Raising Common Magic I
Yesterday I did final close on Common Magic I. I’ve had a few other first-time funds ask for advice; I know very little so far but this is a piece for them (and you, if you’re curious).
What’s extremely funny to me now is how little I thought, before I began the raise, about how much I would like the day-to-day; not just the ambiguity of venture capital given the length of time it takes to know if you’re any good but also the sheer workload of running a solo fund (finding new investments, supporting existing ones, fundraising, all the admin).
Common Magic arrived in my head fully formed one day and that was that.
Luckily, running a small artisan solo fund has turned out to be an excellent personality fit; for my specific blend of curiosity, love of people, love of challenge and passion for funding a very particular version of the future.
Fundraising in 2023/2024 was so hilariously hard you have to start naive; otherwise you would not do it.
Typically, you start a fund because of a specific thesis or angle you believe gives you access to a specific startup group or founder pool others don’t or can’t see. But you only win the right to run a fund if enough LPs back you — this is the real product-market fit you’re looking for. Without it, you’re an angel.
This is my attempt to summarise big lessons learnt.
(and a disclaimer on this whole post — remember; advice that works for others might not work for you.
Other GPs confidently told me cold emails don’t work but one of my favourite wish list LPs came from an agonised-over cold email).
Know yourself
Fundraising is a masterclass in human psychology, both yours and everyone you meet.
Every LP is different, and you can’t entirely control how the market sees you, but it’s important to understand the fund’s strengths and flaws, especially for solo GPs where so much of the raise is naturally based on you. I had a couple of unique advantages in the market:
- Selling something I deeply believed in —products with community at their core is a market opportunity that felt obvious and that I could uniquely make the most of
- Clear founder/thesis fit (long term obsession with the subject matter; I’d been talking about and working on community for years; my entire angel portfolio was on thesis)
- Founders seemed to rate me
- As Charlie Munger would put it, I’m a learning machine
- Wide network with some public profile (but not recent)
And a couple of real disadvantages:
- Marmite thesis, some would say marmite character (highly opinionated, intense, quite direct)
- Track record as an angel is good but not stand out
- An operator (ie. was not trained as a VC; in Europe, only 8% of VCs have any operational experience)
- A woman, over 40, who didn’t grow up rich
- Legendarily bad timing given the wider market for first-time funds was in the toilet
Knowing this, you can build out your materials (the deck that exists to get you meetings, and the data room for interested parties) in a way that emphasizes assets and tries to anticipate known risks and open questions.
In my case, as I knew I couldn’t alter the basic facts of my profile, I chose a fast small first close with LPs that had known me a long time — all well-known venture firms and experienced founders/operators — so I could get to market faster.
The goal was to make the thesis come to life through a living portfolio (show, don’t tell), prove I could access these companies with a fund not angel size check and ensure there were more founders and coinvestors who could validate me. I also had to raise the stakes for myself by going public (snapshot into my psyche there).
Focus on the true believers
Something I didn’t know, early on, is that everyone talks (everyone talks) and the minute you have what you think is a casual coffee, everyone knows — and you’re raising.
The first deck was sent to ten trusted people, all long-term investors or LPs. Nine invested, in the end; all said upfront the basic fund idea was great and the deck was terrible. One person gave me slide by slide feedback so honest that I had to close the laptop and come back to it — months later, when I learnt how few people know how to give hard feedback or decline gracefully, I’d remember how respectful and generous this move was.
Ultimately, fundraising is a numbers game but not in any transactional sense. More, you’re searching out the true believers.
It’s a contrarian move to say yes to a first fund, especially in this market, and it’s an emotional decision more than it is a logical one. You can’t, and shouldn’t, alter your basic strategy based on what you think LPs will think, or what one or two specific LPs say, but all feedback helps you build up a picture.
Time got wasted on LPs that fundamentally didn’t get Common Magic or me or didn’t have money to invest (huge problem in the 2023/2024 cycle; nobody wants to look like the shop is shut). I got in front of household name investors and tanked pitches because of a thousand reasons.
But soon the persona began to be clearer; institutional capital who had evidence, based on past returns, of how well taking risks on new things can pay off; founders that had built and sold companies aligned with my thesis; Europeans based in California who wanted to fund globally minded founders based in Europe; people that had seen my work over time. I had to keep rewriting my wishlist as the right profiles converted.
The LPs who said yes are people I like, rate, and wanted to work with for a decade. Nearly every LP who joined brought a friend, or already knew a lot of my cap table. So obvious in retrospect.
Find the true believers and value them.
The obstacle is the path / manage your energy
There were tough weeks (months, if I’m honest) when I pitched a lot of people, made little progress and worried if the fund and I were fundamentally a bad idea, even if the investing side felt like it was going well.
There were also many mad moments.
The very delayed first close which happened right after the holiday I’d booked in Crete to celebrate first close; the many hours I spent double checking documents gave the holiday the nickname “death by Docusign”.
The time I got so angry with incorrect information from my old fund admin that I burst into furious tears in front of shocked Brits on a call.
Once I was so deep into reading a long document I didn’t notice a stack of books in my room had caught fire from an errant candle.
I had to learn to manage my energy, and that the obstacle was the path. There are no shortcuts in raising a fund — you can’t go round it so you have to go through it.
At a critical juncture, Finn Murphy & I were talking about how fundraising felt Sisphyean; you spend all day pushing a rock up a hill only to have it fall down every evening. And he just said; you have to learn to love your boulders.
Which is true. I’m not sure I could have learnt as much any other way (in a weird way, I’m grateful I didn’t raise in 2021).
Something clicked in early 2024. Maybe I’d spent so long telling the same story I finally found my groove; maybe it was because the fund size was already viable. But I began to enjoy fundraising and the minute I did more people said yes.
Everyone prefers a real conversation to a pitch where you are simply a number on a CRM.
A raise memory I’ll never forget is catching up with an SF-based LP. It was the weekend and we were sat in his garden, discussing fund progress, as his kids played nearby. One came over to ask for his help understanding a tricky word in her pirate book and I sat there, trying not to laugh, as he delicately framed what the word “harlot” meant. LPs are people too.
And next year…
“Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect” — Teller
Last week I sat down and wrote a fast one pager on Common Magic II; this is for 2026 but the shape of it feels so clear in my head already.
The biggest open question I have now, peering into 2025, is how my days will look. I’ve got so used to balancing fundraising with finding and supporting startups that it’s a little weird for me to think my core focus in the next year is just one of these.
But something on my mind is the specific space Common Magic occupies.
For founders, CM aims to be a venture size check with angel style, married with deep operational expertise in a specific domain, and a network to help you win.
For LPs, I learnt often in this raise I was put into the “wildcard” bucket (versus B2B SaaS, climate etc). It’s clear to me I’m part of a wave of wildcard small funds that act like angels, and also clear to me this group can and will build their own category.
