Happy Thursday and welcome to another edition of Beyond TVPI.

A few weeks ago I wrote about placement agents - and how my view of them changed completely over ten years as an LP.

The short version: the best placement agents aren't just selling funds to LPs. They're screening LPs for GPs. Which means your reputation with them matters more than most LPs realise.

Most of the responses I expected came from LPs - a few "guilty as charged" messages, some pushback, a couple of people forwarding it to their teams. That was the audience I'd written for.

What I didn't quite expect was how many responses came from placement agents themselves, summed up to one word.

"Amen."

Several said the same thing: the relationship piece is real, it matters, and it’s underappreciated.

That alone says something.

The best placement agents aren't just thinking about which LPs have capital. They're thinking about which LPs are worth championing.

From the Other Side

One senior placement agent I’ve known for years shared a story (edited slightly for clarity):

"On your point about knowing LPs — I totally agree. We had an oversubscribed fund and I got in one of my smaller LPs over a global consultant. I had been through processes with this LP before and could genuinely advise my client on what they were like to work with.

True to form, they turned everything around in a short space of time. Clean process. No drama. They got into the fund.

The consultant? They never made it. Multiple red line edits on the LPA. They were surprised when we went ahead and closed without them."

Read that again slowly.

A global consultant - well-resourced, well-known, significant AUM - lost a spot in an oversubscribed fund.

Not because of conviction.
Not because of credit.
Because of process.

And the placement agent knew the likely outcome before it happened.

Reputation isn’t built in big moments.
It’s built in how you handled the last LPA.
How clearly you escalated issues.
Whether you gave a clean answer or let things drift.

It’s about doing the hard work early.
Knowing what truly matters to you.
And addressing those issues clearly, proportionately, and on time.

The smaller LP wasn’t less rigorous. They were more intentional.

They had already decided what mattered in an LPA - and what didn’t.

So when the document arrived, they focused on the clauses that were genuinely material and left the rest alone.

The consultant red-lined everything. Not because everything mattered - but because their process required it.

When no one internally has decided what actually matters, the default is to treat everything as important. And when everything is important, nothing is.

From the outside, it looks like rigour.
From the other side of the table, it looks like execution risk.

In oversubscribed markets, capital is not scarce. Certainty is.

That certainty - or lack of it - was built over multiple prior processes, most of which probably felt unremarkable at the time.

The consultant almost certainly got onto that opportunity list on the strength of their name, their AUM, their institutional credibility. All the things that are supposed to matter.

And then they lost the spot to someone with a fraction of their resources because a placement agent trusted the smaller LP's process.

If you're a larger institution - pension fund, consultant, endowment - this is especially risky. Your brand gets you into conversations. It does not get you into funds. The last five yards are all execution, reputation, and the relationships you've either built or haven't.

The question I'd sit with this week: what would a placement agent who knows you well say about your process?

Not your strategy. Not your AUM. Your process.

Because someone is already answering that question on your behalf.

"I'm sorry this letter is so long; I had not the time to make it shorter." - Blaise Pascal, 1657

The consultant in the story above didn't redline everything because everything mattered. They redlined everything because no one had done the hard work of deciding what actually mattered. So the default became: all of it.

I recognise that instinct. My natural tendency is to include rather than cut. Another caveat, another example - just to be safe. It feels like thoroughness.

I've been writing this newsletter every week since September, and that discipline is slowly curing me of it. The post above was 50% longer before I started editing. Cutting it didn't weaken the argument. It sharpened it.

Writing short is hard because it forces a decision: what actually matters here? Everything else has to go.

That's true for LPA redlines. It's true for your commercial due diligence. Apparently it was true for 17th century French correspondence too.

This week, Novacap raises their flagship Fund VIII. It was up from USD 2.8bn in 2024. Below is a screenshot of their data from FundFrame Navigator.