“Trust is everything.”
I just wrapped our latest virtual event. This one was totally different than any we’ve done in the last 2 years.
Why? Because I wasn’t just moderating. I was part of the story.
Sharran Deora (General Partner at DV) and Victor Jakubiuk (co-founder of OnSpecta, acquired by Ampere, now DV’s primary GP staker) took me and our audience on a ~10 year walk down memory lane.
It began with my initial collaboration with Sharran via GoingVC, continued with Victor and Sharran’s founder-investor relationship, and ended with us all as business partners sharing economics in a new venture firm that we co-created.
That firm is DV, part of our Venture5 Catalyst program.
This virtual event was presented by Pliancy
Pliancy is a tech-enabled professional services company offering IT solutions to bold, emerging companies. Pliancy was built on the belief that deep, meaningful connections were the missing link in IT. Thanks to single point-of-contact relationships, Pliancy consultants act as true business partners for each client, solving high-impact problems quickly, creatively, and with the long haul in mind.
Trust Built Over a Decade
“One thing I’ve really learned here is trust is everything.”
This wasn’t a cold transaction. Sharran and Victor’s relationship started when Sharran was working with GoingVC Partners and Victor was building OnSpecta. Victor described how Sharran proved himself over time—not with the largest check, but with strategic value through:
- Customer introductions
- The right founder connections
- Pattern recognition that built credibility
By the time Sharran decided to launch DV, that decade of working together made the conversation about GP staking straightforward. They’d already tested the partnership dynamic. Victor knew Sharran’s investment judgment. Sharran knew Victor’s technical expertise and founder network. The trust was already there—they just needed to formalize the economics.
The Partnership Test That Surprised Me
We talked about the phone call where I asked Sharran if we should write specific Venture5 Catalyst deliverables into the legal docs—like a guarantee of a certain # of LP introductions, or of a certain amount of media coverage.
I remember that call vividly. And being surprised that Sharran said–repeatedly–that codifying this in the docs was not neccesary. But I had never asked him why he pushed back on this.
So I put him on the spot and asked him today during the virtual event.
“The reason why I did not (say) John, give me one LP intro, Victor, give me one founder intro is because we’ve worked so well in the past, and I know how the two of you operate in terms of a give first mentality.”
He also went on to say that if he felt he had to contractually obligate us to leverage our networks and reach, he wouldn’t have even asked us to work with him in the first place.
This moment reveals something critical about GP staking: the legal structure matters less than the relational foundation. Sharran wasn’t buying services. He was bringing in partners who would naturally contribute because they were aligned on building something significant together. The formal economics just reflected a partnership that already existed in practice.
Building a Billion-Dollar Venture Franchise
“If you’re really out to build a billion dollar plus AUM venture franchise, getting the right people around the table and being able to get where you’re trying to go instead of getting your firm off the ground in three years—it takes a year—that could be worth it.”
I brought up this topic with Sharran, inspired by a conversation I had the night before with Andrea Lo. For someone with Sharran’s ambition—building a major venture franchise—accelerating the timeline by years has enormous value. The question isn’t “what percentage am I giving up?” but “how much faster can I build something meaningful?”
This reframes GP staking from what some might think is a GP selling equity out of desperation to what it can be under the right circumstances: bringing in the right partners to build faster and bigger.
Don’t Say ‘Fund Zero’ (Said An LP)
I was really glad Sharran explained why he’s calling his initial deal-by-deal investments ‘Fund One’ instead of ‘Fund Zero’. One seasoned institutional fund-of-funds LP that advises DV told him that positioning those early deals as ‘Fund Zero’ can keep a firm in the ’emerging manager’ bucket longer than it needs to be. After all, most LPs consider that graduation from emerging manager to established manager to occur after Fund 3 or Fund 4. So better to start the clock at “1” and not “0”. Previously my advice to Sharran and other emerging managers had been to look at those pre-fund SPV style deals as a “Fund 0” … but no longer!
When The Deal Got Even Better Than I Thought
Sharran is taking the approach of doing deal-by-deal syndicates instead of a dedicated blind pool of capital for his “Fund 1”. One downside to going deal-by-deal is that you need to find LPs to invest each time. Some may come in, some may not. You never know until you’re in the thick of it.
We recently had a deal come up that reiterated that I’m working with partners who have a long term perspective. That deal was on thesis for DV, but the company was in a vertical that Sharran hadn’t brought to the LPs before. And because of that, the check size to the company was tracking to come in lower than what was promised to the founders.
It would have been easy for Sharran to step away from the deal and just tell the founders of the company that the LP base wasn’t interested. After all, DV wasn’t leading and the check was not a make-or-break size for the company.
Instead? Sharran wrote a (much) larger personal check into the deal than his usual GP commitment to ensure it closed.
The Venture5 Take
I really enjoyed bringing this topic to our audience because it’s one that does not get talked about much.
I also wanted to help dispel the myth that a GP accepting a stake always implies some sort of weakness, or that there’s something “wrong” with the firm. It actually could indicate a source of strength and a burning desire to built a large, meaningful venture franchise.
That disparity is something that we’re betting leads to significant alpha.
Want the actual financial model we used when negotiating this staking? Subscribe below and we’ll send you a download link:
