And thats a wrap for Global Alts Asia 2025! See you next year.
Digital Assets: 33.6% of LPs are out. 24% are on the fence.
Digital Assets: 33.6% of LPs are out. 24% are on the fence. Read More.
Global Alts Asia 2025 Recap
- Video
November 13, 2025
1 min
Table of contents
Topics
You may also like to read
Video
The IPO Window: Inside the Largest IPO in History
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.
3 min
Reports & Data
LP Appetite for Digital Assets: A Market Divided
Digital Assets:
A Market Divided
The LP community isn’t neutral on digital assets. It’s splitting in two. Based on 20,000+ meetings and 1,200 surveyed LPs, here’s who’s moving in and who’s pulling back.
↑ Moving In
Wealth Managers+149%
Public Pension Funds+123%
Investment Consultants+94%
OCIOs+76%
RIA / FIA+54%
↓ Pulling Back
Private Sector Pensions-69%
Sovereign Wealth Funds-63%
Fund of Funds-24%
Single Family Offices-22%
Insurance CompaniesExited
From 1,200 surveyed LPs
19.4%
Cite it as a strategy of interest.
33.6%
Actively name it as not of interest.
24%
On the fence, considering entry.
-14%
Net interest score, 20th of 21 strategies
Asymmetric conviction on both sides
36.6%
Conviction rate, second lowest of all strategies
Fewer than 4 in 10 with a view are in favor
4
GP opportunity vectors in the full report
Intermediary channel, fence-sitters, product, regulation
Get the full report. Free.
33 pages of LP data, and GP strategy implications.
- Which LP verticals are growing digital assets engagement and why
- Net interest score and conviction rate vs. 20 other strategies
- The 24% on the fence: who they are and what they’re waiting for
- Four opportunity vectors for GPs targeting the right allocators
- What the bifurcation means for the next wave of capital
4 min
Video
Gated and Confused: Private Credit at an Inflection Point
Ted Seides of Capital Allocators moderated a candid Global Alts New York 2026 panel on the private credit reset. Terry Monis, co-CIO of $8B Los Angeles multifamily office ICG Advisors, joined Tod Trabocco of StepStone Group and Jonathan Berger, co-head of credit at $25B Third Point. The three allocators and managers worked through the gap between headline anxiety and asset-level reality, the 150 basis point move in direct-lending spreads over 90 days, and the question every LP is asking right now: which managers actually survive when valuations finally reprice
The private credit reset is no longer a forecast. Berger opened with a number: spreads on regular-way core direct lending have widened 150 basis points in the last three months, with capital solutions pricing now running 800 to 1,000 over plus equity kickers on deals that priced at 650 to 700 a year ago. Trabocco framed the same move differently. He told the Global Alts New York room that institutional LPs do not recognize the gating headlines. They read them, they understand the structural pressure on the perpetual BDCs, but at the asset level the stress is not what the retail-channel narrative suggests.
Why the private credit reset is a correction, not a crash
Monis argued the asset class is not unwinding. It is going through the first real test of a cycle that ran almost entirely through zero rates. “There will be a shakeout,” he said. Marginal GPs and marginal fund managers will exit. People will lose money. The quality managers will prove resilience and prove they can generate returns. He pushed back on the doom narrative without dismissing it, which is how the panel earned trust with the LP audience it was speaking to.
Trabocco delivered the line that frames the entire debate. The panel is not talking about a crash. It is talking about a great disappointment. A lot of people were sold a product. A lot of people are going to be greatly disappointed because the funds they sit in are now on the back foot, locked into vintages that need to fund redemptions and cannot lean into the more attractive deals showing up today.
The vintage problem inside the private credit reset
Berger pointed to 2021 as the source of most of the stress now surfacing. Flows surged into perpetual structures during zero-rate post-COVID conditions, deals got done at valuations and structures that should not have cleared, and the correction underway is mostly a vintage problem rather than an asset-class problem. Default rates are rising, recoveries are coming down, and spreads are widening, but institutional capital is still allocating. The reset is healthy. It just punishes the wrong vintage and the wrong structure.
Trabocco added a useful frame for allocators trying to underwrite GPs through the current dispersion. Most people think lenders want companies whose EBITDA climbs in a straight line. That is actually the second least desirable loan. The one nobody wants is the cliff. The one most lenders should want bounces along. The reframe matters because much of the panic narrative assumes lenders need growth to be paid. They do not. They need coverage and collateral, and they need workout experience when neither holds.
What allocators should actually underwrite
Monis returned to the experience question. His shop screens for managers with workout reps, with the elbows to sit in the trenches when a credit goes sideways, and with gray hair. A large share of capital deployed into private credit over the last cycle is run by people who have never seen a full credit cycle, COVID excepted. That is the operational risk the headlines miss.
