The Raise: Allocator-Ready
Most first-time managers pitch their strategy and lose on everything else. I allocated capital to managers for five years — capital I could withdraw whenever execution slipped, which made me a harder audience than most — and ran investment due diligence on 100+ funds. I also sat on the receiving end of prime brokers' capital introduction: I was the allocator they were pitching to. This package rehearses your raise against the person who decides. Key components include, but are not limited to: - Full mock investment due diligence, with written feedback - Pitchbook and DDQ teardown: what allocators read, in what order, and what makes them stop reading - Track record presentation: attribution, portability, and how to handle the gaps honestly - What I saw across 100+ managers: the operational and structural choices that made allocators uncomfortable, and the ones that never came up — so you know where to spend your time and money before a formal operational review - Capital introduction, from the other side: what PB cap intro actually delivers versus what it promises, how managers get selected for it, and how allocators - really treat those introductions - Mapping your capital: family offices, institutional allocators, seeders and platforms — what each wants, and what each costs you - Terms and seed deal negotiation: revenue shares, capacity rights, and what to concede last - Why funds fail to scale after a successful launch, and the signals allocators watch for
What's included
- Survive a full mock investment due diligence and fixed what it exposed
- A pitch tested against someone who has declined more managers than they've backed
- A realistic understanding of what prime brokerage capital introduction delivers, so you can evaluate what a PB promises you
- A defined negotiating position on terms and any seed discussion
Meet your expert
Paul W.
2x Finance Founder — I've Also Been the Investor You Pitch
I've spent twenty-plus years in Asian equities, in every seat the industry offers. Ten years on the sell side at CLSA in Tokyo and Hong Kong, ranked Asiamoney #1 best analyst in the region five years running. Five years inside hedge funds — running my own book as a portfolio manager at Horizon, and most recently as a senior analyst on a Japan market-neutral pod at Millennium. In between, five years independent as founder, CIO and head of alternative investments: I launched a hedge-fund allocation practice for family offices, conducting due diligence on 100+ managers, then co-founded an asset management firm and took it through SFC licensing as its Responsible Officer, growing it from a private-equity and real-estate shop into a multi-strategy alternatives platform. Today I also design and build agentic-AI research workflows for my own global-equities portfolio. Born and raised in Hong Kong, educated in England, and lived in Japan for a decade. Native English and Cantonese, fluent Mandarin and Japanese.
