Happy Thursday and welcome to another edition of Beyond TVPI.

This week’s newsletter looks at one of the most overlooked sourcing opportunities of the year. While much of the industry slows down over the summer, I always found it to be one of the best times to build relationships with GPs - often leading to conversations that paid off years later.

In the article today, I’ll go through the process, step-by-step.

In Founders Corner, I ask whether the same logic applies in reverse. Should GPs and software vendors spend July reaching out to LPs? After ten years on the LP side, I’m not entirely convinced.

If you have questions or comments I’d love to hear them! Just hit the reply button.

Enjoy the read,

Steffen

Every year, the industry slows down in July.

Many LPs do too.

I always found it was one of the best sourcing windows of the year.

Deal flow thins out, half the industry is on holidays, and the instinct is to slow down with it. Wind down the meetings. Clear the inbox. Pick things back up in September.

For years we did the opposite.

Summer was one of the most productive sourcing windows we had all year. Not despite the slowdown - because of it.

It started with the CRM.

Every summer I went in and pulled a specific list: managers we rated highly but hadn’t spoken to in a while, and managers we rated highly but had never actually met. Not the ones already deep in our pipeline. The ones on the edges. The names that kept surfacing in references and peer conversations but never quite made it onto a calendar.

That list was usually 10 to 20 GPs.

These were people I wanted to stay in front of. Some I’d met years earlier and drifted from as their fund cycle and ours fell out of sync. Some I’d tracked from a distance without ever getting in the room. Either way, they were managers I wanted to know better.

Then I wrote to each of them.

The email was simple. It said, more or less: summer tends to be quieter for both of us, and I’d love to grab a call while things are calm. Then a few lines about me and the program.

The framing depended on who I was writing to.

If they already knew me, I called it reference - a quick refresher so they wouldn’t have to dig back through old threads to remember who we were and what we did.

If we’d never met, I called it information - here’s who we are, here’s how we invest, here’s why a conversation might be worth your time.

Same email. Two framings. One for the warm contacts, one for the cold ones.

Here is the part that surprised me the first time and never stopped being true.

The response rate was among the highest of anything we did all year.

GPs are busiest exactly when we’re all working during the H1 and H2 periods. That’s when GPs are mid-raise, mid-process, closing a deal, out on the road. During those stretches, a call with a prospective LP they don’t urgently need is easy to postpone. First to next month. Then the month after that.

Summer removes that pressure.

The fundraise is paused. The deal team is thinner. The urgent things are, for a few weeks, less urgent. A partner who wouldn’t have found forty-five minutes in March suddenly has an open Tuesday and no reason to say no.

So a note that would have gone unanswered in the busy season gets a reply.

And the conversation itself is better. Nobody is watching the clock. Nobody is half-thinking about the board meeting they have in 20 minutes. That is the version you want to meet before you ever think about committing.

None of these calls closed anything. That was never the point.

The point was to be a known quantity before it mattered.

Looking back, several relationships that eventually became investments started with one of those quiet summer conversations.

Just as importantly, some of those meetings raised questions that ultimately led us not to pursue a manager further. That was just as valuable. Better to discover those things during a relaxed conversation in July than halfway through a fundraising process when everyone is under pressure.

Either way, we learned something.

When one of those managers came back to market a year or two later, we weren’t a cold name in the inbox. We’d already had the calm conversation. They knew who we were, how we worked, and roughly what we were looking for. The relationship had a starting line that wasn’t zero.

In a market where access to the best managers is the constraint - not capital, not conviction, access - that head start is worth more than almost anything else you can do with a slow week in July.

So one question to ask yourself now - is this something we should do?

The workflow above is a lot simpler if you know who those 10–20 managers are.

That sounds obvious, but it’s surprisingly difficult without a system that captures previous meetings, notes, ratings, follow-ups, and reminds you when relationships have gone quiet.

That’s exactly why we built FundFrame.

If you’d like to see what that workflow looks like in practice, we’d be happy to show you. You can learn more here.

If this week’s article is right, perhaps GPs - and self-interested software vendors like me - should spend July filling LP inboxes.

I’m not so sure.

Having spent ten years on the LP side, I know Scandinavian LPs (and I suspect most others) are remarkably good at disappearing for the summer.

I was no exception.

I usually had a few internal projects to move forward, but starting something completely new wasn’t really on the agenda. Half the team was away, so there often wasn’t anyone to bounce ideas off anyway.

Also, Tour de France was on.

So while July may be a great time for LPs to reach out to GPs, I’m less convinced the reverse is ideal.

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.