LP Blueprint
Tell us your raise. We'll tell you the 3 things to do today. LP Blueprint's a personal fundraising assistant for GPs: your site, your pipeline, and the LPs most likely to close. More then 300 GPs and investors have paid for LP Blueprint.
- Top in Finance
- #38
- Paid subscribers
- 10+ paid
- Followers
- 121K
- Paid plan
- $20/mo
- Recommends
- 5
- Podcast
- Yes
other newsletters
What they write about
Practical guidance for emerging fund managers raising capital from limited partners, mixed with running satire. Recurring subjects include family offices and allocators, investment committee dynamics, data rooms and fundraising materials, and what raising a fund actually costs.
- fundraising
- venture capital
- limited partners
- family offices
- fund management
Recent examples: Get That Tree Bark Money: The Yuan Dynasty · Terminally Obsessed
Written from LP Blueprint’s own published post titles and openings in Sep 11, 2026. It describes the subjects the newsletter covers, not its views, and is not investment advice.
Growth history
Subscribers (thousands, nightly)
118K on Sep 10, 2026 → 118K on Oct 21, 2026
Followers (thousands, nightly)
Rank in Substack’s finance leaderboard: #38 today · #33 a week ago · #41 a month ago
Stats worth sharing
Tracked since Sep 10, 2026 — 62 daily snapshots so far. The card below is built from what we track and refreshes nightly.
- Percentile
- Top 8%
- Best rank seen
- #29
- Rank, 7 days
- −5 places
- Rank, 30 days
- +3 places
- Followers added
- −586
- Posts
- 10
- Reactions per post
- 81
- Reactions tracked
- 2.3K
of 525 ranked finance newsletters
on Sep 14, 2026
since tracking began
last 30 days
average, recent posts
across 28 posts
Most-reacted post we have seen: Who’s On The IC? None of Your Business 😂 — 210 reactions on Sep 8, 2026.
Recent posts
- Get That Tree Bark Money: The Yuan Dynasty
Fund managers sometimes ask me “Why should I care about Chinese dynasties? China hasn’t even had a dynasty in 114 years.” You got me, dudes. But the Yuan Dynasty ran paper money at empire scale, a partnership that sure looks like a LP and a GP, and launched trade network that figured out how to move product across a continent. So far, we’ve profiled about four or five Chinese Dynasties, the Xia , Qin , Zhou and Han and even touched on the Northern Wei Dynasty . We’re not going in order, but we look at the ones that we think matter, as it applies to how money, land and power come together…
- Terminally Obsessed
I was meeting with one of our GPs yesteday and we were talking about police and fire pensions, like LAFPP. We were talking about Bryan Fujita, the guy who’s the CIO of LAFPP. If you know police and fire, you know his team. You know what they do, and you know they manage $32-37B, their alts sleeve has a 12-14% target allocation for PE and VC. If you can’t name these CIOs off the top of your head, like Iggy Pop records (like Kill City , the one Iggy cut while he was going in and out of the mental hospital - aw, who am I kidding that’s probably half of the ‘73-’77 Iggy albums), how do you expect…
- Take Away My Phone Phoebe Bridgers
I’d been wanting to see Phoebe Bridgers for a long time. As soon as I got tickets to the show my teen told me, “You realize you’re not gonna be able to bring your phone in there, right? They’re gonna make you put it in a pouch!” It was like she thought I was going to go straight into DTs. “Yeah, I know, hon, it’s all good.” I played it cool, but internally I was freaking the F out. I got that How To Break Up With Your Phone book a couple years ago in a white elephant gift thing, and I’ve done a couple of phone-free weekends this year. But this concert? This was the test. This was my first…
- Why Funds Get Stuck & What It Costs The GP
We’re not into vibes or hunches. We have about 341,000 form Ds in our filing cabinet. They cover January ‘21 to this morning. If it were a real printouts it would take up about 2.4 million sheets of paper, so about 960 bankers boxes worth. There’s about 48k VC and 40k PE form Ds in there and another 55k hedge funds. The 46k in the “other” category is growth equity, and stuff like that. It would be about 12 tons of paper, and it would take up my entire 2-car garage at this point. Good thing it fits on a flash drive, fire department would shit if they knew I was storing the paper equivalent of…
- SPVs are going buck wild
I sit in my ivory tower all day listening to Blue Öyster Cult and Mastdon on repeat. In fact, I saw Mastodon and Deafheaven at the Fox in Oakland last Friday, it was insane. The little comic book monkeys they used on their stage backdrop were wild, and they even brought out Baronness’ John Baizley for 4-5 songs. I command an army of robots to monitor the market for me all night and all day. This isn’t because I’m super-smart, it’s because I’m super-lazy and I advise 135+ investment firms. They also do not like to do homework. They like to meet with LPs. So, we need to know at all times what’s…
