Happy Thursday,

This week starts with a FundFrame milestone: we signed our first contract with a large regulated Swedish investor.

That is exciting in itself, but the process also reminded me of something I have thought about a lot as both an LP and now a software founder: the best solutions often remove complexity rather than add it.

That theme continues in the main story.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with an ambitious Nordic family office, and one of the topics we kept returning to was mandate breadth. How broad should an LP mandate be? When is flexibility genuinely helpful? And when does it become complexity that the team will still be managing ten years later?

Their view was simple: “Complexity is easy to add and hard to remove”.

Early in my LP career, our mandate was broad. Over the years, it became narrower. Not because I became less curious, but because I became more aware of the hidden cost of complexity.

More on that below.

Enjoy the read,
Steffen

Last week, we signed our first contract with a large regulated Swedish investor.

They had been looking for a better way to manage their pipeline and GP relationships, and they “didn’t see DealCloud and Dynamo as viable for their needs.”

But the process itself was probably the more interesting part.

We had our first call toward the end of 2025. The investment team quickly understood what we were building and why it mattered. After some back and forth, we entered legal and procurement in Spring and signed shortly after Midsommer.

In many ways, it reminded me of an LP investment process.

There is always a risk the deal falls through. There are always questions, documents, reviews, and small delays. But this was a relatively uneventful process - at least as far as we know 😀

That matters, because when I was an LP, I often felt that LP software providers sold complexity for complexity’s sake.

Large implementation projects. Big integrations. Data migrations. Hundreds of thousands of dollars committed before we, as LPs, even knew whether the software would create day-to-day value.

We are not against integrations or data migration projects. Far from it. For many institutions, they are necessary and valuable.

But most organizations do not need another multi-year transformation project with layers of steering groups before they can see value. They need tools that make their existing work easier, sharper, and institutional from the day 1- not from day 366.

That is the bar we are trying to meet with FundFrame.

You can learn more about FundFrame here.

A few weeks ago, I sat down with an ambitious Nordic family office. It was a great conversation and one of the things we kept coming back to was mandate breadth.

How broad should it be? Where do you draw the line? And when does flexibility become unnecessary complexity?

It reminded me of something that is obvious in hindsight but that I’ve become increasingly aware of over the years:

Adding a new strategy is rarely a one-year decision.

It's usually a ten-year decision.

That's because complexity is incredibly easy to introduce into an LP portfolio.

Removing and living with it is the hard part.

One of the first things we look for in a GP is mandate discipline.

We become uncomfortable when a buyout manager suddenly starts doing “minority with significant control deals”. Or when an infrastructure fund drifts into adjacent sectors because "the infrastructure set is expanding."

Style drift is usually a red flag because the GP is moving away from the area where they have built expertise and a competitive advantage.

Yet we don't always apply the same standard to ourselves.

As LPs, we also have a circle of competence. Every time we expand our mandate, we're making a conscious decision to move beyond it. Sometimes that's exactly the right decision - but we should recognize it for what it is.

We ask GPs to stay within their circle of competence.

We should hold ourselves to the same standard.

Early in my LP career, our mandate included buyout, infrastructure and agriculture. We had also inherited a timber portfolio. At the same time, we were discussing whether to build a co-investment program.

Overall, the broader mandate served us well. It gave us flexibility as a relatively small team and allowed us to build expertise across several parts of the private markets.

But it also led to a few decisions that, in hindsight, added more complexity than value.

One was introducing a drug royalty fund.

Another was stretching our definition of infrastructure because there simply weren't many managers that matched the value-add profile we wanted. At the time, firms like Antin and ISQ were among the few that genuinely fit. Everything else required compromises. And that’s how Riverstone ended up in an infrastructure bucket.

None of those decisions felt particularly significant when we made them.

But every new strategy changes the way you operate.

Every additional strategy creates a new operating model.

You need to source managers. Build expertise. Develop underwriting frameworks. Track different benchmarks. Monitor managers differently.

Eventually, you may even need different people.

And then you live with those decisions. Travel to AGM, new valuation methods, successor funds.

Often for a decade or more.

The investment industry has a habit of treating additional strategies as free- or exciting new options.

They may be exciting - free they are not.

Every new box on the asset allocation slide increases the operational burden of running the portfolio.

I'm not against broad mandates. They can make a lot of sense, particularly for smaller teams that need flexibility while building a portfolio. As already implied, they're also a way to build expertise across different parts of the private markets and discover where your team has a genuine edge.

But every expansion should clear a higher bar than it appears to at first glance.

Every new strategy isn't just another allocation. It's another network to build, another underwriting framework to develop, another reporting process to maintain, and another area of expertise to keep current for years to come.

Looking back, that's the point I wish I'd appreciated earlier.

And it's why I found myself having exactly that discussion with a Nordic family office a few weeks ago.

The goal isn't to have exposure to the greatest number of strategies.

The goal is to build the simplest portfolio that can achieve your objectives.

Over the years, my own mandate didn't expand.

It shrunk.

Not because I'd become less curious, but because I'd become more aware of the hidden cost of complexity.

Every strategy you approve today may still be demanding your team's attention in 2036.

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.