How do global family offices evaluate emerging VC managers?

The twelve variables that differ, and what each one changes

Ask about these directly. A family office that cannot answer them about itself is telling you something useful too.

• Direct against fund investing. Whether they invest in companies, in funds, or in both, and whether your fund competes with their own direct programme for the same deals.
• Decision speed. Ranges from a single conversation to a year, and it is the single most useful thing to establish early because it determines whether they can be in your first close.
• Who decides. A principal, a chief investment officer, a committee, an outsourced adviser, or a next-generation family member with a mandate of their own.
• Ticket size relative to your fund. Whether their normal commitment is a workable share of a fund your size, which is a concentration question for both sides.
• Concentration tolerance. How much of a fund they are willing to be, and whether they are comfortable being the largest investor.
• Access route. Whether they take introductions only, work through a network or a platform, or accept direct approaches, which is a matter of fact rather than of persuasion.
• Governance expectations. Whether they want an advisory committee seat, information rights, or nothing beyond the standard reporting.
• Reporting appetite. Some want less than institutions, some want more and want it in their own format, and the difference is a side letter question. Blueprint's reporting page covers the calendar it feeds.
• Co-investment. Frequently the real reason a family office invests in a fund, and the expectation is often unstated until after the close.
• Portfolio support. Whether they bring operating capability, customer relationships, or geographic reach that the companies would actually use.
• Strategic and regional preferences, including sectors connected to the family's own business history and geographies where the family is present.
• Re-up behaviour. Whether they are building a programme across funds or making a single decision, which changes what a first commitment is worth to you.

How the picture shifts by region

Regional differences are real and are differences of tendency rather than rules. Every one of them has counterexamples, and the only reliable method is to ask.

• Some markets have a long-established professionalised family office sector with institutional processes; others have families whose capital is managed inside an operating business rather than in a separate office, and the decision route runs through the business.
• Where a family's wealth is recent and technology-derived, venture is often familiar and the conversation starts closer to the strategy; where it is older and industrial, the conversation more often starts with the asset class.
• Regional presence changes what they want from you. A family office with operating businesses in your markets may value portfolio access more than diversification.
• Currency and jurisdiction matter for them as they do for you, and a family office may need a structure your fund does not currently have.
• In some markets family capital is the principal available route for a first fund, which raises the stakes on getting the relationship right and lowers the value of a generic approach.
• Blueprint's page on raising from Gulf and MENA investors covers one region where family capital is a primary route in detail, and the LP Archetypes pillar carries the family office profile and its comparison against endowments and pensions.

What to bring, and what to leave out

Family offices generally read less material than institutions and read it more personally.

• Bring: a short, specific account of what you invest in and why it has to be you, evidence for the sourcing claim, and a plain statement of the terms.
• Bring: your own commitment and how it is funded, which is often the question that lands hardest with somebody investing their own family's money.
• Bring: an honest answer about what happens if the fund does not reach target, since this is the group most likely to ask.
• Leave out: institutional-format volume that nobody asked for, which reads as distance rather than as rigour.
• Leave out: any suggestion that a commitment is nearly closed when it is not, because this network talks to itself and a correction is expensive.
• Have ready, without leading with it: the full institutional set, because a minority of family offices run a process as deep as any endowment's, and the ones that do decide quickly whether you have it.

What they are testing

Underneath the variation, the questions converge.

• Do I want a ten-year relationship with this person?
• Is the strategy something I understand well enough to explain to the family?
• Is the manager's own money in it, in a way that is meaningful for them?
• Will I hear about problems early, or find out in a quarterly report?
• Is there something here for us beyond the return, meaning co-investment, access, or insight?

What this page does not do

It states no ticket size, allocation, mandate, or process for any family office or group of them, in any region. There is no published source for such figures and the sector's defining characteristic is that its members differ from each other.

It also does not suggest that family capital is easier than institutional capital. It is faster and less formal on average, and it is less patient with a manager who has been vague, and both of those cut against a first-time manager who prepares for institutions and improvises here.

This page is educational and general. It is not legal, tax, or investment advice.