP Blueprint we are obsessed with this because it is our job to be obsessed with this. We advise 2% of the investment firms in North America. We have to be.
Here's the honest test. If you can't answer "yes" to all four, don't go out to raise right now.
✅ You can probably raise IF:
❌ You probably CANNOT raise if:
The funds that closed in 2023-2024 weren't "fundraising" during that period. They'd been building LP relationships for years. The failed funds were trying to compress relationship-building into a 9-month fundraising window.
Spoiler alert: it didn't work.
We analyzed Fund I-III raises to isolate what operational factors correlate with success when performance track records are minimal. (Our mom, who worked at a library for 38 years, made us cite our sources.)
Already covered above. This is the line of demarcation.
What we mean by pedigree: A GP who spent 3+ years as an investor (Associate, Principal, or Partner) at an established, institutional venture capital firm that LPs already know and respect.
Successful: 80% had a GP from an established fund (Lightspeed, a16z, Kleiner, Bessemer, Sequoia, Greylock, Foundry, etc.)
*Failed: 20% had similar pedigrees; most were operator-VCs or founders-turned-investors
In a risk-off market, LPs defaulted to known networks. If you came from a brand-name platform, you started with institutional relationships that take others a decade to build. You can call the Head of Venture at a university endowment and they'll take the meeting because they know Lightspeed—you're pre-validated.
This stinks and it isn't fair, but it's reality.
Counterintuitive but consistent. For emerging tech VCs or PE investors, hiring a placement agent signals "my own network is insufficient."
LPs interpret this as weakness, not strength. The placement agent doesn't solve the problem. It advertises it.
This isn't why LP Blueprint is anti-placement agent. Here's why we're anti-placement agent: it drastically increases the cost of your fundraise.
The baseline cost of fundraising:
- A typical fundraise costs about 2.5% of capital raised for the first $50M
- For larger raises ($100M-$300M), it's typically around 2% of capital raised
- This covers GP time, team salaries during the raise, travel, LP events, legal fees, diligence support—everything
What that means in real dollars:
For a $50M Fund I raise:
- Normal cost: ~$1.25M (2.5% of $50M) - your team's time, travel, legal, events
For a $100M Fund II raise:
- Normal cost: ~$2M (2% of $100M) - your team's time, travel, legal, events
Now add a placement agent:
Placement agents typically charge 2-3% of capital raised as their fee. That's on top of the baseline fundraising costs you're already paying.
For a $50M Fund I with placement agent:
- Baseline costs: $1.25M (your team's time, travel, legal)
- Placement agent fee: $1M-$1.5M (2-3% of $50M)
- Total cost: $2.25M-$2.75M
For a $100M Fund II with placement agent:
- Baseline costs: $2M (your time, travel, legal)
- Placement agent fee: $2M-$3M (2-3% of $100M)
- Total cost: $4M-$5M
You're doubling or tripling the cost of the raise.
And that money doesn't come from nowhere.
It comes out of fund economics.
Either LP returns decrease or management fees increase. LPs see the placement agent on your Form D and know exactly what it means
It means you paid $2M-$3M because the GP or Managing Director was unwilling to learn the core skills required to close institutional capital: frame control, handling rejection, and managing complex LP relationships.
These aren't optional skills for a fund manager. They're fundamental to the job. If you're outsourcing them to a placement agent, you're signaling to LPs that you lack the executive presence and relationship discipline required to manage their capital for 10+ years.
LPs invest in GPs who can navigate difficult conversations, maintain conviction under pressure, and build lasting institutional relationships.
When they see a placement agent on the Form D, the question they're asking isn't "Did this help them raise?"
It's "Why wasn't this GP willing to develop the skills to do this themselves?"
The placement agent fee isn't just expensive.
It's a visible signal that your institutional network was insufficient.
Our data shows 0% of successful emerging managers used placement agents. Not because they were being cheap.
Because they had the relationships to close direct. And they kept that $2M-$3M in the fund where it belongs.
Content and conferences help, but they're multipliers on existing strength, not substitutes for it.
If you lack pedigree and anchors, launching a newsletter six months before your raise won't save you. Public GTM is a years-long brand investment, not a short-term fundraising tactic.
For Fund I-III, fundraising is the GPs' job. Period.
You cannot outsource institutional relationship-building to a hired IR professional any more than you can outsource it to a placement agent.
LPs are investing in YOU, and they need to build conviction in YOUR ability to manage capital, handle very hard conversations, and maintain long-term relationships.
Dedicated IR becomes relevant when you're managing hundreds of LP relationships across multiple fund vintages (Fund IV+).
At the emerging stage, if you're hiring someone to "handle fundraising," you're signaling the same weakness as hiring a placement agent: unwillingness to learn the core skills of the job.
We also examined four established funds that failed to close successor vehicles in 2023. Three of these failures had nothing to do with LP origination strategy.
You read that right. It had nothing to do with fundraising.
