When I was about 5 years old, we used to have these little black ring magnets on the fridge. They were very, very strong. You could stack a few of them on top of one another. You could smash your little kid fingers in between them.

Actual photo of me under the coffee table, 1982

We also used to have a really nice glass coffee table in our living room. I always used to climb under it and smash my face against it, like I was General Zod, Ursa and Non trapped in the Phantom Zone in Superman II. It was some dope s***.

One day my sister, who was about three, decided to throw one of those strong magnets at the table, and it chipped the s*** out of that table. We kept the table for probably another twenty years. I learned a few things from this:

1. Three year olds do stupid s*** that is generally funny

2. Magnets are a lot of fun to play with

3. Magnets are small but very strong

We built three magnets for fund managers over the past two years:

1. The Site Audit: Tells you if an LP will want to meet with you

2. GP Velocity: Tells you when (and IF) you’ll close your fund or SPV

3. The Narrative Builder: Tells you if your fund has a narrative, and helps you tweak and shape it. Customers in B2B remember things 10x better if you put it in a story.

Whenever I meet with a fund manager that doesn’t have much money and has pretty much zero LPs I think two things.

1. This fund manager probably does not have a P&L or a budget for their fundraise.

2. This fund manager probably does not have any magnets

First off, we are not that smart. Most of our own customers don’t even like us. All we do is sit around and listen to Gorilla Biscuits and Anthrax and yell at them for being lazy.

Today, I am just going to show you our magnets, how we built them, why we build them (we’re lazy and just want to sit around eating potato pancakes and watching AI videos about why nobody visits the Poconos anymore on YouTube)

So, it turns out there is good news and bad news.

The tool that made people feel s*****, the Site Audit, converted way better than the tool that made people feel good. We’re not really into FUD, but wow those numbers are pretty crazy man. So even though the GP Velocity magnet did sometimes give fund managers.

Most magnets convert at 1-5%. Ours convert at 11.7%, the audit converts at like 21.5%, and we are about to make big tweaks to it. We have no problem giving this information away. Steal all you want from it, we do not give a f***.

We will see you at office hours at 12pm PT (3pm ET, 7pm GMT) on Monday!

If you are a fund manager, here are the top three magnets we recommend you put on your website if you want lots of new LPs:

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We used to hand out this cute little two-page budget doc that told fund managers what they needed to do to “raise their fund right.”

It told them to allocate about 2 people for every 25-30M of capital and about 3% of the fund to the fundraise. It turns out:

1. Nobody f******* listened to that advice

2. There were tears, lots of tears

This is not to say that we were right.

This is to say that if you try to raise a $100M fund with 2 people behind the wheel you are going to raise $20-40M.

We start nearly every morning with Bon Scott, because we’re crazy like that.

And now there’s a 6-page version of this budget document.

You can grab it below. And here’s what it contains. So now, we are going to first email this 6-page budget doc to 122,000 of you, and then after that we will directly place it in the inboxes of another 28,000 fund managers.

This time, nobody is going to be able to say, “We’re not really sure how to do the budget.” For that matter, they probably will not even be able to say, “We’re not sure which AC/DC lineup these guys are partial to.”

(Also, if you were wondering, “will I fit in with LP Blueprint people?” - the vetting question would be - “Am I the type of person that asks for permission, or do I just walk into the room?”)

What you’ll see below is the actual budget broken out by fund size, $30M, $50M, $100M and so on. If you don’t see your fund size, don’t worry about it. Feel free to email us this document, and we will redo it for you.

These are the dollar figures for what it costs to go from “I have this idea” to “the fund is f********* closed.”

Here’s what’s in it:

What it actually costs, by fund size.

Legal, data room, travel, compliance, placement fees (if you need one) - it’s all broken down for $30M, $50M, and $100M raises.

The grand total pre-close out-of-pocket runs from around $138K on the low end to $1.3M at $100M, and we show you exactly where that money goes. Dollar for dollar, man.

The tech stack, but mapped to what LPs think of you.

What you run on - CRM, data room, fund admin, reporting - that ain’t “tooling”.

LPs read this s*** as signal. If it’s crappy Google Hangouts kind of s*** they think, “Oh wow, the whole fund is some duct tape s***.” That’s totally fine if that’s your vibe, but no LP who’s any good is going to write a check into that.

We show you what a $30M fund should be running vs. a $50M fund, and what each choice says about whether you look emerging or uh, Google Hangouts.

Where the old-school data terminals bleed your runway.

A legacy PitchBook or Preqin seat runs $20K–$50K a year, chasing a slice of the LP universe that’s narrow, and does not often fund folks under $100M AUM.

If you want to see the latest from board-verified pensions, endowments, and the family offices that allocate to funds your size, you can see that here, at 10% the cost.

We show what the same coverage costs when you’re not locked into a 12-month enterprise contract, and where that freed-up cash is better spent. But hey, you do you.

Headcount, no b*******.

We also show how many FTEs you need at each fund size, assuming you’re running lean, because most emerging managers either overhire OR try to do it all themselves and burn out six months before first close. Either of those two options sucks.

If you’re raising right now, or about to start, this is the budget nobody hands you until you’ve already made the expensive mistakes. Go read it. Or if you just want to spend a bunch of money instead, here is the link for a Pitchbook trial. If you complete that webform they will call you 12 times in a week so you will not be lonely.

