For most of the last two decades, the LP database was the tool every fundraising manager built their raise around. A spreadsheet a printed list. A data-vendor export. Sometimes all three. That list kicked off every outbound campaign, every conference prep document, every email sequence. The problem was always the same: it was a snapshot of who used to allocate, frozen at the moment someone pulled it. The fund manager spent most of their time emailing allocators: maybe the allocator’s mandate had changed. Maybe their fund focus had shifted. Maybe they had simply stopped taking new manager meetings. The manager had no way to know.

The shift in 2026 is not that the list disappeared. Even so, the list stopped being where the work happens.

What iConnections Means by “Live Intent Signal”

A live intent signal is a real-time, behaviorally-based indicator that a specific allocator is actively looking for a fund with a specific profile. It’s not a self-reported preference. It’s not a years-old commitment history. Instead, it’s an actual action the allocator took recently that maps to the manager’s strategy.

On the iConnections platform, intent shows up in several forms. An allocator runs a search with strategy, geography, and fund-size filters that match the manager’s profile. On top of that, an allocator views the manager’s profile for more than a minute. They might also download the deck. The allocator opens a follow-up document the manager uploaded. Here’s the clearest sign this works: Allocators initiate half of live event meetings on our platform.

When the surface is built around behavior rather than around static lists, discovery starts running in both directions.

The intent-signal layer is the answer, and it is the layer iConnections built its platform around. The fund manager who can see profile views, document opens, and search appearances has the information they need to prioritize follow-up. The fund manager working off a static list is flying blind by definition.

Why “More Data” Did Not Solve This

The first instinct of the static-list era was to buy more data. Bigger databases. Longer lists. More fields per allocator. The iConnections Global Allocator Report 2026 makes clear that the bigger-list approach is not what allocators respond to. Roughly 80% of LPs report discovering new managers through their professional networks, not through cold outreach. The uncomfortable implication for the database-first approach. But the database was never the channel the allocator was using to find the manager.

That is the dead zone iConnections built the intent-signal layer to fill. The profile is not a static brochure. On our platform, it is a surface that generates behavioral data every time an allocator interacts with it. That data is what tells the manager whether the profile is doing its job.

What the Signal Layer Replaces

The static list is not gone. Its role has changed. It is now a starting universe to filter against, not a working channel. The work happens on the signal layer. On the iConnections platform, the fund manager spends the first hour of the day reviewing what changed in the last twenty-four: which profiles got viewed, which documents got opened, which searches surfaced the fund. The manager times follow-up to those signals.

The iConnections platform is not trying to replace the manager’s judgment about which allocator is a fit. It is trying to compress the search space so the manager’s judgment is applied to a list of allocators currently active, not to a list of allocators who were active in 2022. See iConnections platform page for the architecture and Violet AI agent page for the AI layer our platform uses to flag shifts in the signal in close to real time.

What This Means for the Fundraising Calendar

The practical implication for a fund manager planning a 2026 raise is one shift in how the calendar gets built. The first cut of the prospect universe still happens against lists. That is where the breadth comes from. But the prioritization, the outreach sequencing, and the meeting-request order are all driven off the signal layer, also on the iConnections platform.

For more on how this changes the post-meeting workflow, see “What Allocators Actually Do Between the Meeting and the Commitment”. For how this fits with the in-person event format, see “How LP-GP Relationships Actually Get Built in Alternative Investments”.

The fundraising roadshow used to be a stamina test. Pick a city. Book ten allocator offices in five days. Repeat in the next city. Hope the deck travels. In 2026, the stamina part is still real, but the work that decides whether the trip pays off has moved upstream. The roadshow that produces commitments now is the roadshow the manager mandate-matched before booking the flights.

This is the playbook. This playbook is for emerging and mid-market fund managers who do not have a fifteen-person IR team and who cannot afford to fly across the country to find out the first allocator on the schedule was researching the space, not allocating to it.

How iConnections Runs a 2026 Roadshow

The category label has not changed.

