🔥The Blood, Sweat & Capital Behind a VC Firm 🔥
Jonathan Lehr, co-founder and General Partner at Work-Bench, brings a rare mix of enterprise GTM expertise, community-first values, and long term consistency to early-stage investing. In episode 043 of New to Venture, Jon pulls back the curtain on what it really takes to build a VC firm from scratch, from Fund I to the recent $160M Fund IV! This episode is packed with practical wisdom for anyone serious about raising their own fund. Don’t miss it! 📈
My key takeaways:
1️⃣ Be Intentional About Hosting: Define the goal, curate the room, and design for serendipity. Collaboration follows when the right people collide with aligned incentives.
2️⃣ Serve Your Community: The more you give, the more chemical reactions you unlock. Momentum builds from meaningful contributions to founders, investors, and LPs.
3️⃣ Compounding is Key: Consistency and discipline in high visibility tasks separates the real players from the noise. It’s how you beat the masses and weed out the phonies.
4️⃣ Raising a Fund is Like Enterprise Sales: LPs are similar to long-cycle enterprise customers. It is all about building deep trust. Target 10x pipeline coverage!
5️⃣ Share Your Work: Take what you’re already doing and use it to create meaningful touchpoints. Share your theses, learnings, or processes. Eventually, your ideas and impact will draw the right people to you.
6️⃣ Sizing Your Fund: Take a bottom up approach. How many checks do you want to write? What ownership targets do you have? How much follow-on capital do you need? Having clear answers here will guide you to a target fund size. Not a random market number.
Timestamps:
(00:00) - Introductions
(01:24) - Jon’s NBA player comparison
(02:38) - New York Enterprise Technology Meetups + Hosting
(07:36) - Morgan Stanley to VC
(13:26) - Starting a firm without any venture experience
(18:30) - Naming the firm
(19:41) - Raising outside institutional capital
(26:54) - GP - LP fit
(29:24) - Fund size strategy
(34:09) - What changes and stays the same as you raise more money
(39:54) - Highlights and lowlights
(44:39) - Ceremonial Final Qs