LPs aren't slow, they're unconvinced: how to find LPs for a first-time fund in six months, not two years

Sunny Ray · May 5, 2026 · 5 min read

LPs don't take two years to trust a new manager because they're slow. They take two years because nobody gave them a reason to talk sooner.

On May 4, Emiliano and I got on a call with a Colombia-based manager who invests in US funds. They'd already raised two funds. Their network in their home city was strong. Outside it, thin. And the week before, they'd landed their first investor from the capital, a small win that told them the model could travel.

The question on the table was the one every emerging manager eventually asks: how do we get LPs who don't already know us to write checks in months, not years? The line from that call I keep coming back to: "And giving us checks after two years, it can be like six months, right? Why wouldn't it? There's ways to accelerate relationship."

I believe that, and the path isn't mysterious.

Why emerging managers stall outside their home city

At home, trust is free. People know your family, your track record, who you had dinner with last month. A wealthy family in your city gives you a check because your reputation did the diligence for you.

Leave that city and you're just another first-time manager in an inbox. The family office in Mexico City or Miami has never heard of you. They default to the slow path: watch you for a fund cycle, see if you're still around, maybe meet you at a conference, maybe invest in fund three.

That two-year courtship isn't caution so much as a lack of signal. Give them signal faster and the clock shrinks.

Qualify LPs before the first call

The first thing we proposed was a qualifying step on the booking form, before anyone gets on a call. Four questions:

• What check sizes do you typically write?
• Are you accredited?
• Have you invested in tech startups or funds before?
• Do you keep allocation for follow-on rounds?

That sounds like admin. It's not. Emerging managers burn months on warm, friendly calls with people who were never going to invest at their minimum. Every one of those calls feels like progress. None of them is.

The follow-on question matters more than people think. An LP who has room for follow-on allocation is an LP thinking in relationships, not one-off bets. Those are the people who come back for fund two.

The middle funnel: what happens between yes and wire

Most emerging managers obsess over the top of the funnel. More names. Bigger lists. More family offices. That's the easy part now. Reaching LPs at scale is a solved problem with the right data and sending setup.

Where funds lose a year is the middle. An LP takes the first meeting, likes you, and then nothing happens. No reason to talk again. No new information. The manager sends a quarterly update into silence and wonders why nobody commits.

The middle of the funnel is where trust gets built or doesn't. What moves it is a steady drip of real things: a portfolio fund's markup, a co-investment opportunity, an intro to another LP they'd respect, an invite to something in person. Each one is a reason to talk again that isn't "are you ready to commit?"

Another line from that call stuck with me: "Money is like ROI and money is energy. Everyone wants it and understands it." LPs speak a universal language. Show them movement, with numbers, every few weeks, and you've replaced two years of watching with six months of evidence.

Events and summits as trust accelerators

The biggest accelerator we talked about was getting in a room. The ideas were a physical event in Mexico City or somewhere else in the region, or an online summit as a lighter starting point. Charles offered to help organize if the schedule worked. Both he and Emiliano have spent real time doing business in Latin America, and they flagged something founders from outside the region miss: Mexico, Colombia and Chile each do business differently. One script for all three won't work. Budget-wise, a physical event like that runs from a couple of thousand dollars to ten thousand or more depending on scale, which is small next to a year of slower LP conversations.

Why do events compress the timeline so hard? Because an LP who has had dinner with you, met two of your existing LPs and heard a GP from one of your portfolio funds speak has done in one evening what would otherwise take a year of emails. Social proof stops being a slide and becomes a room.

An online summit does a smaller version of the same thing, and it's a good first step when you can't fly everyone in. Invite LPs to be on a panel, not just to watch. People trust the ones who gave them a stage.

What we would not promise an emerging manager

I'll be straight about the limits. Nobody can promise an emerging manager a close date. LPs are making a ten-year decision about a team. Some of them will take the full two years no matter what you do, and that's fine.

What you can change is how many qualified LPs you're actively talking to, how fast you learn which ones are real, and how often each real one gets a fresh reason to move. That's the whole game. The manager who controls those three numbers raises faster than the one waiting for their reputation to travel on its own.

If you're raising a fund and want to reach family offices outside your home city, here's how we reach family offices through a show.

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