Berger closed by separating valuation risk from credit risk. A software portfolio company can see its valuation cut in half and still cover interest, still preserve EV coverage, still trade through a refinancing. Lenders have levers. They can pay down a portion, take an equity slice, restructure into a second lien. The mechanical “we take the keys” outcome is one path of many.
The panel did not pretend the reset is over. They argued it is bifurcating. The marginal product gets disappointed. The quality book gets paid. For LPs, the work now sits in manager selection, workout track record, and vintage discipline.
4 min
Perspectives
When Tail Risk Makes You Rich
On conviction, models that miss the moment, and the LP question almost nobody answers right.
If you knew you could walk away with $33,000 by betting $100, would you? Would you double or triple down on a leader who faces bankruptcy, but could earn you billions?
Last week, two of them paid off. One overnight. One 20 years in the making. Both tell us a lot about conviction.
If you bet on the Knicks when they were down 29 points with Game 4 of the NBA finals slipping away, just before OG Anunoby tipped in the winning basket with 1.2 seconds left.
Odds of that happening? Less than 1%. Biggest comeback in NBA Finals history.
SpaceX? Going public at an expected $1.7 trillion valuation after more than one near-death experience. The dedication of those who stuck with it, whether engineers or investors, is minting millions.
When Models Get It Right, and Still Miss Everything
Nobody eyeballed the Game 4 Knicks win. Odds come from models that learn from thousands of scenarios and made best guesses, basically the same way we model portfolio risk.
They look precise and they feel authoritative.
But the Spurs went from the best shooting half in Finals history to bricking everything in sight in about twelve minutes. No model built on normal behavior sees that coming.
In 2008, SpaceX struggled with three consecutive rocket launches. Tesla was days from bankruptcy, and many told Elon Musk to let one company die to save the other.
But Antonio Gracias, a leading investor, did the opposite. He lent Musk money, kept investing in SpaceX through the failures, joined both boards, and never stopped adding capital when everyone else was heading for the exits.
The LP’s Hardest Question: When Do You Add Capital
Gracias wasn’t just right once. He kept being right by doing the thing most investors cannot bring themselves to do: adding capital when everything looks broken.
Most LPs pull out when a manager has a bad year, if the thesis seems wrong and the numbers get ugly. If others are redeeming, it can feel like the responsible move.
Mark Spitznagel at Universa Investments spent years buying options that expired worthless whenever markets were calm. Some were skeptical through years one, two, and three. But for those who stayed, or added, got a 4,144% return in a single quarter when COVID hit in March 2020.
Spitznagel hadn’t predicted COVID, he had just spent years refusing to treat catastrophic risk as zero, absorbing the cost of being early, and waiting for the moment everyone else was unprepared for.
Gracias didn’t just invest in Musk once and wait. He kept going back through the Tesla near-bankruptcy, three SpaceX explosions and every moment the model said this thing is finished.
That’s the move many LPs cannot make. When a manager is down in year two or three, the instinct is to pull capital. The quarterly statement is ugly. The thesis looks broken. Everyone else is redeeming. So you think about redeeming.
The pattern is similar every time. The manager looks wrong. The bet looks stupid. Most people leave. A few stay, or add. That’s where the money is.
OG’s (Anunoby’s) tip-in. AG’s (Gracias’s) checks. Spitznagel’s years of patience.
None of them required predicting the future, but all of them required staying in the game when the model, the crowd, and the quarterly statement said get out.
A less than 1% doesn’t mean impossible, but it does mean almost nobody is prepared for it. That gap is where the money is.
3 min
Video
Seth Klarman on Investing in the AI Era: Why Baupost Is Long Raw Land, Assisted Living, and Patience
When a manager has compounded for 44 years with only five down years — the worst being a single
-10% — the question isn’t whether to listen. It’s what to actually take away. At Global Alts New York
2026, Seth Klarman, founder and CEO of Baupost Group, walked through how his firm is positioned for
what he called a market with “characteristics of a bubble” — without retreating to cash or capitulating to
the AI trade.
The most useful thing Klarman did on stage wasn’t predict a top. It was articulate the discipline that
allows a value-driven firm to underwrite a market this uncertain.
Bubble Characteristics — Without the Easy Call
Klarman did not call AI a bubble. He called the environment bubble-adjacent. “It has characteristics of a
bubble,” he said. “Optimistic tone around a transformational technology. New-era thinking.” His tell:
Allbirds, a shoe company, added “AI” to its name and the stock went up.