If you’d like to join us at office hours on Monday, feel free. Just click the link above. We have 39 seats left in our Founding 100. Come and join 122+ other investment firms in our community! Office hours are at 12pm PT (3pm ET, 7pm GMT).

Also, here are some really helpful links to see if you’re ready to meet with LPs:

1. Site Audit (v1.3):

2. GP Velocity: to tell if you are forming capital fast enough. If you are not, it is probably because you are having budget problems. This is the number one cause we have found.

3. Fund Narrative Builder: This was the very first fund narrative tool we built, about 15 months ago. We encourage you to use it multiple times. The idea here is that it’s meant for iterating the fund’s pitch and also developing the pitch to your three top types of LPs (i.e. family offices, fund of funds, F&E - foundation and endowment).

If any of this stuff is confusing come and talk with other community members at office hours. We learn from talking with one another, in person and on Discord.

We get asked to do 2-3 free 1:1s, demos and such every day.

We say no to that and here is why.

When you are ready to join LP Blueprint you will just join.

You will know when it is your time. You will know when you are called.

If you want blood, you’ve got it.

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We’ve been discussing two big topics lately around family offices at office hours (Mondays, 12pm PT, 3pm ET, 7pm GMT, 11pm Dubai time).

A lot of fund managers come to family offices and say, “I don’t know how to work with family offices and I can’t tell how much money they want to invest!”

Here’s the two big topics (we’ll get back to them in a minute):

1. Allocation pressure: who has to write a check in the next 12-24 months, and how we get this information

2. Check size: which family offices typically write what check size

What I always ask the fund manager is, ”How many startups can you name off the top of your head?”

Then they go and name like 387 startups.

I say, “Wow that’s impressive. Where did you learn that?”

They say, “Oh well, I meet with startups all the time. I go to startup events, I meet with startup founders, startup startup startup….”

I usually then ask if startups ever give them money or buy anything from them and they say no. This is usually the part where they realize that founders and/or the companies that investment firms invest in are vendors and LPs are the customers.

Then I ask them, “Ok, how many family offices can you name?”

They usually get stuck at about 5.

When I ask them to talk about family office AUM, as in, “what’s the right range?” - blank stare (we recommend starting around at least 200M+ AUM, 600-800M+ AUM is sweet spot for fund/SPV).

The reason fund managers do so poorly with family offices is typically because of two things:

1. There is not one team member that is an expert on family offices, and they do not literally memorize information about them

2. Their in-house research practice around family offices f****** sucks. If you are going to get lots and lots of money from family offices, you are going research them a lot, talk about them a lot, meet with them a lot, know what a real family office looks like, know what a fake family office looks like, know family office tax documents backwards and forwards and deeply understand FO problems. If you do not have 1-2 people on your team whose job is called Research, odds are your research is not very good. I’m obsessed with research. I do it all day long. The best salespeople I know are maniacs for research.

These family offices today, we’re definitely profiling them by check size. That’s how we Match investment firms to LPs in our Match Engine program. We use 3 criteria:

1. Check size

2. Thesis match

3. Allocation Pressure

If you want to read the previous six entries in this series, there is a LOT here. We’ve gotten a TON of feedback and a lot of new paid subscribers due to this series. Every one of the first 6 parts focuses on a different kind of family office that invests in blind-pool fund vehicles and SPVs. You can also browse this data in our family office data, which begins at $199/mo. If you’d like to pay ten to fifteen times more, here is a link for a Pitchbook trial.

1. Part 1: Foundations

2. Part 2: The $114M Seed Fund That Has An NFL Owner….

3. Part 3: India’s Family Offices

4. Part 4: Athlete Family Offices

5. Part 5: The Bush Library & TX Family Offices

6. Part 5.5: The Kirkland Family Office

7. Part 6: 5 Killer Family Offices

If you want to come to office hours, feel free to join the 130+ GPs and LPs in our community. There are 40 spots left in our Founding 100, at $18/mo (billed annual). After that, it goes to $27/mo. We don’t allow GPs or LPs to attend office hours for free, as that would let low-intent, low-commitment GPs and LPs join. That’s against our values.

We do not do 1:1 meetings or demos. If you need to join our community, just join.

You will know when it’s the right time.

Site Audit v1.3 (it’s free, one time)

Quick note, we just pushed v1.3 of our Site Audit. You’re welcome to use it one time at no charge. LP Blueprint community members can use it as many times as they want to.

When we launched our original Site Readiness Audit for fund managers back in May, it graded your fund’s site on 3 things:

1. page speed and performance,

2. the basic institutional hygiene LPs expect (having a team page, having a data room, a real stated thesis, proper disclaimers),

3. and whether you’d built dedicated pages for the LP types you’re actually targeting.

Since then we’ve added a bunch of cool s****. Now, it checks for real authorship and cred signals. It makes sure there’s a named person writing the content, that claims are dated and sourced. This is how Google goes over financial content to make sure it’s not b*******. We silent shipped this s*** a month ago. We like just shipping stuff and telling nobody.

If part of the check couldn’t load properly before, your score just took the hit silently. Now it tries again, and if it still can’t get a clean read, it actually tells you.

Participant Tier ($500K – $2M Checks)

These are best for $30-$75M Micro-VCs, or filling out 2nd close (we believe in a two-close approach, not three)

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It’s not very punk rock to listen to Lynyrd Skynyrd, but the ‘76 tour is fire.