On our platform, a Roadshow works like this: The allocator describes the mandate. The iConnections platform surfaces the fund-side fit. The allocator selects three to five managers to host. The managers travel in. Meetings happen at the allocator’s office, on the allocator’s calendar. See the iConnections Roadshows product page for how this runs end-to-end on our platform.

This is the opposite of the legacy roadshow model, where the fund manager built the city itinerary and the allocator was a slot on it. In the iConnections version, the allocator is the host, the manager is the guest, and the bar for getting invited is mandate fit confirmed before the calendar invite goes out.

Why the Old Model Stopped Working

Two structural changes pushed the shift, and both are industry-wide. The first is allocator meeting capacity, which has not expanded even as the number of managers in market has. In the iConnections Global Allocator Report 2026, manager supply across major strategies grew faster than allocator meeting demand. The ratio of meetings-per-fund fell materially in several categories that historically anchored roadshow itineraries. The second is what allocators do with that pressure. They tighten the funnel and push more of the qualification work upstream, onto the manager.

A fund manager on our platform put it directly:

“

I had twenty-five meetings. Maybe five of them were with allocators who were actually allocating. The rest were research mode.

— Fund Manager, Infrastructure

That is the whole problem. iConnections built the mandate-matched, allocator-led Roadshow format to invert it. Three to five meetings. All confirmed against a live mandate. All hosted by allocators who have already engaged with the manager’s profile and materials on the iConnections platform before the in-person meeting begins. The cold-calendar drag goes away. So does the travel-week-with-no-pipeline outcome.

The Pre-Roadshow Week: Where the Trip Is Actually Won

The week before the flights is where most of the work happens. The manager’s profile on the iConnections platform has to be current. The manager has to upload current, recent documents The track record has to be verifiable without an email back-and-forth. This is not a vanity exercise. It is what surfaces the manager to allocators running mandate intake through our platform.

An allocator on our platform was blunt about the cost of skipping the step:

“

If I cannot find the deck or the track record when I need it, the manager is functionally off my list. I will not chase the materials.

— Allocator on the platform

The implication is operational. The materials uploaded to the iConnections platform in the days before a Roadshow is selected are the materials the allocator is reading when deciding whether to include the manager in the week. Allocators skip documents that are stale, missing, or routed by email instead of through the iConnections profile. The manager who arrives at the in-office meeting with the allocator already familiar with the deck is the manager who doesn’t spend the first ten minutes restating it.

A second allocator made the same point about meeting prep efficiency:

“

By the time I take a meeting I have already read the deck. If the manager spends the first ten minutes telling me what the deck says, the meeting is half over and we have not started.

— Allocator on the platform

What to Pack for the Meeting Itself

Three to five meetings in a week is not a lot of room for error. The structure that consistently produces second meetings is not the deck walkthrough. It is two or three case-study specifics the manager has prepared against the LP’s mandate, not against the manager’s own marketing priorities.

A fund manager on our platform reported the data from their own raise:

“

I prepared three case studies for every first meeting in the second fund cycle, and every meeting went to a second meeting. In the first fund cycle I did not prepare them, and I had a thirty percent second-meeting conversion. The difference was not the deck.

— Fund Manager, Private Equity

What changes the conversion is selection. The case studies that move the meeting forward are the ones the manager picks against what the LP is going to test. Which means the manager has to know what the LP has already screened against, what they have recently increased or decreased exposure to, and what strategies adjacent managers have struggled to land with them. That research is available inside the iConnections platform. See the Violet AI agent page for how our platform’s AI agent surfaces it in the pre-meeting briefing.

The Follow-Through

The week ends. The work does not. The Global Allocator Report 2026 documents that nearly half of meetings on our platform are allocator-initiated, which is the clearest signal that discovery happens across the year, not in the four-day window the manager was in town. The manager who keeps their iConnections profile current, who responds to document opens with timely follow-up, and who uses ‘Pipelines’ to track where each allocator stands across the post-meeting funnel is the manager whose Roadshow keeps producing commitments two and three quarters later.

The one part of the playbook that has not changed in twenty years: the meetings that convert are the ones the manager prepared for harder than anyone else in the room. What has changed is where the preparation happens — on the iConnections platform, before the flights are booked. Our platform is the part of the system that decides whether the trip is worth taking in the first place.