1. Basis Set Ventures (Fund III): $135M and $180M previous funds, direct raise through deep institutional networks. Failed because portfolio marks dropped and existing LPs refused to recommit. No amount of relationship-building could overcome that.
2. Threshold Ventures (Fund IV): ~$300M Fund III, relationship-based raise, sophisticated LP base. Failed because Fund III valuations corrected and denominator effect hit institutions simultaneously. Execution wasn't the problem.
3. Primary Venture Partners (Opportunity Fund): Successfully closed their core Fund V using the same LP relationships and strategy. The Opp Fund failed because LPs stopped committing to illiquid growth vehicles. They proved they could execute. Unfortunately, the product was wrong for the market.
These were not GTM failures.
These were performance and market timing failures. Even established funds with sophisticated fundraising operations couldn't overcome portfolio markdowns and institutional LP pullback.
The fourth case is different.
4. Slauson & Co. (Fund II): $50M Fund I raised from HNWIs, family offices, and corporate LPs. Went out for $100M+ Fund II targeting institutions. The fund struggled for 12 months with a placement agent and high public visibility. Ultimately abandoned the institutional raise.
This was an LP origination failure. They needed to scale from angels to institutions, but the institutional pipeline wasn't there. Even with public GTM and a placement agent, they couldn't convert the large commitments required. The LP relationships needed for scale-up didn't exist before the raise, and the market gave them no time to build them during it.
The lesson: Three of four established fund failures were about performance. One emerging manager failure was about inadequate LP pipeline. Both kill you, but they're different problems requiring different solutions.
You can't control market timing.
You can't control the denominator effect.
You can't retroactively change your GP pedigree or fix portfolio markdowns.
But if you have defensible performance, here's what you CAN control:
1. Build institutional relationships continuously, not episodically. The GPs who closed in 2023 had warm LP pipelines before they needed capital. They'd been nurturing relationships for years. LPs already knew their strategy, trusted their judgment, and were waiting for allocation opportunity. If you only talk to LPs when you're raising, you're doing it backwards. [If you want to hang out with LPs and GPs right now, come and join us at office hours and on Discord.]
2. Secure an anchor before you go broad. This is non-negotiable. Spend the 6-12 months before formal launch building deep relationships with 2-3 target anchors. Get one committed. Then use that social proof to close the rest of the LP base in 90-120 days. If you announce without a lead, you're generating FOMO from a position of weakness. It doesn't work. [This is what we do in Capital OS Premium. We make lists of 400-450 anchors. We do this about a year before we need an anchor.]
Avoid placement agents for emerging tech VC. The data is clear: 0% success rate in our sample. If you're considering this because your network is insufficient, that's the real problem. Fix the network gap, don't outsource it.
Use content strategically, not desperately. Public GTM compounds over years. If you're starting a newsletter hoping to source institutional LPs for a raise six months from now, sorry. You're too late. Content helps with deal flow and long-term brand, but it won't directly fill your LP pipeline in the near term.
If you're reading this at 1 AM staring at Q3 deployment pacing and wondering whether you can raise F5, here's what matters:
The funds that waited until they needed capital were the ones that couldn't close.
The funds that had been building LP relationships for years? The ones who had anchors lined up before they formally launched? They closed in 120 days even in the worst fundraising environment in a decade.
You cannot compress years of relationship-building into a 9-month fundraising window.
If you don't have institutional LPs who would take your call today and seriously consider leading your round, start building those relationships now. Not when you need to raise. Now. If you're not sure how? Come to office hours on Monday. Send us questions here.
Because in 2023-2024, execution mattered, but only after you cleared the baseline thresholds of performance and anchor commitment. If you lacked both, no GTM strategy could save you.
The question isn't whether fundraising strategy matters. It's whether you're building the institutional pipeline before you need it, or whether you're planning to start when the clock is already running.
The data says: if you wait, you lose.
But don't take our word for it. Pull the data yourself:
Compare the Patterns. You'll quickly see a trend: successful funds were often led by GPs with elite pedigrees and strong anchor LPs. Struggling funds frequently lacked both.
Build your own thesis. Check my math. In this market, anyone selling certainty is probably full of s**t.
Dataset 1 (Established Funds): Four documented cases validated through SEC Form D filings and press coverage. Qualitative case study research, not a statistical sample. We cannot access proprietary performance data (TVPI/DPI).
Dataset 2 (Emerging Managers): Twenty Fund I-III raises (ten successful, ten failed/struggled) matched by fund number, size, and sector. Data from SEC EDGAR, LinkedIn, PitchBook free tier, Crunchbase, press. Sample size allows pattern observation but not statistical significance testing.
Primary limitation: Cannot control for performance differences. Correlations between operational factors and outcomes may be confounded by unreported TVPI/DPI variations.
What this shows: Observable patterns in fundraising execution. What it cannot prove: Causation independent of performance.