I can listen to the ‘76 Winterland and The Fox shows over and over. Little did they know that their run would be over in less than a year. (Side note, f*** any confederate flag ideology, and this RS piece on the band’s complex relationship, a good read.)

Life’s really short, and fundraising is damn hard.

It doesn’t reward people who don’t like to do a lot of research and who aren’t deeply committed. This means that they’re willing to do unglamorous s*** like sort through rows and rows of data to figure out which LPs are currently allocating and which ones are not. And to figure out which ones wrote checks into funds like yours in the last 12-18 months and which ones didn’t.

Unless you want to sit in meeting after b******* meeting only to find out that they’re writing checks, just not to GPs like you. Or, even worse, to outsource stuff like this to a junior IR person or placement agent to find this out for you.

We have also in the last few months begun to advise some endowments, and the thing that strikes me about the winners, the ones who really do turn things around, is that these are the ones who admit that the old way is no longer working, and that they get very transparent with their donor base about what is going on with the educational institution and the direction of the endowment (enrollment, ops budget, cashflow, etc.)

On Disempowerment

This is something I see a lot when fund managers first land on our doorstep. They think LPs are in charge of some magical pile of money.

They often think, “Oh, LP Blueprint is a magical list vendor. Their platform will print out a list of magical LPs and everything will be okay.”

No, that will not happen. That is not how it works. Fund managers have access to startups and businesses that LPs do not have.

You may be wondering. “Why does Adam talk about all of this mushy therapy-speak emotional stuff? Why isn’t he telling me how to get more LP leads? Isn’t this newsletter and this company called LP Blueprint? What is this b********? Where is the unsubscribe button?”

Well, when the former lawyers, doctors, startup founders, CEOs and Hot Pockets product managers who are our GPs tell us that they do not have enough LP leads and/or meetings, this is what comes up. These are the things they tell me about, and these are the reasons they say that they cannot raise money, or the reasons that things just are not working out for them.

We list these not as a way to say “emerging managers externalize blame,” but as a way to show how they work through the challenge of learning that what got them to this stage in their professional development simply will not get them to the next stage in their career.

There is a clear reason that 70% of funds will not and cannot raise a second fund.

It is not because they are bad investors. Most of the time when a fund does not raise a second fund, the reason has nothing to do with investing. It is related to operations and fundraising. It is because the fund manager does not know how to address the working capital gap.

And that is what the 13 excuses below speak to.

1. Nobody is coming to my website. Yes, that is correct. And most of the time fund managers cannot even tell because often they do not even have Google Analytics or Google Site Manager installed. Use our Site Audit real quick to take a look. The average score is 42 and a good score is 72. (We’re pushing v2 of our site audit in the coming days, stay tuned). The main problem we see with most websites for funds is that they do not talk about your top three types of LPs.

2. I do not have a P&L for my fundraise. If there is a problem with the fundraise, this is generally the number one reason. If we do not have a clear answer as to how much time and money is being spent on the raise every month, that is almost always the answer as to why a distinct amount of capital is not being formed. For example, if it is an $80M raise and the GP cannot get a $15-20M anchor, we will say, let’s see the P&L. If we do not see 5-8 people and $2.8M or so being spent on the raise, that is okay. It also means that they are probably raising more like $10-20M, total. Let’s all get in shared reality. Here is our GP Velocity tool. It will tell you about how much you will raise.

3. We are only doing SPVs. We have no problem with SPVs. Some LPs also have no problem with SPVs. But you obviously have a reason for not raising a blind-pool closed-end vehicle. What is that reason? Let’s talk about it. If you want a strong commitment from an LP, you need to be an all-in GP who can pass ODD. What in your materials or website says this?

4. I am not interacting with other GPs or LPs in the LP Blueprint community. This one, to me, is a giant red flag. When I am wondering which GPs are going to make it and which ones are not going to, this is my biggest tell. The ones that have a give-first mentality and proactively work with other GPs and LPs in our Discord and at office hours and at Thursday cohort (Match Engine) - those are the ones that have a very, very high chance of success. The reason? It’s because it’s easy to make LP intros on their behalf. Everyone wants to advocate for them.

   There are another 8 excuses below. If you want to join us at office hours tomorrow at 12pm PT (3pm ET, 7pm GMT).

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You’ve probably seen two different flavors of the same post lately about how the early stage VC market’s bifurcating. And we all know “bifurcating” is a $20 word for “I want to talk to your manager.”

So what you’re seeing is two groups of very pissed stakeholders, VCs and family offices.

VCs: They’re real pissed because capital concentration breaks their value prop. When the VC pitch for 3 decades has been “we pattern match for blah blah blah and the most rare blend of the Colonel’s herbs and spices” and it turns out they’ve just been YOLO’ing into late-round OpenAI bets the whole time (i.e. instead of choice early deals they sourced) their 2-and-20 gets kinda hard to justify.

Family offices: They’re pissed that VC fee structure and gatekeeping made their going direct look rational. (Who knew?)

But when they went direct it meant they had to write direct checks into the same 4 AI deals that everybody else wanted in on. And basically no emerging fund manager had a free look program for them. (Gee, why didn’t they build it?)