But he was equally careful on the other side. “AI seems like a technology that could be so
game-changing that it would be hard to dismiss it or call anything in particular around it a bubble.” The
hard part isn’t the technology — it’s the multiples. Winner-take-all or not? Which companies actually
win? At 40x or infinite multiples, investors are being asked to underwrite a very distant future. “None of
us can know with any confidence.”
Direct AI Exposure: ~10%, at Sensible Prices
Roughly 10% of Baupost’s book is in companies that directly benefit from the AI rollout — but only at
multiples Klarman is willing to defend. Amazon and Alphabet were the named examples: AWS
exposure at the former, internally designed chips plus AI surface area at the latter.
His operating principle around entry timing: “You don’t have to buy them every day. There are blips in
almost every company where you get windows of opportunity.”
The Optionality Play: Raw Land Adjacent to Power
The position that may travel furthest from this session is Baupost’s investment in raw land adjacent to
power infrastructure — sites that could become data centers. Crucially, Baupost is not planning to
build. The two criteria Klarman named were political permitting and access to power; the structure is
pure optionality at the land basis.
Internationally, the firm took a private position in non-China Asia data centers, acquired via a spinout at
roughly a 40% discount to public market multiples. Same theme, very different entry point.
What AI Won’t Touch — The Quiet Long Book
This was the section that should resonate with allocators thinking about long-tail equity exposure inside
their alternatives sleeves. Klarman described what he called “AI agnostic” businesses: roofing, housing
supplies, travel infrastructure — companies whose end-demand and operating model are not at
meaningful risk from large language models. “People aren’t paying attention,” he said, “and the price is
drifting lower.”
The mirror trade is in credit. Klarman is looking at perceived “AI losers” — software-related credits
getting clobbered, trading at very low cash flow multiples. “At least something to take a look at.”
Private Credit Opportunities 2026 — Idiosyncratic, Not Systemic
Klarman is not calling a credit cycle. But he is seeing more idiosyncratic distress — a Brazilian
corporate restructuring, a large PE deal with impaired debt and an exchange offer that has left
mispriced securities behind. His framing of why credit dislocates well: “Credit is inherently interesting
because of the transition of ownership. When bonds get downgraded, people dump. When they file for
bankruptcy, people dump. Even distressed funds eventually move on — and new capital is needed.”
He believes the market is “due for a credit cycle” without forecasting the timing. For LPs underwriting
private credit opportunities 2026, that’s a useful distinction — between cyclical positioning and
idiosyncratic deployment.
Commercial Real Estate Distressed — The Top Conviction
The single highest-conviction idea Klarman shared was assisted living. Post-Covid, many newly built
facilities couldn’t reach occupancy and a wave of bankruptcies followed. The system, he said, is
starting to clear.
His broader commercial real estate distressed framing was equally direct. “The logjam is starting to
break. Fundamentals are starting to improve. We’re seeing opportunities to deploy capital at significant
discounts to replacement cost with very attractive returns — no heroic assumptions.” Industrial land,
warehouses, and cold storage — all driven by the onshoring trend — were called out as areas of
continued demand. His structural advantage: “I love being below the radar of the big gorilla firms.”
The Macro Overlay
Klarman did not hide his concern on US debt — 100% of GDP, $2T+ structural deficits, a path to $50T
in five years. He flagged the Strait of Hormuz as underpriced, with storage drawn down quickly and oil
potentially at $150+ if it closes for months. He framed the AI build-out as a growing political and NIMBY
risk at the local level. On the Fed: he expects patience — one or two hikes are possible, but a cut is the
preferred path.
The Takeaway
Klarman’s framework in one line: in markets this uncertain, the work is to own what you can underwrite,
leave optionality where the upside is asymmetric, and let the rest of the market provide the entries.
Value investing alternatives AI era isn’t a style box — it’s a discipline about what you’ll pay for
confidence.
Sessions like this one are why allocators continue to use iConnections to find managers operating
with this kind of clarity. Global Alts New York 2026 brought together the firms underwriting the same
market from very different angles — Klarman on the long side of what AI can’t touch, Chanos on the
short side of what’s being overpaid for around it
5 min
Video
Jim Chanos on the AI Trade: “Hopes and Dreams” Valuations and the Coming Wave of Stock Issuance
When Jim Chanos calls something a “hopes and dreams IPO,” institutional investors tend to write it
down. At Global Alts New York 2026, the founder of Kynikos Associates and the short seller who
made his name calling Enron walked through what he sees as the cleanest setup for a market
dislocation since 2000 — and a lot of it has nothing to do with AI itself. It has to do with what investors
are willing to pay for the infrastructure around it.
