Webinar Series

Building a Sustainable Family Office Venture Fund

An increasing number of family offices are investing in venture capital via direct investments, effectively creating an internal fund. While some families have found a successful, sustainable strategy, many have not and even a few have decided to exit direct investing completely.  

This webinar series, presented in partnership with Toniic, the Stanford Emergence Program, CCC Alliance, and GPFO, is designed to help family office principals:

  • Understand the opportunities and challenges with respect to direct investing, and creating an internal venture fund

  • Learn from successful investors in terms of how they design funds, evaluate potential investments, and support portfolio companies post-investment

  • Build sustainable funds that stand the test of time and involve multiple generations

What’s Unique?

  • This series is designed to speak primarily to family office principals, and utilizes principals as speakers, along with select service providers with deep expertise

  • Non-commercial setting: The organizers and speakers do not solicit third party capital

  • Lessons told honestly (i.e. What works, What doesn’t) and via stories and specific examples

Session Breakdown:

Episode 1 - Venture Capital Opportunities and Challenges

March 19, 11:00am Pacific

Vijen Patel

Founding Partner of The 81 Collection

You'll hear from principals and seasoned entrepreneurial investors Jason Ingle and Vijen Patel on key foundational aspects of the venture capital market and its relationship to family offices including:

  • Venture capital basics: size, performance, growth of the market by vertical

  • If VC may be right for your family office

  • Direct vs. fund investing

  • Getting buy-in from the family

  • Involving the next generation

Episode 2 - Designing a Family Office Venture Fund

May 14, 10:00am Pacific

We'll dive into the nuts and bolts of creating an internal family office venture fund, drawing on the extensive legal expertise of Kirkland & Ellis Partner, Ryan Harris, and deep investment experience of Philip Benjamin, Co-Founder of Colzen Capital, and Josh Cohen, founder of City Light Capital and Co-Founder of the The ImPact.

We'll cover:

  • Defining a vision for VC: how will you allocate and how much?

  • How to set up the fund: what structure will you use?

  • Leveraging resources across the family office

  • How to craft your brand and stand out in a crowded marketplace

  • Deciding on investment verticals

  • Determining necessary back-office activities

  • Whether to build or buy operational capacity

Episode 3 - Finding & Evaluating Potential Investments

September 24, 10:00am Pacific

Dave Sachse

Manager at Family VC

Max Khalkhali

Co-Founder of GEX Ventures

In Episode Three of Building a Sustainable Family Office Venture Fund, we get to the juicy part - making investments!  It turns out, there is quite a lot of planning and execution necessary to adequately find and evaluate potential investments.  This episode will cover:

  • How to build a community to generate high quality deal flow

  • Establishing a strategy around participating in rounds as a lead or follower, ticket size, and allocating capital for later stage follow on rounds

  • Creating a framework to measure impact and success for your venture capital investing

Episode 4 - Supporting Entrepreneurs in the Portfolio

November 5th, 10am Pacific - speakers TBA