Lessons from last year’s EUVC LP episodes about LP behaviour and fund design
European venture has entered a more self-aware phase
Lessons from last year’s EUVC LP episodes about LP behaviour and fund design
After reviewing all EUVC LP episodes from 2025, a few structural lessons stand out. Not as surprises, but as signals that European venture has entered a more self-aware phase of its development.
The first is deceptively simple: definitions matter again. Over the past few years, the industry has grown fluent in new labels: opportunity funds, continuation vehicles, secondaries, multi-strategy platforms. None of these are controversial anymore.
What is under scrutiny is how clearly they are defined. LPs are no longer impressed by narrative sophistication alone. They want to understand, precisely, what they are underwriting: where risk sits, how capital moves, and what happens in edge cases. Structure has moved ahead of storytelling. Trust now flows from clarity, not charisma.
The second lesson is that liquidity has become a first-order concern rather than a technical afterthought. DPI, cash-on-cash returns and capital recycling are no longer metrics reserved for late-stage debates or secondary specialists. They shape behaviour across the entire ecosystem, influencing both how LPs allocate and how GPs design funds. Secondaries, in particular, have shifted meaning. Once framed as a niche solution or a sign of distress, they are increasingly viewed as part of venture’s core infrastructure — a way to manage duration risk in an asset class that is no longer young, small or experimental.
Third, and perhaps most enduring: manager selection still dominates everything else. Fund size, strategy labels and branding explain far less than many assume. What continues to matter is access, judgment and individual quality. The most effective LPs sound less like tourists moving between fashionable destinations and more like talent scouts with long memories. They track people, not slogans. They remember how decisions were made under pressure. And they understand that persistence of judgment is rarer than persistence of capital.
Taken together, these lessons do not point to a pessimistic outlook. Quite the opposite. They suggest that European venture has matured enough to drop some of its earlier insecurities. There is less need to imitate other markets, less tolerance for ambiguity dressed up as innovation, and more comfort with trade-offs that cannot be optimised away.
The implication is not that the venture has become boring, but that it has become adult. Adults care about definitions. They care about cash. And they care deeply about who they choose to work with over long periods of time.
Most of this thinking comes directly from conversations with LPs on the EUVC podcast over the past year. What emerges from those discussions is not a market in retreat, but one learning to manage itself with greater discipline. That, in the long run, is a sign of confidence, not caution.
If you want the full context, the long-form discussions are all public here.
Several readers have suggested developing this synthesis into a short, LP-focused report. If you would be interested in contributing insights, sponsoring otherwise or supporting such a project, feel free to reach out privately to david@eu.vc.