The peg for the conversation was SpaceX, which was pricing its IPO at roughly $75 billion in proceeds
on a $2 trillion valuation against $19 billion in revenues and negative free cash flow. Chanos’s framing
was characteristically dry: the Starlink core business, by his math, might support “a couple hundred
billion dollars.” Everything above that — Mars colonies, factories on the moon, data centers in orbit —
is being capitalized today on the assumption it gets built tomorrow.
The “TAM Is Infinite” Problem
Chanos’s deeper point wasn’t about SpaceX specifically. It was about what the market is currently
willing to underwrite. “The TAM for space is infinite,” he said. “You can build whatever story you want to
justify the valuation.”
He drew a direct line to Tesla’s CEO-premium model, which trades at roughly 14x revenues on similar
promise-based narratives. “If it was trading as a car company, it would be at $30 to $40 a share, not
$400.” SpaceX, by contrast, priced at roughly 90x revenues. “A completely different animal.”
His one-line summary of the regime: “In bull markets you put a premium on promises. In bear markets
you put a discount on reality. Right now we’re clearly in the former.”
For allocators thinking about hedged equity, long-short, and short selling strategies as portfolio
constructs going into 2027, that’s the operative sentence. The dispersion between fundamentals and
price is wide enough to matter again.
The Short Selling Case Against Data Centers
Chanos has been bearish on the data center build-out since 2022, and his thesis has only sharpened.
Established operators, he noted, generate mid-to-low single-digit pretax returns on capital. “A really
bad business.”
The newer “neo-cloud” cohort — CoreWeave, Nebulas, and similar — he characterizes more bluntly:
equipment leasing dressed up as growth. “They buy a chip from Nvidia, lease it to a hyperscaler or an
AI company like Anthropic or OpenAI. The bet is on depreciation.”
The structural argument is the one allocators should sit with: “Anybody that’s just a middleman in this
chain — data center guys, equipment leasing companies — should never trade at higher multiples than
the company that controls their supply: Taiwan Semi, Nvidia, AMD
In a maturing capex cycle, the market eventually re-rates middlemen down. Chanos thinks the market
will be forced to distinguish, in his words, “what’s special versus what’s a commodity.”
A Connected Short: Alternative Energy
The same logic, Chanos argued, applies to alternative energy names that have been bid up on the data
center thesis. Geothermal, solar, and nuclear plays are trading at 50–70x earnings and 30–40x
EBITDA on the assumption they will power the next generation of AI infrastructure.
His counter is structural rather than ideological. The US is not, in his view, short on power — it has
natural gas in abundance. The real bottleneck is turbines, permitting, and red tape, and that resolves
on a two-to-three-year timeline. Power costs, meanwhile, are roughly 5–7% of data center revenues.
“It’s not the game changer.” He sees the gap between valuation and reality as one of the cleanest
setups available to a fundamental short book.
The Issuance Signal Investors Aren’t Pricing
The most overlooked data point in Chanos’s session may have been the simplest. “For the first time
since 2021, we’re seeing large amounts of issuance.” Wall Street’s printing press is printing stock
again, and historically that has been a late-cycle marker.
He expects 2026 to break all-time records for equity issuance — surpassing 1999, 2000, and 2021.
“Every time we’ve seen a wave of IPOs, it’s generally not been good for the stock market.”
The parallel he drew to the dot-com era was specific and worth thinking through. The 1998–2000 capex
boom around Y2K and telecom build-out artificially inflated S&P; 500 earnings; when that spending
slowed, earnings fell roughly 40% from mid-2000 to mid-2001. Today’s AI and data center capex,
Chanos argued, is functioning the same way — and the same demand myth is at the core. MCI
WorldCom famously claimed internet traffic was doubling every three months. It was actually doubling
every year. Today’s equivalent, in Chanos’s view, is the idea that demand for compute is structurally
infinite.
What This Means for Allocators
For LPs building exposure to alternative investments outlook 2026 themes — particularly hedged
equity, event-driven, and dedicated short books — Chanos’s session reframed the opportunity set. The
thesis isn’t that AI is fake. It’s that the second- and third-derivative trades around AI infrastructure have
been priced as if every cell in the chain captures the same value as the chip designers and the model
labs. They don’t.
Chanos also acknowledged the hardest part of the business: short selling is psychologically brutal, and
the talent pool is thin. Kynikos is building a training program to help allocators identify and develop
short-side analysts — a signal that even the most public bear in the market is thinking about pipeline.
And on the regulatory front, he noted that the Andrew Left case had factual complications beyond the
question of whether short publishers must hold their position. He expects the appeals courts to view the
legal concept differently than the district court did.