- Getting Your Founders Funded, Again, And Again
I love talking with smart women who know how to get founders funded. And I love talking with some of the best writers on Substack. Helena Fogarty checks both of those boxes. Her Substack, The Phenom Brief , has been going now for a year, and she covers some of the hardest material I know - how founders get funded, past the first time. That’s what today’s interview covers. If you pass ONE piece of LP Blueprint stuff onto your founders (if you back startups) this is probably the one. We’ve broken the piece down into sections. Also, if you’re not a paid subscriber, don’t trip out, feel free to…
- The 3 bank products emerging VCs use
If you’re in this business long enough, somebody from a bank may call you. There is no bank promo BS in this post either. We’re just here to make sure your fund or SPV gets closed, and sometimes that means referring you to a good banker, attorney, etc., to smooth out bumps along the way. I’m just gonna put this here. We get 2-3 questions every single day on “What should my fundraise cost?” We’re not even gonna gatekeep this document anymore. A fundraise costs about 3%. I don’t know if you know this but if you incorporate a fund with the SEC someone from Pitchbook will call you within about 7…
- LinkedIn Shut Off The AI Slop Button
I stop by LinkedIn every week or so, more for shits and giggles than anything. It’s a hard place to be. Frankly, since about 2020, I’ve found it a not very fun to browse. I dunno, whenever I go there, I just don’t feel very good. I think the reason is because I frequently hear from younger people in capital formation talk about phony job postings on LinkedIn. Also, I’ve made real relationships on Substack. I talk with other Substack creators often. A few of them have become friends of mine, and have had very real impacts on my day-to-day life. But there’s been one positive shift. LinkedIn has…
- Is This LP a Fit for Your Fund or SPV?
Guilty as charged, your honor. We’ve all done it. I’ve met with LPs who are a crappy fit. They’ve met with me. Why? Because I’ve been in sales for 27 years and I’m really good at getting people into meetings. Doesn’t mean it was a good idea for me or for them, lol. Even if you were a GP that started raising a fund 26 weeks ago, you probably are not terrible at what you do and you can probably land 50 or 100 meetings. These LPs have probably met with you too. They’ve wasted their time, and they’ve wasted your time. We were wondering what this actually cost so we did the math. Don’t worry, it…
- Most Family Offices Backing Emerging Managers Don’t Wanna Talk About It
Every emerging fund manager in our community want a check from a family office. I usually ask GPs to name 3 or 4 family offices that have written checks at their check size in their thesis in the last 12-18 months. Most can’t. The GPs that I see that get lots and lots of checks from family offices do 4 things right: They know the names of lots of family offices from memory. No AI needed They know what these family offices invest in and when They have 3-4 publications they read weekly to track family offices They have a person on their team who runs what we call a Family Office Program. This…
- Sometimes They Catch Ya
Took my kid to see Hot Water Music and The Menzingers at Great American Music Hall last night. I take children to punk shows on school nights. His first show was Bad Religion and The Avengers when he was 8, so he got kind of a late start. We were standing against the wall in the arcade along the east end of the building, and some guy came up to us at the end of Hot Water Music’s set and said, “Is this your kid?” I thought the show was all-ages, and for a second was thinking, “Oh shit, this guy is gonna throw the kid out.” “This is so amazing that your kid is here. You gotta bring the next…
- Fundraising: It’s Not A Switch You Flip
From the data we’ve seen, the fund managers who close aren’t the ones who sprint hard at the end of a raise. In fact, the results and data say the exact opposite. They’re they ones who just do not stop . They’re the ones who are constantly building pipeline. Every emerging manager we talk to knows fundraising is existential. Unfortunately, almost none of them do it until they absolutely have to. LPs can smell that. They call it panic fundraising. They know. We advise 135 investment firms right now. (About 40-45% of them are venture capital and private equity - the rest are real estate, growth…
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Data: Substack public leaderboards and publication archives, refreshed nightly, plus public beehiiv sitemaps and recommendation pages, refreshed weekly. Source for this page: LP Blueprint. Subscriber counts are Substack’s own rounded public figures, so week-on-week changes move in steps. beehiiv audience sizes are self-reported by the publisher and are not verified. Last snapshot: Nov 10, 2026.