How To Raise a Venture Capital Fund Over the last 4 years, I have raised around $400M across different vehicles from many different types of investors. Today I am going to break down the early stages of how to raise a venture capital fund and then stay tuned for a follow-up to this where we will break down a fundraising deck for a fund, what to do, what not to do etc. But to the first element.  Your Fund Size is Your Strategy: The most important decision you will make is the size of fund you raise. So much of your strategy and approach will change according to your fund size target (LP type, messaging, documentation, structure etc). Remember, your fund size is your strategy. If you are raising a $10M Fund, you are likely writing collaborative checks alongside a follower, if you are raising a $75M fund, you will likely be leading early-stage seed rounds. These are very different strategies and ways of investing.  MISTAKE: The single biggest mistake I see fund managers make is they go out to fundraise with too high a target fundraise. One of the most important elements in raising for a fund is creating the feeling of momentum in your raise. The more of the fund you have raised and the speed with which you have raised those funds dictate that momentum. So the smaller the fund, the easier it is to create that heat and momentum in your raise. LESSON: Figure out your minimum viable fund size (MVFS). Do this by examining your portfolio construction. In other words, how many investments you want to make in the fund (the level of diversification) and then alongside that, the average check size you would like to invest in each company. Many people forget to discount the fees when doing this math and so the traditional fund will charge 2% fees per year and so across the life of the fund (usually 10 years), that is 20% of the fund allocated to fees.  Example: We are raising a $10M Fund.  20% is allocated to fees for the manager and so we are left with $8M of investable capital.  A good level of diversification for an early-stage fund is 30 companies and so with this fund size, I would recommend 32 investments with an average of $250K per company. That is the $8M in invested capital. Big tip, I often see managers raising a seed fund and are only planning to make 15 investments, this is simply not enough. You have to have enough diversification in the portfolio if you are at the seed stage. No one is that good a picker. Likewise, I sometimes see 100 or even 200 investments per fund, this is the spray-and-pray approach, and although works for some, your upside is inherently capped when you run the maths on fund sizes with this many investments.  A big element to point out in this example is we have left no allocation for reserves. For those that do not know, reserves are the dollars you set aside to re-invest in existing portfolio companies. Different funds reserve different amounts, on the low end there is 0% reserves and on the high end some even have 70% of the fund reserved for follow-on rounds.  In this example, given the size of the fund being $10M with a seed focus, I would recommend we have a no-reserves policy. Any breakout companies you can take to LPs and create SPVs to concentrate further capital into the company. This is also better for you as the manager as you then have deal by deal carry on the SPVs that are not tied to the performance of the entire fund. So now we know we know $10M is our MVFS as we want to make at least 30 investments and we want to invest at least $250K per company. Great, next step.  Set a target that is on the lower end, you can always have a hard cap that is significantly higher but you do not want the target to be too far away that LPs question whether you will be able to raise the fund at all. This is one of the biggest reasons why many do not invest in a first time fund, they are unsure whether the fund will be raised at all.  The Team: Alongside the size of the fund, th