The Takeaway
Chanos’s view in one line: the market is paying premium-software multiples for capital-intensive
middlemen, on the assumption that demand never blinks. If issuance accelerates the way he expects,
the marginal buyer disappears at exactly the moment the marginal seller — corporate insiders, IPO
syndicates, secondaries — shows up in size.
Conversations like this one are why allocators show up to Global Alts New York 2026. The most
active LPs in alternatives use iConnections to find the managers who are positioned for exactly this
kind of dispersion — funds running dedicated short, long-short, and event-driven mandates with the
discipline to underwrite the AI infrastructure trade from both sides.
5 min
Perspectives
The First LP Meeting: What Fund Managers Should Bring (and What to Leave Out)
The first LP meeting is the most over-prepared and under-prepared event in alternative investments fundraising at the same time. Fund managers prepare exhaustively for the wrong parts of it and almost never for the parts that decide it.
The exhaustive preparation usually goes into the deck — the part of the meeting the LP cares about least. It also goes into a long set of credentialing facts about the firm, which the LP has already read in the profile before agreeing to the meeting. The under-preparation shows up in the moments that actually drive the internal tag the allocator writes when the meeting ends. Those moments are: the answer to the risk question, the handling of the track-record specifics, and the manager’s read of what the LP actually came to the meeting to learn.
This is a piece about both halves. What to bring to the first LP meeting, and what to leave out. It draws on what fund managers themselves describe as the things they wish they had known going into their first meetings, drawing from the iConnections Global Alts/25 GP Research Report (43 fund manager interviews) and the matching allocator voices from the Global Alts/25 LP Research Report (34 LP interviews).
What the LP Already Knows Before You Walk In
The single most common preparation mistake is not knowing what the LP has already read. The LP almost certainly has already read the firm summary, the strategy one-pager, the AUM band, the team backgrounds, and the headline track-record numbers. They read them when they decided to take the meeting.
“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.
— An allocator on the platform
The implication is operational. The first ten minutes of the meeting are not for re-stating the deck. They are for establishing a working line of conversation about the parts of the strategy the LP actually came to test. The fund manager who arrives knowing what the LP has already read can use the first ten minutes to ask the right opening question rather than to repeat the marketing.
What to Bring: The Two or Three Specifics That Carry the Meeting
The meeting is carried by specifics, not by the deck as a whole. The fund manager who has prepared two or three specifics that demonstrate the strategy in action is a fund manager who has prepared for the meeting that is actually going to happen.
The specifics that work share a structure: a particular trade, position, portfolio company, or scenario that exposes the manager’s process, decision-making, and risk discipline in a way that the deck cannot. The specifics that do not work are abstract claims about the strategy (“we are disciplined”, “we are differentiated”, “we are bottom-up”) that the LP has heard from every manager in the sub-strategy.
“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 30% second-meeting conversion. The difference was not the deck.
— A fund manager on iConnections
The two or three specifics should be selected against what the LP is going to test, not against what the fund manager is most proud of. This is one of the places where pre-meeting research pays off in disproportion to the effort.
What to Bring: A Clean Track Record With Provenance
The track record is the second non-negotiable in the first meeting. The LP needs to be able to take the numbers at face value within the first five minutes, or the meeting stalls on provenance.
“f I have to spend the first part of the meeting figuring out whether the track record is real, audited, and current, we are not going to get to the parts of the conversation that decide whether I want to do diligence.
— An allocator on the platform
The fund manager who arrives with an unverified spreadsheet track record is a fund manager whose meeting is going to stall on the provenance question, and stalled provenance is the single most common reason a first meeting does not produce a second.
iConnections built the Get Verified program on iConnections for exactly this. Performance data flows directly from the fund administrator into the manager profile and into the materials the LP can pull, with a visible From Administrator badge. The fund manager with Get Verified is a fund manager whose first five minutes are spent on strategy rather than on convincing the LP that the numbers are real. The reduction in friction here is substantial.
What to Bring: A Specific Answer to the Risk Question
The third thing to bring is a specific, prepared answer to the risk question the LP is going to ask. The risk question varies by strategy, but it always comes, and it almost always comes in the second half of the meeting.
The fund managers who do well on this question prepare a specific answer to a specific risk, not a general defense of the strategy. They name the largest position-level loss they have ever had, the largest drawdown, the largest concentration risk on the book today, or the largest operational risk in the strategy. They walk through what they did about it, what they learned, and what they would do differently. The fund managers who do poorly on this question deflect with statistics, framework language, or boilerplate about risk culture.
“The answer I remember from a first meeting is rarely the answer to ‘what is your edge’. It is almost always the answer to ‘what is the worst trade you have ever made’.
