Happy Thursday!

Now, let’s start with something embarrassing…

I once did desktop screening on a GP.

Solid. Good track record. Strong team. Right in our mandate. At least one we should take a look at.

So I reached out asking for a meeting.

Their response: "Thanks, but we actually met with your colleague five months ago. You decided to pass."

Ouch.

It had been in and out of our Excel pipeline between pipeline_v3 and pipeline_v5. No one had told me. And now I'd just signaled to a GP that our internal process was a mess.

So we decided to fix it.

(Back in October I shared the A-E rating framework itself - definitions, cadences, and implementation. This builds on that with why it matters for allocations).

The Real Cost of "Interesting"

We spent plenty of time analyzing managers.

But we were slower to commit to what a meeting actually meant in practice:

LPs can analyze managers. That's not the problem.

The problem is translation: you leave with thoughts, but no decision about what happens next.

Forcing the Question

The fix we implemented was simple: within 24 hours of every GP meeting, assign a single letter rating.

A through E. That's it.

A meant "commit to the next fund unless something major changes." E meant "never meeting again." B, C, and D were gradations in between.

Were some managers B+ or realistically B-? Of course.

But here's what forcing a single letter actually did:

Why this mattered for allocation odds

In private markets, access compounds.

It comes from:

The letter grade quietly aligned us around that.

A meant: build the relationship even when nothing is happening. B meant: stay close enough to be underwrite-ready. C meant: stay informed, don't spend scarce time.

This wasn't about being harsh.

It was about making sure the managers we believed in actually got our time.

Did we go deeper and grade across a spectrum once the screening process started? Of course.

Did we need to do that 3 years before a fundraise? No, we kept it simple.

What GPs Should Know

If you're a GP reading this: serious LPs are making these decisions about you, whether they tell you or not.

If an LP shows up outside the fundraising cycle, you're rated highly.

If they politely decline a second meeting a year after the first, you're likely filed under "track, don't chase."

Treat that as a signal.

The Bottom Line

You don't need our exact system.

What matters is forcing a decision immediately after the meeting—and sticking to it.

Indecision compounds:

Try it with your next five meetings.

Assign the rating. Log it. Move on.

You'll find the "now what?" disappears.

And you'll never have a GP remind you that your colleague already passed.

I’m running a short survey on how LPs and GPs actually spend their time operationally - where hours go, and where friction hides. 5 questions, ~2 minutes. I’ll share the results with everyone who participates.

Click here to participate.

And thanks to all who have already participated.

A few people have asked about my current journey with FundFrame, so going forward I’ll share short notes on the ups and downs of building a startup as a former LP.

A quick update on what we're building:

We started with FundFrame as an Investment CRM - built around this exact A-E rating system. It's given me tremendous value and is a product I am deeply passionate about.

But the more I talked to LPs, the clearer it became: you don’t want yet another system and sourcing is just one piece. You need diligence tracking. Portfolio monitoring. Cash flow forecasting. And they all need to talk to each other.

So that's what we're building now - the full end-to-end LP operations platform.

Still early. But it's coming together.