Now, we’re five years post-2021. The 1955-style abundance ain’t coming back anytime soon.

We have sort of a barbell type market now. On one side, at the top, we have these mega-rounds and creamy AI premiums - almost $200B raised by 5 AI companies, all big-ass late stage rounds. Then, at the bottom, all of the little early-stage bets.

You can call them “pre-consensus” but I call them:

• Sectors that nobody’s f***** pumped about, these are high-fiber low-fat bets

• $250k-$1M on pre-seed, Seed, $1-4M, $5-8M on early A

• Contrarian, which means a tough sell at the partner meeting

If you’re still facing trouble with your fundraise or SPV, join us at office hours at 12pm PT (3pm PT, 7pm GMT) on Monday.

Lately we’ve been spending a lot of time on allocation pressure - determining which LPs have to allocate capital in Q3 and Q4 2027, so that you can prepare to meet with them now. We’re also establishing institutional LP timelines for 2028 and 2029 for fund managers seeking $10-50M anchor checks.

Feel free to read our blog a bit if you are uncertain if you’d like to join the community and attend office hours. If you are not ready to work with other GPs and LPs to raise your fund or make LP introductions that is okay.

Go at your own pace and learn about how fundraising and the working capital gap are what keeps funds solvent.

One note; LP Blueprint is not a data vendor and we do not do 1:1 meetings or demos for fund managers. Sure, we do scan 500 checks per day and have a list of almost 90,000 LPs. But that’s not the way we help you get your fund closed.

We’re a community of nearly 115 fund managers and LPs. We meet with our fund managers multiple times per week and all day long on Discord. We figure out which LPs are deploying capital, right now. We engage with those LPs and we do not waste time. That’s why so many fund managers join our community, because they don’t want to f*** around. If that’s you, join us.

If that’s not, here’s the link to trial Pitchbook.

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By Adam Metz, Junior Copy Editor

They can’t all be keepers. We apologize for holding back our best material, it was a really busy summer, we took on like 65 new investment firms.

1. Best To Worst: 90 Day Fiancee Startup Rodeo

2. 5 AI Headquarters That No One Has Chained Themselves To This Week, But Hey It’s Tuesday

3. First Principles Gave My Dog Ringworm

4. 12 LPs that Roadied For The Doobie Brothers (‘72-’82)

5. Zapier Workflows That Can Potentially Cause Erectile Dysfunction (12“ remix)

6. What Your IRR Says About My Attachment Style

7. OpenAI staff members that quit due to ennui and/or reservation wage threshold economics calculations

8. The Acemolgu Cookbook: Why Your Kitchen May Not Produce Good Food Generation After Generation, But Other People’s Will

9. 873 Investors We Know For Sure Who Had Diarrhea This Summer (US/UK edition)

10. 10 $10B Opportunities In $10M Markets

11. 12 Times The New Boss Really Was The Old Boss (Roger Daltrey Interviews Larry Ellison)

12. 100 Hours Of Solitude: My Blue Apron Walk-In Refrigerator Experience

41 Seats remain in the Founding 100. If you’d like to join 110+ investment firms (GPs, LPs, family offices) at office hours on Mondays (12pm PT, 3pm ET, 8pm GMT) or during our Thursday cohorts (only for funds actively raising), do click below.

We’re not a data or list vendor like Pitchbook or Preqin. We’re a community of GPs and LPs.

We don’t do 1:1 meetings or demos,

If you need a 1:1 meeting to join our community, you’re probably not ready to meet with the GPs and LPs in our Discord. That is not a diss on you or your fund. It is because the people who join opt-in. They do not need to be pitched or sold. We filter for vibe and mindset, not economics.

We’re a place for fund managers who are ready to stop b********** themselves and engage honestly with allocators and LPs. We’re a place where fund managers talk honestly and clearly about rejection, changing strategy and what is not working.

When you’re tired of banging your head against the wall, come join us.

by Adam Metz, Southern California Folk Music Correspondent

In a weird career turn akin to Lou Reed’s Metal Machine Music, Phoebe Bridgers surprised-released a 14-song mixtape, where each song, specifically disses a different venture capital investor.

Tracklist:

1. i read your deck on the toilet at rosewood

2. series g (end of the world)

3. 23 Oakwood Blvd.

4. you are diluted mfer

5. founder friendly drink olive & june

6. sand hill coma

7. cram down factory

8. your venture is too slow

9. beautiful surveillance camera man

10. nobody likes miami anyway

11. you cannot walk on my beach

12. ivy pee

13. lettuce diarrhea warrant man

14. king of SPACs

Venture investors, completely taken aback by the release, expressed a mixture of confusion and surprise.

“Like, I saw her at Outside Lands a few years ago and I thought she was cool, but maybe she didn’t like our work with Juicero? I dunno. Have you guys heard Gracie Abrams? You should try th…

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This one’s been a long time coming. Deutsche Bank’s been selected to be the first European yuan clearing bank in Frankfurt.

For decades, getting yuan out of China legitimately was harder than finding an original copy of Minor Threat’s Filler EP (red version). It was a super big pain in the ass on purpose.

Beijing had tight-assed capital controls. They had a $50k annual cap for individuals and strict approval requirements for big transfers. The whole setup was designed to stop money from leaving the country, duh.

If you wanted to move real cash, you had to go through tightly controlled channels run by Chinese state banks, or you could “get creative”, which had real inherent risks.

