The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
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Pierre-Jacques: Calling Yourself a FinTech VC Specialist Is Meaningless
“Like, how can you be a specialist for 30 to 40% of the market? Like, being a FinTech investor doesn't mean anything. Like, there's multiple verticals. There's multiple differences.”
Harlem Capital aims for consistent 3x-5x net returns over single outlier wins
“And so for us, like we're not targeting to be that one coin based outcome, that one stripe outcome, like we're saying over time, how do we get LPs to know that we can consistently generate three to five X net returns.”
Institutional LPs prefer consistent 2x fund returns over volatile high peaks
“They don't care if you have one, five X. Right? Like, they'd rather take a two X over 10 funds consistently than a five X, one X, three X, two X, right? They want to know, do you know how to institutionalize and operate and have processes that allow you to bes…”
Pierre-Jacques: Diversity VC Funds Pre-2020 Focused Exclusively on Gender, Not Race
“You know, six years ago, diversity meant gender equality, right? Before George Floyd in America, all the diversity focused funds were women focused funds. There was no racial lens for, you know, investing.”
Pierre-Jacques: 99% of VC Funds Lacked Black Partners in 2017
“I didn't want to work for a firm that didn't have black partners, which was 99% of all VC funds.”
Pierre-Jacques: Venture entry pricing only matters relative to fund size
“Ultimately, the price only matters based on the fund size, right?”
Pierre-Jacques aims to build Harlem Capital into a multi-billion global firm
“Like, I'm 30 years old. I want to do this for the rest of my life. I'm trying to build a multi-billion multi-asset class business globally.”
Pierre-Jacques: LPs Cannot Expect Emerging GPs to Fit Traditional Criteria
“I push back on LPs like you're looking for these check the boxes and like all GPS aren't going to fit into these perfect boxes of working in venture and, you know, doing a spin out, whatever it may be, or having a great angel track record, because they were al…”
Harlem Capital runs investment committees in reverse order of seniority
“One thing we do now is the junior person always goes first after we have investment committee. So we go associate to principal to partner to GP, right? And so for everything, for opinions, the general partners always go last. Because if the GPs talk first, eve…”
Pierre-Jacques: Harlem Capital aims to back 1,000 diverse founders in 20 years
“Our mission is to back thousand diverse founders and every founder we back obviously matters. Every life we change obviously matters, but I know we can do so much more and we set that mission. Of a thousand founders over 20 years for a reason, right?”
Pierre-Jacques: Harlem Capital is the 3rd or 4th largest Black-owned VC fund
“We're now the probably third or fourth largest black owned VC fund, which is kind of crazy.”
Pierre-Jacques: Nine-Figure VC Funds Must Secure 10% to 20% Portfolio Ownership
“When you start getting into the a hundred million, the nine figure funds, like that's where you have to start doing 1015, 20% ownership. Like the math just doesn't work otherwise”
Harlem Capital invests $1M-$2.5M for 10%-15% ownership in $134M fund
“So for us, a hundred and thirty four million dollar fund, we tell people we invest one to two and a half million dollars for 10 to 15%.”
Harlem Capital rejected Fund 2 LPs demanding rigid GP commitments
“And we had a few LPs in fund two that we didn't let in for, you know, Whether it was GP sake or other rules, because we just felt like they weren't really humanizing us, right? They're kind of were using us as a number.”
TPG anchored Harlem Capital Fund 1 and sourced three institutional LPs
“TPG was our anchor in fund one. Right. So one of our high net worths introduced us to TPG November of, Ninth, November of 18, and we had a bunch of conversations. We were doing this for five, six months back and forth, met probably 45 partners. It was a six-mo…”
Targeted contact research yields far better LP introductions than general requests
“When you ask LP for their introductions, they may give you one or two if they're really nice. Most of them are going to be like, okay, cool. And they'll never get back to you because they don't have the time. It's not my job to find the people in my network fo…”
Pierre-Jacques: Harlem Capital Requires Two Great Factors Out of Four to Invest
“Ultimately, if we have two of the four that are really, really great, like we're gonna invest. If you have three good ones, we might still invest, right? But we need two of them to be great at least.”
Pierre-Jacques: Harlem Capital can execute deals in 48 to 72 hours
“We do deals in as fast as. 48 hours, 72 hours. We can do a 30 page deck that fast.”
Harlem Capital Launched Fund I in 2018, Closing at $40M in 2019
“Yeah, our summer of July July of 20 18 between first and second year business school. We formally launched fund one. Ended up raising 12 and a half million dollars, our second year of business school, and then ended up closing on forty million November of 1906…”
Harlem Capital scaled average check size from $25K to $2M in three years
“Now I'm fun to, you know, our average check size is two million. And so I basically got from 25 to two million in three years”
Sapphire Ventures Data Shows Average Seed Fund Holds 28 Portfolio Companies
“According to Sapphire Ventures, which one of the best fund the funds, the average seed stage fund has 28 companies in their portfolio.”
Pierre-Jacques: Average First-Time US Venture Capital Fund Is $40M to $50M
“The average first time fund in the US is 40 to fifty million.”
Harlem Capital capped Fund 1 GP commit at $250K despite hitting $40M
“So fund one, our target was 25, our cap was 40. We hit forty million. So we ended up doing two 50 K instead of 400 K, right?”
Silicon Valley Bank financed 60% of Harlem Capital's Fund 2 GP commit
“Second thing we did in fund two, which we didn't do in fund one, which was help, was get a GP credit line. Right. So basically we use Silicon Valley bank. They put up 60% of our GP stake. We put up 40% of our cash and over time it gets paid.”
Harlem Capital Secured 55 LPs for Its First Venture Fund
“And we, you know, we ended up with 55 LPs in Fund One.”
Harlem Capital's First Fund Secured Six Institutional Investors
“We ended up with six institutions in the fund and we had a lot of GPS and family offices.”
Harlem Capital's initial Fund I launch email got only two responses
“So when we first launched the fund, it was actually tax day of 2018. And we did this mass email and we got like two responses from like a hundred emails of people who we knew.”
Harlem Capital created approximately 200 versions of their Fund I pitch deck
“Now we have probably 200 versions of our fund one deck.”
Harlem Capital raised Fund I check minimums from $100K to $500K across closes
“Fund one, we did three closes. The first close, we did a hundred K minimum. Second close is two for decay. Third close is 500 K, right?”