Part I: Why invest into venture funds?
An overview on how we think about fund opportunities in the EUVC LP community
You probably already have a pretty strong view towards investing in venture funds - but I thought I’d share our take on why we’re so hyped about it, and what makes our approach at EUVC a bit different.
Firstly, we’re a vested community of like-minded peers
That means that we’re all operators, founders, execs, investors, and the like. But - and importantly - we’re also a bit of a different breed. As an example, we deliberately tell our stories with memes and gifs, we deliberately swear, and deliberately poke our finger in the eye of the establishment.
But why? Because we want a community that thrives together, that enjoys each other’s company, that sees the world as it is and wants to turn it into something different and better.
Let me pull in Stefano Bernardi’s ode to entrepreneurship and venture capital to help me out here:
Recently I've started to realize why I've been so fascinated by and attracted to venture capital […] The reason, as I believe it today, is that venture capital is one of the most important activities of man kind: the choice of how to allocate resources.
That choice, now almost fully monopolized (as most everything else) by nation states governments (and more and more supranational entities), is also practiced at small but very very effective scale by small players around the world: angel investors, venture firms, accelerators, etc. They all have a bit of a say in what gets built by founders.
I believe practicing venture comes with an ethical, moral responsibility to all of your fellow humans on top of your limited partners for what you decide to invest in. Some people decide to invest in the next deployment of scooters around towns or the next 10 minute delivery app, and I think those people are failing all of us.
Would you rather come back home to your kid at home and say: "hey! today I've invested in a company that has a slightly better SaaS sales outreach technology" (or whatever) or "today I met with a founder that might solve humanity's quest for infinite energy (proteins, plastics, etc.)"?
I believe that in our era, venture and entrepreneurship are the most impactful things you could do with your time on this Earth.
We aspire to build a family, rather than a business. And the above is true to part of our family’s values. Much more on these in the future 💞.
We’re a community that has come together to invest & grow together.
That means that we don’t like hang-arounds. We are here to help when we can. It also means we optimize for impact and prioritize investors with the biggest commitment and value add to the funds. Which might not necessarily be the biggest net worth 🙅. In other words, while anyone can join the EUVC LP syndicate, the make up of each individual syndicate is designed with the GP in question and optimized for strategic fit.
We meet virtually, in person, WhatsApp and do everything we can to create an atomic network around each fund that’s second to none.
Our commitment: we’ll fight for the best deals in Europe
Expect us to launch a new deal every other month. And you can expect a couple of core characteristics:
Top-tier performance in sight (i.e. our diligence has proven to us that there’s good reason to believe the fund will deliver >3x);
Some will be emerging (defined as Fund I - III), some will be more established. We love emerging, but we’ve also got amazing established players that we want to back.
Highly collaborative and committed to the syndicate. We look for GPs that share our community’s values as they’re described above. This is both important for the softer reasons, but it’s also imperative when it comes to ensuring co-investment opportunities, knowledge-sharing and network effects.
In other words, we fight to get you:
Diversified exposure to the best in Europe 📊
The best network of high-impact investors in Europe
The opportunity to learn and grow with the best in Europe