Compare this format with the in-conference equivalent in “How LP-GP Relationships Actually Get Built in Alternative Investments”, or with the broader allocator-side context in “What Allocators Actually Do Between the Meeting and the Commitment”.

Bloomberg’s Natalia Kniazhevich moderated a Global Alts New York 2026 panel on dollar dominance with David Zervos, chief market strategist at Jefferies, and Brendan Greeley, Financial Times contributing editor and author of The Almighty Dollar. The discussion covered the recent equity selloff, hotter-than-expected jobs reports pushing expectations toward a rate hike, and the deeper structural question Greeley’s book frames: why the world still borrows in dollars despite a decade of predictions otherwise.

Dollar dominance has survived every credible obituary. Zervos opened with the recent shocks. Energy is up 50 to 70%, rate expectations have moved from pricing two cuts to pricing one hike, a 100 basis point swing in front-end rates. Those are large negative shocks on both supply and demand. The economy has absorbed both. The stock market sits up roughly 8% on the year, off the highs but well above where any reasonable model would have predicted. Zervos read that as evidence of a productivity story rooted in AI, deregulation, pro-business policy, and tax certainty. The capital share of income has never been higher.

Why dollar dominance compounds through cycles

Greeley walked the historical arc. The Almighty Dollar argues that the world borrows in dollars because the legal, plumbing, and institutional infrastructure that prices, clears, and enforces dollar contracts is still unmatched. Sanctions risk has weakened the case at the margin. The Russia asset capture in 2022 accelerated diversification by reserve managers. None of that has produced a credible substitute. The euro carries fragmentation risk. The renminbi carries capital control risk. Dollar dominance does not require the dollar to be loved. It requires the alternatives to be worse, and they still are.

Where Zervos and Greeley disagreed on dollar dominance

Greeley pushed back on the productivity story. He argued some of the apparent labor share decline reflects measurement issues around AI-driven services and gig work, and some reflects policy choices that have made it harder for labor to capture productivity gains. That distinction matters for the durability of dollar dominance. If the productivity story is partly a measurement artifact, the policy environment that supports the premium is more politically fragile than the consensus currently prices.

Zervos accepted the measurement caveat but stayed on the underlying point. Capital is being deployed where the returns are clearest, and those returns sit disproportionately in dollar-denominated assets.

What allocators should do with the dollar dominance call

The panel converged on a practical takeaway. Hedging FX exposure on cross-border portfolios is more important now than at any point in the last decade because the dispersion across G10 currencies is wider. Selective EM positioning makes sense where rates are restrictive and credit conditions are improving. Gold belongs in most portfolios as a reserve-mix hedge, not as a primary return engine. The Almighty Dollar thesis does not say the dollar is invincible. It says the cost of betting against it is consistently higher than the consensus expects.

Travis Williamson of Albourne moderated a Global Alts New York 2026 panel on the global power shift reshaping cross-border capital. Zongyuan Liu of the Council on Foreign Relations and Columbia, Daken Vanderburg of MassMutual, and Jackie Rosner of PAAMCO Prisma joined the discussion. The panel walked through the lessons of the 2022 Russia invasion and sanctions regime, the speed of US economic warfare, what central bank gold buying is signaling, and how China, tariffs, and the multi-currency world are now priced into hedge fund and institutional portfolios.

The global power shift is the single biggest unresolved variable in institutional portfolios. Rosner pulled three lessons from the 2022 episode that still drive how PAAMCO Prisma constructs risk today. First, exit liquidity under extreme scenarios matters more than the brochure suggests, which means stress-testing portfolios for tails rather than averages. Second, geopolitical headlines transmit to asset prices faster than they transmit to fundamentals, which forces managers to react in shorter windows. Third, the statistician who drowned crossing a river that was on average three feet deep is the right mental model. The extreme depth gets you, not the average.

