On October 8, 2026, we put a limited partner, a fund manager and a founder on the same call and asked them to walk through how the money actually moves, with Kelly Schricker hosting.
If you came into venture from the founder side, the layer above you can be hard to see. Investors mostly aren't spending their own money, because they raise a fund from LPs first and then pick the companies.
Watch the full session: LP, GP, Founder Roundtable: How Capital Flows
Who was on the call
Jessica Kamada runs Swizzle Ventures in Seattle, investing at pre-seed and seed in women's healthcare, caregiving and financial health.
Katie Kersh founded Yellow Cherry Capital in Detroit. She came up as a founder and operator in medical devices, and Swizzle is her first LP position.
Liz Truilo is co-founder and CEO of Nolia Health, which builds the clinical platform for family caregivers of older adults. She was Jessica's first investment out of fund two.
Everybody met years before any money moved
This is the part to pay attention to if you're raising right now.
Katie met Jessica through a previous job in venture, where they co-invested in a company together, and before that there were university connections. The relationship ran a year and a half or more before it turned into a check.
Liz got onto Jessica's radar by name only, through a shared founder community, at a point when Jessica was still raising fund one and had no capital to deploy, so Jessica invited her to a dinner instead.
Jessica curates those dinners around people working in women's health and care, and Liz turned up to one and found the CMO of CVS at the table, with no idea that person was even in Seattle.
Liz spent the next year and a half watching from a distance and talking to founders who'd worked with Jessica. When she opened another round, Jessica was at the top of her list.
Timing kills more deals than fit does
Jessica said the alignment with Nolia only worked on the second try, because her fund one check sizes were too small for what Liz needed.
Kelly made the wider point here. You can meet an investor who's a perfect thesis fit and still get a no, because of where they're sitting in their fund, how much dry powder is left, or whether they're only doing reserves right now.
Both Katie and Jessica jumped in to say it works the same way one level up. Timing is everything on the LP side too.
Katie's own entry is a good example. She'd set aside capital to be a GP, then personal circumstances made that partnership wrong for her. It hadn't occurred to her that she could be an LP instead until a mentor suggested it.
What the LP was actually diligencing
Katie's process wasn't a data room exercise, and she'd already been looking at fund twos as a potential GP partner, so she knew what performance she wanted to see in a fund one.
Jessica had a distribution out of fund one already, which is unusual that early. Katie also looked at how fast Jessica raised and deployed, and still got meaningful returns back, which she called impressive in this market.
The rest of it was behavior. Katie described taking a stealth operator approach, where people didn't know she was a potential LP, so she could watch how they treated founders and acted in rooms when nothing was at stake.
She also had mentors already in fund one who could refer her in and tell her what working with Jessica was like.
Raising fund one, in Jessica's words
She set a first fund target her own network could realistically reach, treated it as her minimum viable product, and oversubscribed it.
Her method was unglamorous. She set herself a goal of attending one in-person event a week in Seattle, and after three or four months people started recognizing her name on calls.
She'd also started raising right as things reopened after COVID, so she had almost no Seattle community to begin with and built it while fundraising.
Her advice is to say yes to everything until you can see which LP archetype keeps responding, and then double down and ask those people for referrals.
On pace she was clear, because this takes a steady weekly rhythm of LP conversations, and she got there by doing outreach early in the morning and keeping 8am to 4pm blocked for calls.
The thing Jessica did that Liz had never seen
Liz has sat through hundreds of investor calls. The moment that stood out was when Jessica and her partner Ashley pitched her.
They came in with growth areas and revenue opportunities they'd identified outside of what Nolia had presented, and made commitments about how they'd help. Liz said it showed a level of care that disarmed her.
It also helped that she didn't have to explain the basics. Ashley had built, scaled and sold a healthcare company and then worked on the payer side, so nobody needed the difference between fee-for-service and value-based care spelled out.
Jessica's framing of this is simple, because once they hit conviction the posture flips and they go into winning mode, chasing the allocation and the check size they want.
She was also honest about why it matters for a fund two firm. Her brand isn't up there with the established names yet, so proving herself to founders is how the reputation gets built. Founders talk to each other, in both directions.
What changed between fund one and fund two
The LP base shifted between them. Fund one was mostly individuals, and more than half of those were operators themselves or had built their careers in sectors Swizzle invests in.
Her LP mix shifted toward the institutional end as the firm grew, and she explained why that tends to happen. A fund can only hold so many LPs, so a larger fund means larger average commitments, which pushes you toward a different archetype.
Many of her fund one LPs came back. So did people she'd been building relationships with in between, including some who had passed the first time.
Keep that one. Don't write off anyone who said no, because it often has nothing to do with you and everything to do with their timing.
Her newsletter is the nurture engine
Jessica is a marketer by background and she recommends every manager run one.
Her rules are short, concise, your own voice, and never outsourced to AI. The whole point is that it's a touch point that builds trust, and she estimates it takes seven or more touch points with a brand before somebody makes a decision. You're the brand.
The format is a short intro, quick bullets on portfolio progress and press, more detail when she makes a new investment, and where she'll be travelling next. It shouldn't take more than three minutes to read.
What to take from this
- Start the relationship before you need the check, on all three levels. Every connection on this call predated the money by a year or more.
- Treat a no as a timing signal rather than a verdict, and keep those people on your list.
- If you're a GP, find out what your LP actually wants from the relationship, because it often isn't only returns.
- Pick a first fund target your own network can actually reach, then oversubscribe it.
- Run a short, personal newsletter from day one, because it's the cheapest way to stay in front of people between closes.
Watch the session
LP, GP, Founder Roundtable: How Capital Flows, recorded October 8, 2026 with Jessica Kamada, Katie Kersh and Liz Truilo. More sessions are on the VC Lab YouTube channel.
Launch your own fund
Jessica raised fund one by going to one event a week until people knew her name, and anyone can learn to do that.
VC Lab is a free 14-week accelerator for people launching a first fund. We've helped launch over 1,000 venture firms across more than 90 countries, and we charge no fees and take no equity.
Apply to VC Lab at govclab.com. If you'd rather back funds than run one, look at the LP Institute.