On October 21, 2026, Kelly Schricker sat down with two active LPs and asked them what they're actually looking for when a manager pitches them. Both write checks into venture funds, and both were unusually direct about it.
Gary Gitelson is in San Jose, with 28 years in Silicon Valley across Cisco, Google, VMware and startups. He's made a dozen or so direct investments and is an LP in a number of funds.
Gary Ireland is in Menlo Park. He came up in football, as a player, coach, club director and owner, and has started four companies and three non-profits. He invests with his wife Corrine in funds, fund of funds and startups.
Watch the full session: What LPs Actually Want
The three questions on the first call
Gary Gitelson runs every first conversation against the same three questions.
Can you find good deals? Do you know enough to recognize that they're good when you see them? And is there something about you that makes founders want to work with you, so you can actually get into those deals?
Find them, know them, get into them. He screens on those three and little else.
His thesis includes you wanting him involved
This surprised people in the chat, and it's worth hearing clearly.
Gary Gitelson invests partly to stay in the ecosystem, work with founders and keep up with new technology. So part of his thesis is whether the GP actually wants LPs involved as advisors, for their network, for diligence help.
He put it plainly. If your answer is send me a check and I'll send you an update every three months, that's not interesting to him.
He gave an example of what going wrong looks like. He told a GP up front that he wanted to be involved with founders, got an enthusiastic yes, then heard nothing for nine months. The eventual response was to go look at the portfolio page and ask for an intro.
He also gave the opposite. One fund he found through Decile gets every new portfolio founder on a webinar with all the LPs. The founders say what they need, the LPs work out how to help, and it builds a real community between them. He now asks every fund he invests in to do it.
Nobody believes your projections
Gary Gitelson was blunt about decks that promise returns.
If he sees 2x, 5x, 9x on a slide, none of those numbers mean anything to him. He'd love everybody to make 200x, and they won't, so claiming you've got the formula should be taken with a very large grain of salt.
Kelly said this comes up constantly in VC Lab and Emerging Institute, where managers want the numbers to tell the story. The LP mentors keep saying the same thing back. In the early days the numbers can't tell them much, so they have to get to know you.
Gary Ireland said he doesn't carry hard return targets at this point in his life. He's a patient investor, and he's backing people with real subject matter expertise.
What they do with your deck
Both of them said roughly the same thing, which should save you some time.
Gary Gitelson reads about two slides and ignores the rest, because he already knows what a VC Lab deck looks like. He'd rather look you in the eye and have a conversation than watch you present while you're a small box in the corner of his screen.
Send the deck afterwards as a summary. He isn't reviewing it up front, because until he's talked to you he doesn't know whether it matters.
Gary Ireland has been sent thousands of decks and has only ever read one after meeting the person, usually to check a detail he'd forgotten. His ask is two sentences. What's the industry, and what's the ask.
Then came the line that reframes the whole thing. Gary Gitelson pointed out that his time is worth more than his money, so wasting his time is a reliable way of not getting any.
Gary Ireland built on it with a story about a friend who's already made his money and now splits his day between walking his dogs, exercising, and flying his plane around the Bay Area. The question you have to answer is why that person would give an hour of that to you.
How they assess a person
Gary Ireland spent decades in player identification and development, and he scores people on four dimensions. Technical skill, tactical understanding, physical ability, and psychosocial.
The fourth one is what decides it. Grit, resolve, ambition, determination, reliability and values. He says investing in a fund is long-term player development, so he isn't expecting you to win the next game.
Gary Gitelson comes at it from years of interviewing engineers. If he pushes back on something and you make an answer up, that's a red flag. If you say you don't know and come back later with the answer, that's a green flag.
He also treats the conversation as a sales call, and his test is whether you bothered to learn who your customer is. Did you find out what this particular LP wants, and are you taking it seriously?
Corrine, Gary Ireland's wife, looks at something narrower and smarter. Not how people treat them, because people are friendly to anyone with access to capital, but how people treat everyone else.
Their red flags
Gary Gitelson named two. People who can't tolerate being challenged on their thesis, because if you can't take in new information you'll do poorly as an investor and you'll pass that on to your founders. And people who have no idea how their own behavior lands on others.
Gary Ireland described a conversation he thought was private, where the other person was taking notes. Shortly afterwards, their assistant emailed him asking him to invite specific people he'd mentioned to a fundraising event. One of those people got contacted directly, without an introduction from him.
He never took the second call. His reasoning is that he lives here, these are his neighbors and friends of 20 years, and he doesn't want to cross the road to avoid someone.
Their actual process
Gary Gitelson's diligence runs light on technical work and long on calendar time. Most of his LP commitments happen after three to six months and half a dozen conversations.
He does reference checks with founders, other LPs in the fund, other GPs the manager has traded deals with, and LPs who said no, to ask why. It's all conversations, and he might have an hour a week to give it.
He said something managers should hear. If a GP is annoyed that it takes three months to get comfortable, that in itself is a problem, because this is a 10 to 20 year relationship.
The habit he picked up from LP Institute is to say no quickly, because his time is valuable and so is yours. If it's a hard no, nothing you send will change it.
Both of them pointed out that a no isn't the end. Gary Gitelson has said no to people he still sees every quarter and trades deals with.
He said no to one manager's first fund and told him it wasn't the right time. He invested in the follow-on, and that manager just had an exit and is sending him a check.
On warm intros
Gary Gitelson was direct here. The bar for a warm intro is far lower than for a cold one.
His reasoning comes down to the numbers. If you're raising a $5 to $10 million first fund, you're talking about 25 to 100 LPs. If your network can't produce warm introductions for at least the first half of that, something's off. A second-degree warm intro still counts.
He compared it to hiring. The first five people he hired at a startup were people he knew, and the next 25 came through them.
What to do with this
- Answer the three questions in your first conversation. Can you find deals, do you know they're good, can you get into them.
- Ask the LP what they want from the relationship, and then act on the answer.
- Lead with two sentences, not a deck, and send materials afterwards.
- Expect three to six months and half a dozen conversations, and don't get impatient about it.
- Treat a no as the start of a relationship rather than the end of one.
Watch the session
What LPs Actually Want, recorded October 21, 2026 with Gary Ireland and Gary Gitelson. More sessions are on the VC Lab YouTube channel.
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Apply to VC Lab at govclab.com. If you want to invest in funds rather than run one, the LP Institute is where Gary Gitelson learned the diligence process he described above.