Happy Thursday and welcome to another edition of Beyond TVPI.

Let's talk about placement agents.

When I started as an LP, I thought placement agents were highly paid used car salesmen. I'd sold a house, worked with real estate agents - I understood they provided value to the GP. Raise the fund. Find the investors. Move on.

But value for me as an LP? I couldn't see it.

Why would I pay attention to someone whose incentive was just to get me to commit? Weren't they just another layer between me and the GP, another voice telling me why this fund was different, this team was special, this strategy was the one?

That was me in year one.

By year ten, my view had changed completely.

Over time, I started noticing a clear pattern.

Some placement agents kept pitching me funds that were obviously irrelevant - credit, venture, strategies far outside my mandate. Those were easy to ignore.

Others behaved very differently. They filtered hard. They only came with opportunities that actually fit. They knew what we valued - and remembered it.

That’s when it clicked: placement agents aren’t just intermediaries for GPs. The good ones become gatekeepers in both directions.

Take a recent example that’s been discussed publicly: Nautic Partners raising with Evercore. I don’t have any particular insight into that fundraise, and this isn’t meant as a behind-the-scenes account. But it illustrates a broader dynamic that’s become increasingly common.

In highly sought-after raises, capital itself isn’t the constraint. What matters is speed, certainty, and execution risk.

In those situations, the role of the placement agent isn’t really distribution. It’s screening:

If you’re not already known as someone who can move decisively, you may never even see the opportunity.

Over time, two things materially changed how placement agents worked for us - and both were fully within our control as LPs.

First: Communicate your strategy clearly and consistently.

I had a clear mandate: Mid-market buyout investor, US and Europe. $500M to $5B fund sizes. That's it. I told every placement agent this up front.

The ones who kept pitching venture or credit or mega-buyout? I felt like a line-item in the CRM, “see how many LPs we know and can contact”.

The ones who respected it - and only came with relevant opportunities - became long-term counterparts. Not because they were charming, but because they were precise.

Clarity compounds.

Second: Be as transparent as possible about your process.

Even oversubscribed GPs care deeply about execution risk. Can this LP actually close? How long does diligence take? What causes delays or passes?

When placement agents understand your process end-to-end, they can credibly vouch for you. They can say, “Yes, this LP is serious. Yes, they’ll give you a clean answer. Yes, they can hit your timing.”

And that vouching? That's when it gets valuable.

A few years ago, a brand-name GP I'd been tracking for years suddenly had a spot open. It was one of those funds you don't get into unless you're already in. Highly oversubscribed. Moving fast.

The placement agent called me.

They knew our strategy. They knew our process. They knew we could move quickly without drama. And our ticket size was just right.

We got the commitment.

Would we have gotten that opportunity cold? Not a chance. Would we have gotten it if I'd treated placement agents like used car salesmen for the previous five years? Also not a chance.

The relationship mattered. The consistency mattered. The fact that they could vouch for us mattered.

So here's what I'd ask: Are you treating placement agents like gatekeepers working both directions? Or are you still treating them like salespeople trying to push product?

Because if it's the latter, you're leaving money on the table. Not every placement agent deserves your time. Many won't provide value. Some only do it rarely. But the ones who do? The ones who actually listen, who bring you relevant opportunities, who can vouch for you when it counts?

Those relationships are worth building.

We’ve been building software the wrong way in one important respect.

Not in a “company’s struggling” sense - we’re doing well - but in how we’ve approached feature requests.

Someone says they need better reporting. We build better reporting.

Someone wants automated notifications. We build automated notifications.

We took requests at face value and shipped them. And now, some of those features just sit there - fully unused.

The issue wasn’t the features themselves. A feature request is only one possible solution to a deeper problem - and sometimes not the best one. There are usually several other ways to solve the same underlying issue, some of which work better and apply across more users.

You only find those options if you understand why the request exists. What’s actually breaking in their workflow? What are they trying to achieve?

Our best product decisions didn’t come from building what people asked for. They came from understanding the problem underneath - and then designing the right solution. Sometimes that matched the request. Sometimes it didn’t.

One approach builds features.

The other solves problems.

We’re trying to do more of the second.

This from Leyla Kunimoto on potential zombie funds is very interesting. Some highly rated names in there.

On to those who have raised.