That’s stuff like underground banking, cypto, maybe even really weird stuff like invoice fraud that looked like a shipping deal. People even did things like turn yuan into casino chips in Macau and cash back out somewhere else. Wild stuff. Half the time it was probably just regular people just trying to move their own money. Maybe the other half, actual laundering.

The whole idea was high friction, and the goal was preventing capital flight. That’s how Beijing stayed in control of who got money out and how much money got out, by who.

Now, it’s 2026. Instead of routing everything through Chinese state banks that everyone’s got their eyes on, there’s a new front door. It’s a European bank, in Europe’s biggest economy, with a big-ass regulatory stamp of approval.

On paper, sure, it sorta looks like it’s got the same restrictions

Then you look at it closely and you realize, “Wait a second, no man, I know these guys….”

Here’s what you need to know if you’re a family office managing assets in or from China OR if you’re a fund manager taking on funds from China.

Office Hours Tomorrow

If you’d like to join us at office hours tomorrow (12pm PT/3pm ET, 7pm GMT), here’s the link. We have 43 spots left in the Founding 100. Come join more than 105 other GPs and LPs who are currently members of our community, and ask questions about your fundraise or SPV!

Join Us At Office Hours!

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I was so pumped when celebs began the cosign on Iron Maiden t-shirts around 2015. Seriously, nothing legitimizes your favorite band from when you’re 12 like Kim Kardashian wearing it down to Health Nut on Mullholland.

It’s funny, people sometimes ask me why I’m so into family offices, and I tell them that the skill for memorizing family offices is the exact same skill as memorizing who played bass for Uriah Heep in 1973. Or who sang for Maiden in 1981.

Then they ask, “Gee man is it because you’re into capital formation?” And I say no, I just ran out of rock bands.

There are a finite number of good bands. There are also a finite number of family offices.

Today, we continue our ten-part series on family offices, which we began for no reason other than to taunt Pitchbook and Preqin. You can read our in-depth coverage of families that like to YOLO into funds and SPVs here in our piece on foundations, a wild $114M seed fund, India’s Venture scene and the really interesting families behind it, athlete family offices, and the Texas Family office scene.

If you’d like to browse our family office vaults, we have two:

The Big Vault: about 88,000 LPs, includes email, real-time verification, weekly office hours with other GPs and much more, for the cost of a sandwich.

The Small Vault: that one is vetted family offices who invest in funds and SPVs and it includes check size, thesis and proof of UBO, requires NDA.

So, without further ado, if you’re raising anywhere from a $10M SPV to a $1B fund, these five are pretty great and really worth a look, receipts below.

See you at office hours on Monday!

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7,383 family offices are sitting in our Vault right now.

If you want to email someone from one of them, you get to verify every name and email, on the spot.

Also if we see anyone spamming or verifying too many emails? Boom, gone. This is a GP/LP community, not the buffet on the freakin’ Costa Toscana La Sagra Dei Sapori.

78 of those 7,383 go way further: they’ve cranked money into a fund or SPV. We don’t do any self-reported BS, either. We have the reporting data on all 78, and you can see it under NDA.

Dakota wants $16,500 a year (and $1k per additional user) for a smaller version of this. Altss wants $15,500 ($12k for emerging manager and the homepage says $10k but seriously we’re not smart enough to get what all of that means).

We start at $27/mo, discounted to $18/mo (annual only) We’re not into fund managers who half-ass it. If you want to pay ten times what LP Blueprint costs and not have a community that includes 1 in 30 fund managers and lose the punk rock vibe, we totally get it. Some fund managers just need that corporate suit and tie feel and we completely understand.

We are not here to be liked.

We are here to f*** s*** up.

We’re built for fund managers under $5B - Fund I through Fund VIII.

Every one of these family offices that we’re tracking has sat through enough pitches to know the difference between conviction and a good slide in about seven seconds.

Here is what they are looking to hear from you if you are going to be meeting with them (or even reaching out to them in late 2026):

1. Check Size: If you need to use our LP check sizer, it’s down at the very bottom of this post. Just scroll down to the bottom and you can get the Google sheet. If you meet with a family office and you do not know the size of checks they write into funds and SPVs that is very bad. You do not want to do this, ever.

2. Thesis match: You need to know exactly where the family office has written their last 7-8 checks. Don’t meet with an FO unless you have done this. Not a super good use of your time. If you don’t know how to yank their 990-PFs, 13-F and all of their other yummy delish tax docs, WELL then come and join us at office hours and we will teach you exactly how to do it. I dunno if you think we sit around on Mondays at noon and just shoot the shit about our favorite Lifetime 7-inches, but no, that is not what we do. Okay, fine that is some of what we do. But mostly we stalk family offices like that one weirdo who won’t stop watching your Insta reels.

3. Allocation Pressure: I do not want my GPs meeting with any FO or UHNWI LP who does not have allocation pressure. Like, sure it’s real nice if someone has money to allocate (i.e. $200M+), but if they can’t allocate it near term (i.e. next 6-12 months), then that’s “next fund” convo. No harm in taking the meeting, but that is a 2028-2029 convo, just so that we are on the same page.

We don’t do rent-a-list BS.

We don’t scrape lists from a conferences.