— An allocator on the platform
The specific risk answer reinforces the internal tag the allocator is going to write when the meeting ends. The deflective risk answer does the opposite.
What to Leave Out
The harder half of the work is what to leave out. The most common things that should not be in a first LP meeting are:
- The firm history before the strategy. The LP has read it in the profile. The exception is if a specific part of the firm history is directly relevant to the specific strategy being raised. In that case, it is one of the two or three specifics, not a separate section.
- A wide tour of the deck. The deck is reference material. The fund manager who walks through every slide is a fund manager who has not prepared for the meeting that is going to happen.
- Boilerplate market commentary. The LP has read more market commentary in the last week than the fund manager has produced in the last quarter. The market commentary in a first meeting should be the bare minimum needed to set up the specifics, and no more.
- Defensive answers to questions the LP did not ask. The fund manager who anticipates an objection the LP did not raise is a fund manager who introduces a problem that was not going to be there.
What This Means for Fund Managers Raising in 2026
- Walk in knowing what the LP has already read. Use the iConnections platform engagement signal and Violet’s (iConnections agentic AI) pre-meeting briefing so the first ten minutes do not retread the profile.
- Prepare two or three specifics, not a deck tour. The specifics carry the meeting. Select them against what the LP is going to test, not against what the fund manager wants to show off.
- Take provenance off the table before the meeting starts. Get Verified moves performance data from the manager’s spreadsheet to the administrator’s record with a visible badge. Five minutes of credibility, recovered.
- Prepare the specific risk answer. The LP remembers the answer to the worst-trade question more than the answer to the edge question. Treat the risk question as a primary, not as a defense.
The bigger story under all four takeaways is that the first LP meeting is decided by what the fund manager chooses not to do as much as by what they choose to do. The fund managers who get second meetings are the ones who treat the first meeting as a calibration. They arrive with a well-prepared opening, two or three specifics, and a willingness to leave out the parts the LP did not come for. They are doing the work on the platform built for the way the work already happens.
8 min
Perspectives
What Allocators Actually Do Between the Meeting and the Commitment
The most expensive misconception in fundraising is that the meeting is the decision.
It is not. The meeting is the calibration that determines whether the manager moves into the part of the process that produces a commitment. The actual decision happens in the days and weeks after the meeting. It lives inside a system the fund manager almost never sees, with people the fund manager has almost never met. The number of meetings that end with apparent enthusiasm and produce nothing is a function of how invisible this post-meeting stage is to the manager who needs to influence it.
This article walks through what allocators actually do between the meeting and the commitment, the five distinct stages that decision moves through, and how iConnections built the platform around the cadence the work already follows.
Stage 1: The Same-Day Note and the Internal Tag
The first thing that happens after a meeting is a note. The allocator, or the analyst who staffed the meeting, writes a short same-day summary, usually inside a research or CRM system, and assigns the manager an internal tag. The tag is rarely “yes” or “no”. It is usually one of “follow-up”, “watch”, “pass”, “revisit in next mandate cycle”. That tag is the single most important output of the meeting from the manager’s perspective. However, the manager does not see it.
“After a meeting I will write maybe three lines, give the manager a status, and that status is what we work off of for the next six months.
— An allocator on the platform
What determines the tag is not the totality of the meeting. It is the strength of one or two specific moments. The portfolio company the manager named that landed. The risk question the manager handled in a way that felt original rather than rehearsed. The track-record number that was supportable rather than hand-waved. The specifics carry the tag.
For fund managers using iConnections, this is where Pipelines become operational rather than nice to have. Every meeting captured on the platform feeds into a per-LP record with meeting notes, document engagement, profile activity, and stage tracking. Violet (iConnections agentic AI) can draft a same-day follow-up note for the manager based on the meeting record, with the specifics the LP is most likely to remember. The follow-up that lands in the LP’s inbox within 24 hours, referencing the exact two or three specifics from the meeting, is a follow-up that reinforces the internal tag the allocator just wrote.
Stage 2: The Document Pull and the Engagement Read
Within the first week after a meeting, the allocator will open the manager’s materials again, usually to test a specific question that came up. If the materials are organized and accessible, the test gets done in the LP’s normal workflow. If the materials are not, the test gets deferred. In practice, deferred tests almost never get done.
“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./p>
— An allocator on the platform
The implication for fund managers is simple. The materials uploaded to the iConnections profile, the pitch deck, the DDQ, the track record, the most recent investor letter, are not just discovery surface area. They are post-meeting decision surface area. iConnections built the Documents system on the platform to make those materials retrievable in the moment the LP needs them. The manager sees the engagement signal when the allocator opens a document. That engagement signal is one of the most reliable read-outs of where a manager actually stands in the post-meeting window. It is invisible to managers who are sending PDFs by email instead of routing the materials through the platform.