What the speed of economic warfare tells us about the global power shift

Liu offered the historical comparison. He has studied many decades of military and economic warfare. The speed at which the United States captured Russian sovereign assets in 2022 was unprecedented and changed how central banks think about reserves. The clearest evidence is in gold. Central bank gold buying has run at multi-decade highs since 2022, and the relative shift away from treasuries toward gold among non-Western central banks is now a structural fact rather than a tactical hedge.

Vanderburg added the wealth management dimension. Client questions have moved from tactical positioning to structural ones about dollar hegemony, sanctions risk for cross-border family wealth, and the durability of US-centric portfolios.

How tariffs and the multi-currency world reshape allocation

Williamson asked the panel to translate the global power shift into actual portfolio decisions. Rosner argued for more global macro and relative-value exposure — policy dispersion across G20 central banks is widening rather than narrowing. Liu emphasized that tariffs are no longer a marginal tax. They are the primary tool of industrial policy on both sides of the Pacific, and the resulting supply chain bifurcation reshapes everything from semiconductor margins to commodity trade flows.

Vanderburg framed the practical advice for wealth clients. Diversify across currencies, not just across countries. Use real assets and hard commodities as a hedge against the policy uncertainty that defines the multi-currency world.

What allocators should underwrite next

The panel closed on the China question. Liu argued that the consensus underestimates how much of US industrial policy is now structured as a direct response to Chinese industrial capacity rather than as standalone domestic stimulus. The global power shift is not partisan in the way Washington framing sometimes suggests. It is bipartisan and likely structural through the next decade.

Noah Theran moderated a Global Alts New York 2026 panel on the macro regime change now reshaping how capital gets priced. Mark Sullivan of Wellington Management, Brian Friedman of Brevan Howard, and Zachary Squire of Tekmerion Capital joined for a forty-minute working session on AI CapEx, central bank reaction functions, and what comes after the post-GFC playbook stops working.

The post-GFC macro regime is over. Sullivan opened with the framing the rest of the panel built on. Two decades of positive supply shocks gave central banks the luxury of managing demand. That world has flipped to negative supply shocks driven by deglobalization, conflict, and a labor market that no longer adjusts the way the textbook says it should. The Fed has missed its inflation target for five straight years and, until very recently, kept contemplating additional cuts. The macro regime change shows up in that asymmetry, where hikes are treated as bad and cuts as good even when the data argues for symmetry.

Why the macro regime change runs through AI CapEx

The panel pulled AI CapEx out as the single largest swing factor. Sullivan framed it as the most significant economic event of his career, multifaceted and still being underwritten in real time. The order of magnitude matters. Hyperscaler CapEx plans now run into the hundreds of billions per year, and the resulting demand for power, land, water, and skilled labor is reshaping regional economies in ways macro models did not anticipate.

Friedman pushed on the second-order consequence. AI CapEx is partly responsible for the productivity case that has kept growth stronger than most macro forecasters expected. The capital share of income has never been higher. Labor share is falling.

What the Fed reset tells us about the macro regime change

Squire walked through the policy implications. The Fed reset is not just about the next meeting. It is about a central bank that has telegraphed an asymmetric reaction function. Policymakers will support real growth aggressively at the first sign of weakness. They will tolerate above-target inflation for longer than the dot plot suggests. For allocators, that maps to a structural bid for real assets, a higher term premium, and a more durable dollar role than the consensus expects.

Sullivan added the fiscal dimension. The post-GFC regime ran with central banks doing most of the work. The new regime runs with fiscal authorities running large deficits even outside recessions, central banks accommodating the resulting issuance, and a yield curve that has not yet repriced fully for either.

How allocators should position for the macro regime change

The panel converged on practical conclusions. Macro hedge funds are back as portfolio diversifiers because the dispersion across rates, currencies, and commodities is wider than at any point in the post-GFC period. Long-duration assets carry more risk than the consensus prices, particularly in fixed income. Real assets, hard infrastructure, and selective private credit benefit from the supply-side reset. AI-exposed equity remains the highest-conviction beta but increasingly needs to be paired with hedges against the CapEx digestion cycle

Alex Pall, partner at Mantis VC and one half of Grammy-winning duo The Chainsmokers, sat down with Heather Hartnett, CEO of Human Ventures, at Global Alts New York 2026. The conversation walked through how Pall and Drew Taggart turned a music platform with 150 shows a year into a venture firm now writing checks alongside Sequoia and Founders Fund. Pall talked about the partner architecture, why founder access is the only metric that matters, and what the consumer pendulum looks like from a celebrity LP base that includes Tom Brady, Mark Wahlberg, and DJ Khaled.

