3 mistakes to avoid as an emerging manager

By all accounts, I was a successful emerging manager. I raised $65 million with fewer than 25 LPs, including an institutional fund of funds and a sovereign wealth fund. I was not a spin-out manager from a name brand fund. Hell, I didn’t even have a VC or tech background.

Still, I spent a good chunk of my fundraising period wrestling an unrelenting sense of self-criticism I couldn’t ignore. Fortunately, listening to that critical inner voice instead of ignoring it led to my success.

While there’s no one right way to go about fundraising, there are a few wrong ways — and failure is a wonderful teacher. Here’s how I learned from my failures in order to succeed as an emerging manager:

LPs don’t care about the same things you do

As a systematic fund that spent thousands of hours unearthing unique insights through deep research, I assumed that my LPs would care to know exactly what that research process looked like, what insights were uncovered and how they applied to our investments.

To my surprise, they really didn’t care about any of that. At least not to the extent I thought they would.

By over-explaining how I was going to make them money, I committed the same mistake I’ve seen many technical founders make: talking incessantly about perceived superiority without gauging my listener’s actual interest in the topic.