Most capital connectors introduce people over coffee and hope something sticks. That's not a system. That's networking cosplay. What LPs actually need — especially new-money family offices entering alternatives for the first time — is an operating system. Intake. Qualification. Deal flow matching. Follow-up. Reporting. I spent the last few years building exactly that. Not a Rolodex. A repeatable process that turns LP interest into committed capital. The firms that figure this out will raise faster than everyone else. The ones that keep relying on "warm intros" will keep wondering why their close rate is 3%.
Hot take: the best emerging managers right now aren't competing with Andreessen. They're competing with family office direct deals. And most of them don't realize it yet.
I talk to a lot of family offices in the $30-500m range. First-generation wealth. Tech exits, crypto, real estate. Here's what most GPs get wrong about them: They don't want your 80-page deck. They want to understand your edge in 3 minutes. They want to know who else is in. And they want someone on your side who speaks their language — not fund-of-fund jargon. The FOs that are deploying fastest into alternatives right now aren't doing it because of FOMO. They're doing it because they found a GP who made the process feel simple. Simple wins capital. Complexity loses it.
Dubai didn't become a capital hub because of zero tax. It became one because every family office from Riyadh to Lagos needed a neutral meeting point with real infrastructure. The firms setting up here now understand that. The ones still "exploring the region" are already two years late.
I started working in a hedge fund in Kyiv at 17. By 22 I was running OTC desks. By 25 I'd moved ~$60m in OTC volume and had a $300m RWA pipeline. Here's the thing nobody told me early on: the hardest part of capital markets isn't finding deals. It's earning the trust of the person writing the check. LPs — especially HNWIs and family offices — are allergic to hype. They've been burned. They've seen the pitch decks that promised 100x. What works: specificity. Show them exactly what you did, for whom, and what happened. No "we're revolutionizing." Just "here's the outcome." That lesson took me years. It's now the foundation of everything I do.
Everyone's talking about RWA tokenization. Almost nobody is talking about the actual LP demand side — who's buying these tokens and why. Spoiler: it's not DeFi degens. It's family offices who want real estate and credit exposure without the fund wrapper. The distribution question matters more than the tech.
Something I keep seeing: GPs spend 18 months building an LP pipeline. They get to final close and realize 40% of their commitments came from 3 relationships. The other 97 "interested" LPs? Gone quiet. This is normal. But it means the economics of fundraising are brutal if you don't have a system to identify your real 3-5 anchor LPs early and build everything around them. Most capital formation strategies are too wide. The best ones are narrow and deep.
Family offices doing direct deals without a dedicated investment team is like performing surgery because you watched a YouTube video. The ones that figure out co-invest structures with experienced GPs will outperform. The ones going solo will learn expensive lessons.
If you're fundraising and you don't have a MENA strategy, you're ignoring the fastest-growing LP base in alternatives. Not just sovereign wealth. Family offices. HNWIs. Corporate treasuries sitting on generational commodity wealth now looking for tech and venture exposure. But here's the thing — you can't just fly to Dubai for a week and expect allocations. These relationships are high-trust, slow-build, and they require someone on the ground who understands the culture. I've watched dozens of Western GPs try the "parachute in" approach. It almost never works. What works: consistent presence, warm introductions through trusted connectors, and patience. Lots of patience.
There's a massive gap in the market for placement agents who actually understand crypto-native and tech-native family offices. Traditional placement agents speak institutional language to people who built their wealth in Discord servers. Someone's going to build this bridge and make a fortune.
I spent a decade in crypto. Built companies. Moved real volume. Worked across three continents. And now I'm deliberately moving toward broader venture and alternatives. Not because crypto is dead — it's not. But because the most interesting thing happening in capital markets right now is the convergence. Crypto-native wealth flowing into traditional venture. Traditional FOs tokenizing real assets. The line between "crypto" and "finance" is disappearing. The people who can operate on both sides of that line are rare. That's where I want to be.
90% of fundraising advice on LinkedIn is written by people who've never actually closed an LP. If someone's tips include "build your personal brand" as step one, they've never sat across from a family office principal who just wants to see your track record on one page.
Note: All drafts are first-pass. Edit for your exact voice, add specific anecdotes where you have them, and adjust any numbers you want to keep private.