The celebrity venture playbook has a credibility problem, and Mantis VC has spent eight years engineering around it. Pall told the room that he and Taggart started by asking experienced investors and founders what they wish they had known before raising a fund. The answer that kept coming back was that brand opens the first door, but founders only return calls for partners who actually help. Mantis built backwards from that. Pall and Taggart bring distribution and culture signal. Jeffrey brings six startups of operator reps. Milan brings the traditional venture training. Pall described it as putting the Avengers on a cap table.

How Mantis VC underwrites the celebrity venture playbook

The firm runs a thesis around the consumer pendulum. Pall argued that after a decade where capital chased pure software and AI, attention is rotating back to consumer brands that earn cultural relevance the slow way. The Mantis network on tour, in arenas, and across social platforms gives the partners a real-time read on which products actually break out.

The point Pall hammered is that the celebrity venture playbook only works when the celebrity is one input among several. Mantis writes concentrated checks, runs portfolio support like a platform team, and refuses deals where the founder wants a logo more than a partner. That filter cuts most of the inbound. It also explains why the firm has been able to co-invest into competitive rounds at Sequoia, a16z, and Founders Fund pricing.

What founders actually want from the celebrity venture playbook

Hartnett pressed on the access question. Pall said the most underrated value the firm delivers is talent introductions — specifically to operators who would not take a cold recruiter call but will take a meeting from someone who just played their wedding. He described a portfolio CEO who closed a head of growth in 48 hours through a Mantis intro after six months of pipeline work elsewhere.

The conversation turned to fund size. Pall said Mantis intentionally caps its funds where the math still favors concentrated bets. The team writes a small number of meaningful checks per year, doubles down on the winners with reserves, and avoids the index-fund failure mode that has caught a lot of platform-heavy firms.

The signal Mantis VC reads that other firms miss

Pall closed on what he called the only metric that matters: are you in the best deals. Everything else at Mantis works backward from that North Star, and the partners screen every internal decision against it. The deal that gets passed up because the founder is great but the market is wrong is still a pass. The deal that the partnership debates for two weeks because the founder is unproven but the product breaks something real is still a yes. That discipline is rare. It is also what separates the venture funds that compound from the ones that index.

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Joseph Magazine, Commissioner of the City of Miami Beach, joined Justus Parmar, Founder and CEO of Fortuna Investments, and Michael Simas, President and CEO of the Florida Council of 100, at Global Alts New York 2026. The three spent the session unpacking the Florida shift: why hedge funds, private equity, and family offices have moved meaningful capital and staff to the Gold Coast, what is structural and what is cyclical, and what New York allocators should actually price into their assumptions. Citadel, Millennium, Bailey, and Wells Fargo’s wealth business all came up by name.

The Florida shift is no longer a tax story. Magazine, who started his career on the Merrill Lynch structured credit desk before public office, told the room that the ecosystem now accompanies the migration in a way it never did in earlier cycles. Wealthy individuals always summered in Florida. What changed over the last six years is that firms moved their full org charts. Orlando Bravo did not just relocate. He brought the senior partners, the vice presidents, the associates, and the analysts. Citadel, Millennium, and Bailey did the same. Wells Fargo moved its entire wealth business to the southeast. The Gold Coast across Miami-Dade, Broward, and Palm Beach now sits on a $600 billion economy with a financial services ecosystem that did not exist a decade ago.

What is structural about the Florida shift

Parmar ran the lifestyle and logistics case. Zero state income tax matters at the margin. Proximity to South America, Europe, and New York matters more once a firm is operating across multiple time zones. The thing that surprised him during the Covid period was the accommodating posture of state and city government, which translates into permits, schools, and infrastructure decisions moving on quarter-by-quarter timelines rather than annual ones.

