Fundraising Deck: Introduction

This series walks through a fundraising deck that I created for a hypothetical growth equity fund. The presentation is designed to illustrate key elements of the GP’s investment and value creation strategy using the value creation models on this site.

The presentation’s Excel backup and the slides in PowerPoint and PDF are available below:

I hope that this series generates a few ideas for your next pitchbook or annual meeting presentation. If you are seeking additional advice or bandwidth for private equity marketing or track record projects, feel free to get in touch with me through the support page or my consulting website.

Cannae Growth Equity Fund IV, L.P.

This is an entirely fabricated presentation that, to the best of my knowledge, bears no resemblance to any real firms or funds in the market. I wouldn’t expect anyone who branded their firm with Roman iconography to name it after the crushing defeat delivered by Hannibal in 216 BCE.

Disclosures

Every fundraising deck requires at least one Disclosure slide. Check with fund formation counsel and compliance consultants for the latest language appropriate to your size and strategy.

Firm Overview

The first content slide is typically an overview that serves as a backdrop for the introductory narrative (or elevator pitch). It illustrates key elements like the firm’s history, size, and investment focus, so audiences can fit you into their mental allocation framework.

Overview slide formats are quite diverse and can depend upon a firm’s maturity:

• Large, established firms tend to emphasize their global presence and hundreds of billions in AUM
• New firms without established track records often lead with team or the hot sector in which the fund will invest
• Most highlight 4 to 6 key elements that support the introduction and set up themes that can be revisited later in the presentation

Introduction to Cannae Growth Equity

Here, we chose to highlight that the firm:

• Is relatively young, but established (10-years old)
• Is a growth equity stage investor focused on four key sectors
• Manages over $1.6 billion of committed capital across three funds
• Is raising a reasonably sized Fund IV, on a timeline consistent with past deployment
• And has achieved excellent realized returns since inception

A Foretaste of Portfolio Performance

I generally like to have at least one performance statement on this slide. It is too early to discuss the track record in detail, but you can foreshadow that conversation and remind audiences why it will be worth attending to the slides that precede it.

Choose a performance metric that the firm look good, but make sure that it is fully disclosed and not misleading. Realized returns in this presentation reflect the combined performance of 15 exits in three funds. Firms with longer histories sometimes highlight the individual or aggregate returns for their most recent funds.

The SEC’s Marketing Rule 206(4)-1 defines these subsets as “Extracted Performance”. It is important to emphasize that these are only a subset of total performance, which should available elsewhere in the fundraising deck (for example, see the footnote, slide 17, and Appendix A).

Note that presenting Net MOIC and Net IRR for realized returns requires a hypothetical model, because the 15 exits are not in one dedicated fund. That model is included in the Excel template, and the methodology is explained in Module 01 and in the Net Return series at auxiliamath.com.

The performance footnote at the bottom is probably shorter than what fund formation counsel and compliance consultants would recommend. However, consider starting with shorter footnotes because they tend to get longer with every legal or compliance review.

One more point… before choosing the headline performance metric, think through how it may change over the next 12 to 18 months. It is never good to have a key number drop during the fundraise. If an investment subset is small, then moving one or two companies from active to exited can change performance significantly — especially if it is an IRR.