The Metz 50, Part 5: He Ran the Bush Presidential Library. Today, He's Building a Rival to the NYSE

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.