Happy Thursday and welcome to another edition of BeyondTVPI.

A year ago, I started this newsletter for three reasons.

First, I was lucky to start as an LP in an established setup with strong processes and brilliant people. BeyondTVPI exists to share the frameworks, tools and lessons I learned over 10 years in the seat. Most allocators don't have that luxury.

Second, I thought much of what I had learned the hard way could be learned much quicker if someone explained it. Having good people around me helped enormously. But I - and we - still made plenty of mistakes. Our Alpine miss was one of them.

The third reason is one I didn't mention back then. I still think many of our constituents have little idea about what LP work actually is (pension fund ICs, I'm looking at you). Too often, the assumption seems to be that you can invest in a private fund much as you can buy a stock.

A year later, explaining the work behind that decision is still why I write.

In the Founders Corner, I go a little behind the scenes for BeyondTVPI, sharing some growth stats.

Enjoy the read,

Steffen

The job of an LP in a nutshell:

It sounds straightforward when you describe it that way.

But it leaves out much of the job.

A manager may not be raising when you want to invest. When it does raise, there may be no room for you. And the fund you can get into may be very different from the one whose track record first caught your attention.

You need time to understand the manager and build the relationship. You also need a process for deciding which relationships deserve that time.

And yes, sometimes you need to do sales work. You have to give the GP a reason to choose you as an investor when it has more demand than room in the fund.

The layout below shows some of what we do as LPs in the screening phase. It also shows where screening leads into deeper diligence, a commitment decision and monitoring.

This is what I write about. Finding managers, deciding which ones deserve another conversation, recording what concerned us and keeping track of what would change our view.

With Alpine, we passed because of concerns about unrealised marks, then failed to stay close as those concerns resolved. By the time we revisited the manager, the fund was closed. The follow-up work in this chart can make the difference between being ready for a fundraise and arriving too late.

When I started, I had experienced colleagues to learn from. There were established ways of evaluating managers, documenting a view and deciding what happened next.

In 2016, I was effectively an apprentice, learning the job alongside people who had done it for years. The team had six people when I joined. Today, it has more than 40. I benefited from the experience and processes already there, long before it reached that size.

If you are building an allocation programme in a smaller team, you may have to develop all of that yourself while also doing the investing. A manager database won't tell you how often to meet a GP or how to distinguish "not this fund" from "not this manager."

That is why I have written about all the boring stuff. Meeting preparation, evaluation frameworks, ratings and follow-up. They are parts of the job I benefited from learning in an established setup.

One reader put it better than I could:

It is what I hoped to share.

The chart only covers part of the work. Detailed underwriting, portfolio construction and a decade of managing commitments bring plenty more.

In year two, I want to keep making that work visible and useful, including going deeper into diligence workflows and how LPs can use AI.

Which part of the LP job do you wish someone had explained when you started? Hit reply. I'd like to write about it.

One year in, BeyondTVPI has about 1,200 active subscribers. Looking at the graph, I am also struck by how much of the growth came from one moment.

Approx. 400 subscribers came in late 2025 after I posted on LinkedIn that LPs should receive carry. That post reached 118,647 impressions. One clear opinion did a lot of the work of bringing people here.

Since then, growth has been steadier and slower. I haven't posted much on LinkedIn for the last two months, which probably explains some of the recent slowdown. But I am pleased that the line has kept moving up after that initial burst.

There is also a difference between what gets attention on LinkedIn and what I want to write about here.

Most of the newsletter content is meant to be read in a longer form. The useful part is often in the detail: why we passed on a manager, what would have changed our view, or how a process worked in practice. Shortening that to a LinkedIn post can remove the very thing I wanted to explain.

The carry argument worked well as a short post. Many of the deeper points here need more room.

I do plan to write more on LinkedIn, but I expect those posts to have less direct overlap with the newsletter. The growth that brought people here is interesting to reflect on. It doesn't mean every issue needs to produce the next spike.

This newsletter is written by Steffen Risager, the founder of FundFrame, a platform for LPs to manage their private markets investments.

Before that, Steffen was CIO at Advantage Investment Partners, a Danish Fund-of-Funds.

Steffen has a decade of experience as an LP, and has made commitments totalling approx. $6bn across fund- and co-investments.