(If anything, we put on the conferences ourselves) a list somebody scraped off a conference badge scanner: every name in the Verified Family Office Feed has already put real money into a fund or an SPV that wasn’t theirs to run, checked against a source, and every one of the other 8,553 is a real person with a real title who decides what gets a meeting.

That’s 8,626 named contacts in the Vault alone, filterable to Family Office in one click.

There’s also four solid LPs in this Forbes hit as well as Cindy Padnos who we profiled in LP Blueprint about 18 months ago who I am a big fan of. Here are the Forbes LPs I would check out and our rundown on each allocator, and how to approach each one for your fund:

Remember, when you’re working with LP Blueprint, we always break out your longlist 3 ways:

1. Check size

2. Thesis (and your thesis MAY CHANGE!)

3. Allocation Pressure (who has to allocate, right now!)

This is why when you send us your longlist of, say, 300, 700 or 1500 LPs, we will usually send you back a shortlist of about 1.5-4% as long. This is also why we do LP intros at no charge. We are delighted to do them. You may think we’re f******* crazy. We are not. LPs are thrilled to hear from us.

This is because we are solving a critical problem for LPs.

We are only willing to introduce you to an LP if you solve 1, 2 and 3, and you are not an a*******.

We don’t do this for the money.

Like Hebrew National Hot Dogs, we answer to a higher authority.

And now, 4 really awesome women LPs you need to know about:

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We are the Black Flag of finance. We are confrontational. We realize that probably only 10% of all people who see our stuff will like it.

We do it anyway.

Most of us did not come from finance.

I did not come from finance. I came from the Fireside Bowl, 924 Gilman and the dank basements of the Midwest.

We ask fund managers the same question every day. We send over 11 million emails per year.

The question: “Do you want to f*** with us.”

At present, 110 fund managers are doing just that.

That represents about 1 in 9 fund emerging fund managers.

Before we get into why most emerging managers join LP Blueprint, here are four things they are typically trying to avoid when they join.

Only 25 to 33% of all Fund One fund managers ever raise a Fund Two.

Guess what? It usually has nothing to do with what the fund manager invested in.

Absolutely nothing.

Key Reasons Funds Go Under Before Fund 2

1. Could not raise fund II (capital formation issues)

2. Ops/back office failure

3. Vague or drifting strategy

4. Underestimating raise timeline (working capital gap) - we have written extensively about this

I’m now going to tell you, even the ones that have come aboard, the things that they still have a hard time doing.

Running a fund means being deeply honest with yourself.

The Five Things Fund Managers Won’t Do,

What They Avoid, Because It Causes Emotional Pain

1. Show up where you have to say your number out loud. The pain: being witnessed not succeeding in real time. When you attend office hours, and weekly cohorts — anything live, you can’t “manage it.” On email, sure, you control the story; you can craft or AI the s*** out of a sentence, soften it, whatever. In a room, someone might ask a follow-up. When you peers watch you say “we’ve raised $15M in three years” and see your face while you say it. That’s when it becomes clear you may have been under-resourcing or starving your fund.

Also, just like we do not do 1:1 sales meetings (we do office hours at 12pm on Mondays, you can come and ask as many questions as you want, browse our LP directory, etc.), we’ve recently begun to put most of our posts behind a paywall.

We’ve discovered there’s a much more serious class of fund manager has been reading and engaging with it. The quality of fund managers and LPs in our Discord has gone way up in the last 90 days.

The quality of office hours has gone way up. If everyone else was paying to use your gym or community swimming pool, would you want 20% of the people getting in without paying, especially if the fee was minimal?

Didn’t think so.

Free content is really nice and well and good. If you want free fundraising tips, here is a link to a company called Pitchbook, and another one called Preqin. They are not punk rock.

Feel free to accuse us of gatekeeping. It’s way more fun on this side of the gate.

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Jedidiah Kirkland was 23, broke, and counting barrels outside Sackets Harbor during the War of 1812. The man was no hero.

He was no founder in any story you’d want to tell at a dinner party.

He was a mere quartermaster’s assistant watching every other buyer in the U.S. Army do the dumbest possible thing with money: panic-buy the second the cannons got loud.But Kirkland did the opposite. Four barrels of salt pork? Sure, whatever, anyone can buy four barrels.

Jedidiah bought 400, during a two-week lull nobody else even noticed, at half the price the Ohio militia paid a month later scrambling for the same pork, mid-crisis.

He wrote one line in the ledger margin that the family still treats like scripture: “The price of a thing is loudest right before the cannons are.”

That’s Young American Genius.

Buy in the boredom. Let the other damned fools pay the panic tax.

Oh, and the pork? He s…

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Three Pizza Chains Are at War, and PE’s About to Own Two of Them, Delish!

Every major pizza chain in America is shrinking from extra large to, well, I guess you’d call it a medium.

Pizza Hut’s closing 250 locations under the not-so-great sounding “Hut Forward” initiative.

Papa John’s is closing 300, with 200 set to shut down by 12/31.

Domino’s biggest Australian franchisee is closing 205 more. Even the Indie shops are taking it on the chin.

Gina Maria’s Pizza, a Twin Cities institution since ‘75, shut all four of their locations and filed Chapter 7. Fiorella in San Francisco just filed its fourth Chapter 11. How do you even do that?