For fund managers in the Get Verified program, the administrator-sourced performance data appears with the From Administrator badge. That removes the most common back-and-forth question — is the track record real, audited, and current — before it can become a reason to defer the test.
Stage 3: The Peer Sanity Check
Sometime in the first two weeks, the allocator runs a sanity check on the manager with a peer. The check is informal. It is usually one or two messages or a quick call with another allocator known to be in the same sub-strategy. The peer either confirms the read or surfaces something the original allocator missed.
“I have a small group of LPs I trust on hedge fund managers. If two of them have a positive read, I move the manager forward. If two have a negative read, the manager is done.
— An allocator on the platform
This is the moment where the allocator-to-allocator network does most of its work. A fund manager who is already visible to peer allocators — through Coffee & Connections, Allocator Roundtables, the Allocator Pro tier on iConnections, and the Allocator Intelligence dashboard — survives the sanity check by default. By contrast, a manager unknown to the peer allocator network has to be defended by the original allocator on the strength of a single meeting, which is a much harder argument to make.
That said, the fund manager cannot directly run this stage. The fund manager can make sure they have invested in being known across the allocator network around their sub-strategy in the months and years before any single meeting.
Stage 4: The Investment Committee Pre-Read
If the manager survives the first three stages, the next step is the investment committee. The IC pre-read is the document the original allocator writes to brief their committee on the manager, and the IC discussion is where the committee makes or defers the formal decision. The pre-read takes the original allocator anywhere from a half day to several days to assemble, depending on the institution.
The IC pre-read is built almost entirely from materials and conversations the allocator already has. It draws on materials the allocator already has: The manager profile, the pitch deck, the track record, the DDQ, the meeting notes, the peer sanity check, and the operational due diligence flags from service providers. The manager stayed clean and credible across all of those surfaces is a manager whose pre-read writes itself. The manager who has been inconsistent across them is a manager whose pre-read requires the allocator to do extra work, and extra work in this stage is the single most common cause of a deferral.
“Half my IC turn-downs are not about the manager. They are about me not having time to assemble the pre-read in the window the committee gave me..
— An allocator on the platform
iConnections built the platform to compress this stage. A manager profile with current materials, an active document set, a clean Get Verified track record, and a visible history of platform activity gives the allocator the raw material they need for the pre-read. The manager does not need to scramble. Pipelines on the allocator side keep the per-meeting history organized in a way that the IC pre-read can be assembled from in hours rather than days.
Stage 5: The Commitment, the Pass, or the Re-Open
The IC either commits, passes, or defers. The commit case is the rarest of the three. The pass and defer cases are far more common, and the difference between them is operationally meaningful for the fund manager.
A pass is a hard close. A defer is a soft re-open. The manager needs to wait for a structural change in their fund (new strategy, new track record, new team member) before approaching the allocator again. A deferred manager needs to maintain a structured cadence of new-information touchpoints (a new co-invest, a portfolio update, a relevant Global Alts appearance) until the allocator’s next mandate cycle opens.
As a result, deferred relationships die for operational reasons, not strategic ones. The manager loses the cadence. Three months pass with no new information. Six months pass with no contact at all. By the time the allocator’s next mandate cycle opens, the manager is not on the working list anymore.
This is the structural problem Pipelines and Violet solve. The platform tracks where every LP is in the cycle, shows managers when materials are opened or the LP returns to the profile, and surfaces the right touchpoint at the right time. Roadshows, Coffee & Connections, and Digital Gatherings give the manager the right kind of touchpoint, a real piece of new information rather than a generic check-in, at exactly the cadence the deferred allocator is willing to absorb.
What This Means for Fund Managers Raising in 2026
- The same-day follow-up is the most undervalued moment of the entire process. Use the platform record and Violet to send a follow-up within 24 hours that references the two or three specifics from the meeting. That follow-up reinforces the internal tag the allocator just wrote.
- Treat the platform profile as post-meeting decision surface area, not just discovery surface area. Materials, Get Verified performance data, recent activity. The allocator is going to pull these inside the first week.
- Build peer-allocator visibility long before any single meeting. Coffee & Connections, Allocator Roundtables, Allocator Pro. The sanity check that happens in week two is a network problem, not a meeting problem.
- Defer is not a no. Defer is a soft re-open with a six-month cadence requirement. Pipelines and Violet make the cadence default. Roadshows, Digital Gatherings, and Global Alts give the cadence content.
