How To Raise A Venture Fund| Reem Mobassaleh Wyndham (Pact)

May 9, 2023

Reem Mobassaleh Wyndham, General Partner of Pact, shares insights on raising a venture fund amidst market downturns. She discusses keeping in touch with LPs, founding a fund while pregnant with Crunchbase co-founders, Head of AI at Google, & artist Anne Hathaway. They dive into how having kids while raising the fund cultivated extreme focus & organizational maturity, and leveraging hands-on value-add early-stage engagement.

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ADVICE

Iterate Your Deck Until LPs Understand You

Do iterate your pitch relentlessly until LP-language and conviction align; dozens of deck versions are normal.
Pact simplified complex pillars into three ABC themes to make their thesis digestible for LPs.

ADVICE

Test Your Fund Story With Friendly Ruthless Listeners

Start fundraising by testing your story with friendly but critical listeners, then test with less-likely LPs to get real-market feedback.
Use early feedback to ruthlessly refine positioning before broad outreach.

ANECDOTE

Cornerstone Family Office Jumpstarted The Raise

Pact secured a cornerstone family office term sheet early because of prior board relationships, which provided capital, office space and network support.
That anchor helped validate them but also revealed they still needed to refine messaging for broader LPs.

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Description: On the sixth episode of our “How to Raise a Venture Fund” series, we're joined by Reem Mobassaleh Wyndham, General Partner of Pact, a seed stage thematic fund focused on ABCs - access, betterment and climate solutions. They have raised a 15m GBP fund on first close, already starting deploying capital and set to have a 30m GBP fund by second close in 2023.

This episode dives into the ins and outs of how a fund is akin to a pre-seed investment, how to tactfully keep in touch with LPs (tip - nothing is over until there is a no!), and how they raised in the midst of one of the worst market downturns in recent history from the co-founders of Crunchbase, the Head of AI at Google and artist Anne Hathway while all getting pregnant with their first kids! Listen in to how to start a fund through it all here.

Adding to the podcast from Reem's perspective:

In regards to having kids while raising the fund, what originally we perceived as a burden has pushed us to cultivate a superpower of extreme focus and organisational maturity.

From a positioning and value add perspective we also saw the opportunity to be hands on early stage investors because not only have we been investors, bankers and lawyers, but we have also been operators at the small and large scale - ones we grew and sold, as well as another that ultimately listed. We have done this while also having worked across almost a dozen countries. This background has positioned us to working closely with a relatively concentrated portfolio providing both operational insight as well as access to a deep global network not just in the US but also in typically hard to access markets in the Middle East and Asia