Seriously, if you don’t play the Fear song while you read this post, you are truly missing out. I play it every time I order Domino’s. This song was featured in one of the greatest films of the ‘80s, Repo Man

How this actually happened

Delivery apps were the biggest single culprit, and the math is freakin’ brutal, not vague.

DoorDash, Uber Eats, and Grubhub typically take 20-30% commission per order.

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Blue Öyster Cult formed at SUNY Stony Brook. I spent the first ten years of my life right down the road from there, in Rocky Point, New York.

Their first three albums, the ones with all black-and-white covers, are one continuous vibe. BÖC fans are a weird sort - they literally brought the umlaut to rock n’ roll. They’re basically the cross section of poetry, tech, mysticism, biker gangs and smoky basements. Patti Smith co-wrote at least 5 of their songs and sang on one.

These three albums called the Black-and-White trilogy: the 1972 self-titled record, Tyranny and Mutation (my fave by a longshot), and Secret Treaties. That’s where this structure for this post comes from. It’s three parts, the same as your LP book: current, re-up, pipeline.

One thing up front: we don’t do affiliate links. That’s some weak-ass sh--. If we’re recommending something, it’s because we buy it ourselves, not because somebody’s paying us to say it. We’re not the digital simps at Wirecutter.

Every link below goes straight to the real store, nothing tracked, no kickbacks. These are just places where we shop.

This isn’t just some random list - it’s a program that says who gets what and when, how much to spend, when to mail the card, and when to order the gift so it actually shows up on time. Who knows, you might even get a thank-you note.

You don’t know how many times I get an email every year that says, “You were the only person that sent me a hand-written card.” I feel bad when I see that email because I wish way more people took the time to send hand-written cards.

I. “Then Came the Last Days of May”: Current LPs

These are the LPs already carrying you. A gift here is a thank-you, not a pitch. Keep these a bit understated on purpose. Budget: $40-60.

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Melinda French Gates ain’t writing checks through the foundation you’re thinking of.

Pivotal Ventures, her own vehicle, backed Magnify Ventures’ debut fund in 2022. Then, this year, she came back and did it again.

Today’s post is part five in a ten-part series on family offices that invest in closed-end funds, typically in PE and VC. Why, you may ask, are we writing a ten-part series that sounds more like something you’d see on side 6 of a Yes album than in an emerging manager Substack? (BTW, that new 6/17/76 NJ show smokes.)

Well, it’s because nobody else has an audience of 119,000+ GPs, LPs and family offices. We write for our people, and from the data we have, our people want to read about family offices, family offices and nothing but family offices.

In the last month or so, our volume of family offices has grown to 72, from about 30. We’re now at about 15% of the 500 or so family offices that write checks into PE and VC funds. The larger data platforms like Pitchbook or Preqin do track thousands of family offices, but we only focus on the ones that we know are writing checks into closed-end funds.

If you’d like to take a look at the data, it’s here. We charge about $199/mo for this.

If you’d like to just attend weekly office hours and use our LP Vault, that’s normally $27/mo, but it’s $18/mo for the next 49 firms that join. There are currently about 105 investment firms in the community. Currently about 1 in 9 emerging fund managers are members. Do join us for office hours at 12pm on Mondays. If you do need help with LP intros, here’s how we help your team sort through LP mandates and allocation pressure to tee those up.

Now, on to the family offices and where they’re allocating.

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My kid has turned into a big basketball nut in the last year or two. I play basketball with him, and I really suck.

We watched The Last Dance while we were on vacation down in Rocky Point, Mexico a couple weeks ago. (It’s a great town, and an easy drive from Phoenix).

There’s a pretty wild story about how Shaq got into investing, and I’ve heard about three or four versions of it, so I finally went and hunted down the straight dope on it, because I really wanted to know how this deal went down.

Around ‘99, Shaq was having lunch at the Four Seasons (or the Beverly Hills Hotel, accounts vary) when Ron Conway, a well-known SV angel who’d go on to back Google, Facebook, Twitter, and PayPal real early, walked in with his grandkids.

The kids recognized Shaq and ran over to play with him, which is basically how the whole thing kicked off. While that was happening, Conway started talking about a company he was involved with: this search engine called Google.

The way Shaq’s retold it: “One gentleman says, ‘I want to talk about this company called Google,’ and was just talking about search engines, saying, ‘You’ll be able to type in anything,’ and I was like, ‘That sounds good.’”

This wasn’t just some random hallway chat, either. Shaq’s agent, Perry Rogers, actually followed up and formally introduced him to Conway, and that’s what turned this from a casual chat into a real deal. Shaq put in roughly $250k, buying into Google’s Series A. And then he just, like, forgot about it. Didn’t track it, didn’t think about it again for years.

Reported figures vary pretty wildly depending on the source and when the story's being retold. Some say the stake’s grown to around $16.5M at one point (unconfirmed), while more recent viral retellings inflate it to $400M+ given Google's current ~$2T valuation. Who the f*** knows.

Next time you run into Topher or Ronny Conway (two of Ron’s sons), thank them for raising basketball fans. They’re probably responsible for a lot of athletes getting into startups, venture capital and private equity. Ron, thanks for starting SV Angel and for your decades of leadership in the Valley.

Since ‘99, pro athletes have moved from brand-endorsement type money into real capital allocation. They’re doing a mix of fund LP seats and direct personal checks, not one or the other.

