Happy Thursday,

Over the years, I’ve written quite a bit about getting in front of exceptional managers before they begin fundraising.

The underlying argument has always been that the best opportunities are often identified long before a data room opens. If you want access to exceptional managers, you need to start building the relationship before everyone else is trying to do the same.

But that isn’t the only reason repeated meetings matter.

Looking back on my LP career, one of the highest-leverage things we ever did was systematically capture what managers told us and compare it with what actually happened over time.

Not because any single meeting was particularly important.

But because conviction rarely comes from a single meeting.

It comes from years of observations accumulating into a pattern.

This week’s main story is about the difference between underwriting a snapshot and underwriting a story. Why the managers that aren’t obvious often require the most attention. And why institutional memory may be one of the most underrated advantages an allocator can build.

Further down, in Founder’s Corner, I share a lesson we’re applying inside FundFrame. Over the last year we’ve had more opportunities than capacity, and we’ve learned that too many choices can be just as limiting as too few. The goal isn’t to become less ambitious. It’s to become more deliberate about where we focus our attention.

Enjoy the read,

Steffen

Over the last year, I’ve written quite a bit about getting in front of exceptional managers before they are fundraising.

The argument is simple.

When a top-performing GP eventually comes to market, the investment decision is relatively simple. It’s a yes. The real question is whether you’ve spent enough time building a relationship that you’re even considered for an allocation.

For good reason, some readers have interpreted this as meaning manager meetings are primarily a sales game.

I don’t think that’s quite right.

In my experience, there are only a handful of opportunities each year where the investment case feels unusually straightforward.

Strong team. Strong track record. Strong organization. Clear strategy. Getting into those managers is integral, but unless you’re making two or three commitments per year, they are unlikely to fill your entire portfolio.

Most allocators eventually have to make decisions that are less straightforward. Here are some examples:

And that changes the purpose of the meeting.

With the obvious managers, meetings are often about two things.

First, making sure they know who you are.

Second, continuously re-underwriting the opportunity.

Has anything changed? Is the organization still developing as expected? Are we as excited as we were last year?

The underwriting is important.

But with many of these managers, the case is already relatively clear.

The more interesting challenge is the managers that aren’t obvious.

The ones where you are trying to determine whether they are becoming better or worse over time.

And on the baseline, whether the things they told you two years ago are actually happening.

Looking back, many of my best manager relationships were built long before any investment decision was required.

You hear a GP describe where they want to take the organization. A year later, you see whether they did it.

You hear them identify a portfolio company they believe will become a major outcome. Later, you see whether it became one.

You hear about planned hires, succession plans, operational improvements, sector expansion or fundraising ambitions. Then you observe what actually happens.

Every conversation becomes another data point.

None of them are particularly important on their own.

Together, they create conviction and trust... or they remove it.

The challenge is that none of this scales through memory.

If you follow hundreds of managers, it becomes impossible to remember who said what two years ago.

You won’t remember the GP who predicted a specific exit.

You won’t remember the manager who promised to strengthen the investment team.

You won’t remember the concerns you had around a team departure several funds ago.

Without a system, these observations disappear into notebooks, OneNote folders and individual memory.

With a system, they become institutional knowledge. And institutional knowledge compounds.

When a manager eventually returns to market, you aren’t underwriting them solely based on a fundraising deck and a handful of meetings.

And you know whether the gap between those two things has been narrowing or widening.

Institutionalizing this knowledge was probably the highest-value thing I ever did as an LP.

We captured plenty of notes, meeting observations and manager updates over the years. The problem wasn’t collecting information. The problem was finding it again when it mattered. Without a system, insights ended up scattered across notebooks, OneNote folders and individual memory, and I found myself constantly chasing information instead of using what we already knew.

This is one of the reasons I started FundFrame.

FundFrame is software built by LPs for LPs. You can learn more here.

One exercise I increasingly find useful is asking a simple set of questions:

For the obvious managers, these questions help maintain conviction.

For the less obvious managers, they can be the difference between identifying a future winner and avoiding a future disappointment.

At the end of the day, most successful commitments are not made because of a single meeting.

They are made because dozens of observations slowly reduce uncertainty.

The allocator who only meets a manager during a fundraise is underwriting a snapshot.

The allocator who has followed that manager for years is underwriting a story.

And stories are ultimately just accumulated observations about whether people do what they said they would do.

Last week I wrote about how this exact dynamic led us to not re-up with a Manager: the case that monitoring isn't a quarterly tax but the slow accumulation of observations that becomes conviction — or removes it.

The Part of Being an LP That Took Me Years to Accept: why access goes to LPs who started building the relationship years before the fundraise, not the ones who show up with a check.

Once a GP shows you who they are, believe them: what "the gap between what they said and what happened" looks like when a GP's true character finally shows.

How to Spot Winners Early (Without any Performance Data): building conviction on a manager from signals over time, long before the fundraising deck forces a decision.

The Alpine Investors Miss — And the Hidden Cost of Going Quiet: the flip side — what it costs when you stop doing the continuous work and let the relationship go cold.

One thing I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about recently is decision fatigue.

Note: There’s a famous study showing that judges were more likely to grant parole early in the morning and just after lunch than they were before a break. Whether the exact numbers hold up or not, the underlying idea is intuitive: the more decisions we make, the worse we tend to get at making them.

For most of the last year, we’ve had more good ideas than capacity. New features, new products, new markets, new experiments. None of them were bad ideas. The problem was that there were too many of them.

And oddly enough, having more options often slowed us down.

A few months ago, I realized that one of the healthiest habits in my life works precisely because it requires almost no decisions. I run every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. No debate. No negotiation. No waking up and asking myself whether today feels like a running day.

I simply run.

As a result, I’m in better shape than when I relied on motivation and daily decision-making.

Running a company isn’t that simple, unfortunately. But we’re trying to move in that direction.

We’ve spent a lot of time over the last few months sharpening priorities, reducing the number of active initiatives, and being more deliberate about what we choose not to do. The goal isn’t to become less ambitious. It’s to make sure our ambition is concentrated rather than scattered.

There will always be more opportunities than time.

The challenge is making sure the things we say are important are the things that actually receive our attention.

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.