Simas layered in the macro. The Florida Council of 100 represents 200 statewide CEOs working on infrastructure, housing, water, and transportation at the policy level. Ken Griffin and Steve Ross gave the council $10 million this year specifically to correct what Simas called the perception gap that still exists in New York and California about what it actually takes to scale a business in Florida.

Why the Florida shift matters to hedge fund allocators

Magazine took the talent question head on. Hedge fund staffing in Florida still skews to back office and securities operations. Investment professional headcount is real but lower than the headline news cycle suggests. The reason is that pure portfolio talent moves slower than ops talent. The Florida shift on the investment side is happening at the senior level first, then through new hires, and only at the margin through bulk relocation of existing books.

Parmar pushed back gently. The dichotomy of visions across US cities is real. Capital concentrates where it is not penalized, and Florida has been deliberate about staying business-friendly without giving up the basics of public safety, cleanliness, and quality of life.

How LPs should underwrite the Florida shift

Simas walked through the policy work. Florida passed one of the largest affordable housing laws in the country, putting three quarters of a billion dollars into workforce housing. Bright Line is moving mass transit from Miami through Broward and Palm Beach into Orlando. The investment takeaway is that the Florida shift now affects manager selection. GPs with Florida offices, Florida-based portfolio operations, and Florida-resident teams will price differently than the same strategy headquartered elsewhere.

Bloomberg’s Natalia Kniazhevich moderated a Global Alts New York 2026 panel on the SpaceX IPO. The session explored the broader IPO window opening for the highest-quality private growth companies. Paul Abrahimzadeh, partner at 1789 Capital and one of the largest holders of SpaceX through eight tranches, walked through the underwriting case for the largest IPO in history. Stéphane Gruffat of Deutsche Bank ECM joined from the capital-markets side. Legendary short-seller Jim Chanos provided the bearish counterpoint in a separate fireside with the same moderator. Together, the sessions delivered the most complete bull-bear framing of any IPO event in recent memory.

The IPO window has reopened, and the SpaceX print is the headline trade. Paul told the room the deal is roughly four times oversubscribed. It enters Friday with around $30 trillion of total addressable market across three subsidiaries that each clear $1 billion in revenue. Notably, Starlink supplies 60% of revenue today with durable cash flow. Meanwhile, AI takes 60% of CapEx today, with sell-side underwriters modeling 100% revenue compound annual growth over five years that would take the business from $20 billion of revenue to $1 trillion.

Why the IPO window is structural, not seasonal

Paul made the structural argument. The IPO window has opening because the highest-quality private companies have aged into a stage where the private market cannot absorb them efficiently. In particular, OpenAI’s $120 billion private raise was, by his framing, the largest equity capital markets transaction in history. As a result, the public market is the only venue with the depth to clear what is queued up behind SpaceX.

Gruffat ran the historic comp. Alibaba was a 20-times oversubscribed $25 billion IPO a decade ago, implying roughly $500 billion of demand. Similarly, SpaceX approaches that order of magnitude on a single Friday print.

The bearish case: Jim Chanos on the IPO window

Chanos offered the bluntest read in the room. “This is really a hopes and dreams IPO,” he said. Even so, the company is valued at close to $2 trillion on $19 billion of revenue with negative free cash flow. He compared the premium being paid to Elon Musk’s involvement to how Tesla trades. That stock commands a massive premium to the underlying car business based on promises of robotics and full self-driving. “Space is coming at roughly 90 times revenues. Bull markets put a premium on promises. Bear markets put a discount on reality. Right now we’re clearly in the former.”

What allocators should price into the IPO window

Paul listed three risks investors should price. To start, the first is execution: SpaceX has to hit an unprecedented 100% compound annual revenue growth rate over five years. The second is the cap table — Facebook has delivered roughly 20% total return CAGR since its IPO; By contrast, Uber has compounded around 6% per year. Both had deep private cap tables. Therefore, the IPO window does not guarantee post-IPO returns. The third is plumbing: SpaceX will likely trade $30 to $50 billion or more on day one, unprecedented single-ticker liquidity that will test index-inclusion rules.

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