Today, we’re going to review four cool athletes involved in a $100M+ fund.

If you’d like to grab one of our 50 remaining Founding 100 spots, click here. Feel free to join us at office hours on Mondays.

To review the family office data yourself, just click below.

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We don’t write about LPs from India a lot, but let’s be clear. There are many members of our GP/LP community who were born in India, and many of their portfolio companies that are based in India.

The first two articles in this series focused on family foundations and an unlikely LP syndicate that brought together an NFL owner, a rest stop fortune and a combination of Toyota distribution and diversified conglomerate, based in the Middle East.

Today, we examine old-line Indian industrial wealth. This is the money that came from incense, steel, timber, real estate. One of these family offices makes incense and has since 1947. It just became an LP in a fund backing spacetech, financing India’s own supply-chain future.

The alternative would be sending that capital to a foreign fund. India made up 8% of global VC deal count in the first five months of this year, and about 1% of global VC deal value.

India’s entire 2025 VC deal value, around $16B, is roughly the same order of magnitude as a single mid-tier US VC hub state, probably something like Massachusetts.

It’s not quite on par with California or New York. It’s lazy math to just say “India = Massachusetts.” US total 2025 VC deal value was $320B. California did $191.2B, about 60%.

The top 3 states combined took roughly 75%, which leaves the #2 and #3 states (historically New York and Massachusetts) splitting about $49B between them. India’s $16B fits inside that range for a single one of those two states, but that’s not confirmed exactly,

India punches way above its weight class not only on how many deals happen but also far below on dollars per deal. Regardless, there is quite a bit happening here, and this is a market to disregard at your peril.

Now, for the family offices that invest in investment funds, and where to look if you’re raising a fund.

To learn more about all of these family office LPs, there’s three ways you can do it.

1. You can review our family office data, which is here.

2. You can attend weekly office hours on Monday at 12pm PT. We have 50 remaining spots in our Founding 100. We’ve had about 50 firms join in the last 50 days.

3. If you’d like to learn more about what our family office data looks like feel free to review it here. If you like it, feel free to begin using it. We do not do annual contracts. But we do parse about 500 checks every day.

   

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Today’s a special day for LP Blueprint and the near 100 investment firms active in our community of fund managers.

About 50 firms have joined our community in the last 50 days. That’s wild. We hang out on Discord all day and chat.

We meet up every Monday at 12pm PT (3pm ET) and do office hours. Many of us also meet up every Thursday for small group cohort as well (for active fundraises).

We’ve also debuted our family office offering. We’ll be sending out our third family office post tomorrow (post 3 of the Metz 50). There’s about 1032 family offices worldwide that invest in VC/PE and similar closed-end funds. So far, we have precise data on about 57 of them, and we’re adding about 2-3 every day. We do this by parsing about 500 checks per day. That’s about one check every 3 mins, 24/7/365.

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Somewhere in a Fund III close binder there’s a strange looking cap table that doesn’t make sense.

In it, there’s one NFL franchise owner, a hedge fund family whose money goes back decades and an investment arm tied to one of the largest private capital groups in Saudi Arabia.

They didn’t, like, meet up at a conference. Nobody introduced them through a placement agent. But they did end up in the same $114M seed fund for reasons that have zero to do with each other.

Breakout Ventures closed its third fund at $114M. Looks innocuous, like a standard F3, right? No man. This is why we scan 400 (no, 500) checks per day.

LP Blueprint tracks family office and institutional capital across active fund closes, and this one’s is worth a real look.

It shows what LP syndicates look like for real.

So, let’s start with the name in that fund that everybody already knows.

Before we get into the family office names, 3 quick housekeeping notes:

1. Office Hours: They’re every Monday at 12pm PT. If you’re a fund manager and you’d like to learn things like how to penetrate an investment committee, punishment architecture (how to incentivize LPs to make candid and frank decisions about your closes in a timely manner). We also do real-time deck and website tear-downs. Here’s the link. It appears that we have 4 seats left at the $9/mo price before it goes to $18/mo (billed annual). This means 46 fund managers have joined the community in the last few weeks. You can see their logos on our website. We put the logos there so it would look like one of those metal fests where there’s too many bands playing in one weekend and you’re like “damn, how will they get all those bands on and off stage on time?”

2. Customer Portal: We don’t do contracts. You can manage your own billing and cancel anytime now. We also provide customer service for any member of the community who uses our family office products.

3. LinkedIn: Please do not follow us on LinkedIn

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By Adam Metz, NBA Insider

Jamie Dimon confirmed today his retirement timeline “hasn’t changed,” marking the eleventh consecutive year that quote has been true, technically.

Asked point-blank at the JPMorgan annual meeting when he's stepping down, Dimon reportedly said it's "up to God and the board," extending his personal streak of not actually answering the question.

In a related filing, sources confirm Dimon negotiated his own contract extension, then also chaired the committee that approved it.

No board seat controversy here, well, he just is the board.

When pressed for an actual exit date, Dimon said “next year, probably.”

Reporters noted this is the same quote he gave in 2019, 2021, and 2023, read verbatim off the same exact index card.

Analysts remain “extremely bullish on staying exactly where he is,” a position held with zero forward guidance and 100% conviction since 2016.

Satire. Dimon's not on the 76ers roster, mostly because nobody asked and also he's 69. The "up to God and the b…

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