📖 This article is the 6th and final part of a wider series on “Fundraising 101 for MENA VCs” – you can check-out earlier instalments here.
Everything we've discussed so far, finding anchors, crafting pitches, navigating strategic capital, surviving the marathon, has been about how to raise a fund within the LP landscape as it currently exists.
This final step is about something different, how to actually change the landscape itself.
Ivo Detelinov is the most forceful voice on this point, and his framing is worth taking seriously because it redefines LP development as a collective responsibility rather than an individual fundraising problem.
It's our job as a VC fund community to grow the LP base. That is our job. And we don't need to be told. Those funds that will succeed in the forthcoming years and decades will be those that actually succeed to grow the LP base. And that should include much deeper relationships with the best corporations, and not only because we shouldn't only be scratching the surface by going to the banks, the telcos, the food companies, the water utilities and be done with it.
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"We don't need to be told." There's something bracing about that. Ivo isn't waiting for a government programme to expand the LP pool or for some exogenous shock to bring new institutional capital into the market. He's arguing that the VC community itself has to do the work, fund by fund, LP by LP, conversation by conversation, of building the capital base that the ecosystem needs.
And he's right that the funds who do this most effectively will be the ones that thrive, because a GP who brings new LPs into the ecosystem isn't just raising their own fund, they're reducing their dependence on the same oversubscribed sovereign programmes that every other GP is competing for.
The corporate LP opportunity, in Ivo's telling, goes well beyond the obvious names.
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