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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