Kate Simpson

sell themselves on why they should be the right partner for a venture investor.

And then it's incumbent on the LPs to understand that dynamic and understand who the best founders are gravitating towards as their capital partners.

So it does come down to differentiation, and that can take a lot of different forms.

It comes down to that value add capability and what venture investors can bring to the table to help founders build their business.

know if it necessarily boils down to the number of references.

What really moves us from a maybe to a high conviction, yes, is the quality of the references.

I think the reality is most of the references that LPs do are good, right?

If you're going down the list of listed references that a manager has provided a potential LP, all of those references are going to be good.

The craft of doing references comes down to the types of questions you're asking, of course.

But also some pattern recognition such that you can differentiate between what's a good reference and what's a glowing reference.

Obviously, references that we do that are off-list, right, where we're leveraging people in our network, people that we trust, people that we think we will get a very candid, truthful response.

answer to our questions.

Those references carry probably more weight than do others, but founder references are important.

But again, it comes down to, I think, asking the right questions and being able to recognize through doing so many of these over the years, which ones are good and which ones are outstanding.

And that's a bit of a nuance and a bit of something that's hard to kind of describe and put into words, but you can recognize what a glowing reference is and not just a

Yeah, I mean, asking for anecdotes and very specific examples, understanding the dynamics of financings and the types of decisions founders make at various points in their capital raising journey to decide which partners to...

partner with.

Seeing that a reference has made multiple introductions and referrals to whatever VC we're referencing, I think carries a lot of weight.

The detail with which they can speak about the relationship, can speak about how a VC has helped them, can speak about their personality and work style.

I think it comes down to...