For the better part of a year, we’ve been sitting down with venture capital CFOs and finance leaders to understand what the job looks like in practice. The Office of the Venture CFO series has taken us through fund structures, tax strategy, liquidity, and compliance, the operational backbone of running a VC firm.
One theme has kept surfacing that we didn’t expect: the CFO’s critical role in fundraising.
The conventional understanding is that LP fundraising belongs to the GP. That’s accurate but incomplete. What we’ve learned, from talking to some of the best venture CFOs in the business, is that there’s a layer of work underneath the GP’s fundraising activity that determines whether or not LPs say yes. And almost all of it runs through the fund CFO.
Here’s what we uncovered.
The Fundraising Conversation Starts Before The Fundraise
Most GPs treat LP reporting as a compliance function. Yet an institutional LP we know quite well told us it’s one of the most underutilized tools in fundraising. By the time a GP calls an LP about the next fund, the LP has already formed a view. That view is built from a few years of quarterly reports, the valuation methodology… and especially the quality of the explanations when something went differently than expected.
Dave Rivinus came up through public markets IR at Yahoo, then Twitter, where he helped take the company public alongside Adam Bain and Dick Costolo. When they founded 01 Advisors in 2018, Rivinus came to help build the firm from scratch. That background shows up directly in how 01 handles LP transparency.
“Taking some of those IR principles from the public world into the funds side has been received really well… When you can give a much greater level of detail into the portfolio, into the companies, talk about specifics on portfolio construction — that’s a real differentiator.”
At 01 Advisors, that means showing LPs two sets of marks on every portfolio company. The internal mark, generated using public comps and documented methodology, and the “last-round” mark.
The goal, Rivinus said, is explicit.
“As an LP, you make the decision of what this portfolio is worth… [We say] ‘we think this is where it’s going, here’s the market mark, and here’s enough information that you can form your own view.’”
This matters more than it might seem. Since 2021, a lot of last-round marks have gone stale. Valuations from that era were set on metrics that may not reflect reality today. By surfacing both views, Rivinus lets LPs see the gap, and tries to anticipate the conclusions someone might draw so that he can address them proactively rather than waiting for the questions. That builds trust.
The firms doing “reporting as fundraising” well don’t just send quarterly charts and graphs, they layer on strategic commentary and attempt to answer stated (or unsaid) questions their LPs have like:
- What’s the liquidity outlook?
- Where will value accrue from here?
- Is the strategy working?
That narrative, coming from the finance function, is distinct from anything the investment team delivers and helps LPs stay oriented between fundraises.
The practical implication is that your LP reporting cadence is not separate from your fundraising strategy. It is integral to your fundraising strategy.
The CFO Has to Know the Portfolio (Better Than Anyone)
When an LP asks what’s actually happening with a portfolio company, not just what the mark says, but what the business is doing, that question often gets routed to the fund CFO. If the answer is confident and specific, it builds credibility. Dan Rochkind double-majored in journalism and accounting at the University of Maryland, and at Lerer Hippeau, he uses both. He describes the communication side as the core of the job.
“We’re the storytellers of the firm. A CFO that has communication skills is absolute table stakes.”
The journalism training shows up in specific ways. On a recent evening, Rochkind got an email at 8 pm from his managing partner about a portfolio company’s follow-on round. They needed a clear read on where things stood. Rochkind had it done by 8:30. Lead first, most important information up top, roughly 200 words. As you would imagine, the same communication clarity translates to LP information requests.
That clarity comes from Dan’s background in journalism, as well as Lerer Hippeau’s systematic data infrastructure. Fifteen years of tracking, five hundred portfolio companies, quarterly KPIs, and information rights on every seed deal from the last seven or eight years. The CFO is the keeper of that record. As Dan said:
“I think the CFO should know the portfolio better than pretty much anyone on the team.”
Chris Huether at Inspired Capital shared how he builds that knowledge through direct operating involvement, spending roughly 25% of his time working with ~80 portfolio companies. The knowledge that comes from that involvement isn’t in a spreadsheet. It’s the contextual intelligence you only get from sitting across many companies over time. For example:
“I can tell them what’s market (for venture debt terms) and what’s not, what to push back on, where they’re leaving something on the table… That perspective comes from sitting across so many situations.”
The same cross-portfolio intelligence that makes Huether useful to founders makes him a helpful resource to LPs who want to apply what he’s learning to their other venture and fund investments.
LP Communication Is Not One Size Fits All
Send the quarterly letter you’d write for a pension fund CIO to a family office investor who’s still learning the asset class, and most of it won’t land. Worse, it can rattle them. An LP who’s confused about what they’re reading is a harder re-up.
Chris Huether has had to operationalize that principle across two very different LP structures. At Pruven Capital, Prudential’s independent venture program and his old firm, there was one LP. Institutional, sophisticated, one reporting language, one set of expectations. Inspired Capital’s LP base is much broader. Pensions, endowments, family offices, high-net-worth individuals, some of whom are new to the asset class.
He described the difference plainly. With institutional LPs,
“You’re speaking the same language.”
With family offices or individuals newer to VC mechanics,
“You’re spending a lot more time explaining things, walking through concepts, giving updates on companies.”
Same information, but different audiences require different considerations. What Huether brought to both environments was a framework built before he joined venture, after years of doing M&A, investor relations, and treasury at a 30,000-person organization.
There’s also an underappreciated upside to managing a diverse LP base. As Chris pointed out, the cross-industry perspectives that come back in (from LPs invested across venture, private equity, and real estate) become a source of intelligence.
“The perspectives they bring are really interesting… Things they’re seeing from the other funds and managers they’re involved with.”
Family offices new to the asset class ask the questions that force clearer explanations. Pensions tracking dozens of managers bring comparative data a single institutional LP never would. The diversity of the base may make reporting more time-consuming, but it can also have benefits.
For GPs building or growing a multi-LP base, the communication strategy is not a one-time decision. It is an ongoing calibration. And it is often the CFO’s responsibility to manage it, even when the GP owns the actual relationships.
What This Means in Practice
The pattern is the same across all three CFOs’ experiences, even though their firms look nothing alike.
Each has taken work that most people assume belongs to the GP (valuation credibility, portfolio narrative, LP communication) and built the infrastructure to do it consistently. Not just at fundraising time. All the time.
And that matters because LP fundraising isn’t a discrete event. It’s shaped by every quarterly report, every capital call, every mark, every update call, every time an LP asks a question and gets an answer that either builds confidence or doesn’t.
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