The bigger story under all four takeaways is that the decision happens in the system, not in the room. The fund managers who close treat the post-meeting window as the part of the process they can actually influence, and who do that work on the platform built for the way the work already happens.
9 min
Perspectives
How Institutional Investors Find New Fund Managers in 2026
The mental model most fund managers carry about how allocators discover new managers is wrong, and it costs them years of fundraising time.
The model they carry is: an allocator has a screen, runs a query, generates a list, works the list. The reality is closer to the inverse. An allocator already has a working list of names in their head, refreshed continuously through a small set of trusted signals. The new manager who breaks into that list does so through one of three or four well-defined routes, almost none of which start with a cold introduction.
This is the gap between the marketing copy around capital introduction and the operating reality of the business. Closing the gap is the work of any fund manager raising in 2026.
Nearly 80% of LPs report that they discover new managers through their professional networks, and over half cite conferences and industry events as a primary sourcing channel, per the iConnections Global Allocator Report 2026. The remaining sourcing volume is split across consultant referrals, prior-employer reconnects. A much smaller share comes through databases and cold outreach. A fund manager who is not present in the first two channels is competing for a small share of a small pool.
This article walks through how institutional investors actually find new fund managers in 2026, the four sourcing routes that matter, and how the iConnections platform is built around the way the work already happens.
Route 1: The Allocator’s Existing Network of Allocators
The single highest-conviction source of new manager names for an institutional investor is another institutional investor. The diligence work that another allocator has already done on a manager is treated, correctly, as the most credible signal in the market. It costs nothing to receive and saves months of the receiving allocator’s time.
“Most of the managers I have ever committed to came through another LP I trust. By the time they’re on my desk, half the work is done.
— An allocator on the platform
The implication for fund managers is not subtle. The relationships that move capital are the ones that produce peer recommendations, and the recommendations that produce capital are the ones that travel between allocators in the ordinary course of their work.
This is one of the structural reasons iConnections is built on a network of 6,000+ LPs and an Allocator Pro tier where the most active institutional investors share research, mandates, and peer signal. Coffee & Connections and the Allocator Roundtables that run year-round inside iConnections are designed for exactly this allocator-to-allocator transfer of names. The fund manager whose name shows up inside that network through a peer reference is already past the cold-outreach problem before they have made the first call themselves.
Route 2: The Conference Floor and the Pre-Scheduled Meeting
The conference is the highest-velocity discovery channel in the alternative investments business. It is also the most under-optimized.
For LPs, the conference is a forcing function. It is the one time in the calendar when the universe of potentially relevant managers is compressed into a few days of structured meetings. The meetings that get accepted are the ones where the LP has done at least some pre-work on the manager. The fund manager who arrives at the event having only just appeared in the LP’s awareness is going to lose the meeting slot to a fund manager who has been building familiarity over the prior six months.
“By the time I land in Miami I already have a shortlist of managers I want to meet. The discoveries usually happen at the bar at 9 p.m., not on the meeting floor.
— An allocator on the platform
What changes the outcome here is the pre-event work. iConnections anchors Global Alts events (Miami in Q1, New York in June, Asia in November, the inaugural Europe debut in April 2027) with pre-scheduled LP-GP meeting slots, and the meeting slots that get filled are the ones where the LP has already engaged with the manager’s profile and materials on the platform in the weeks before the event. Roadshows, Digital Gatherings (Webinars, Manager Showcases, Meet the Allocator live Q&A), and Coffee & Connections layer in the touchpoints across the calendar that build that familiarity. Nearly half of platform meetings are allocator-initiated, which is the clearest signal that the discovery is happening in real time across the year, not just at the event itself.
Route 3: The Mandate That Gets Built, Then Matched
The third route is the one most fund managers do not see, because it happens on the LP side of the platform. An allocator with a new mandate, a fresh allocation bucket, or a change in strategy starts looking. The question is whether the right fund manager surfaces in the search.
iConnections built Violet, the iConnections agentic AI, to do exactly this. On the LP side, Violet scans the network continuously against a configured mandate and surfaces fund managers the moment their strategy, AUM band, geography, and behavioral signals match. The 100K+ AI-driven searches happening on the platform in any given 90-day window are this work compounding at scale, across 6,000+ LPs and 1,400+ GPs and the service providers who connect them.
For fund managers, the implication is operational. Specifically, the profile, the strategy tagging, the uploaded materials, the recent activity on the platform, and the Get Verified badge for administrator-sourced performance data are all the surface area an allocator sees when Violet returns the search result. A fund manager who has not invested in the profile is invisible to the search that the LP is running right now.
“I used the search tools and found former colleagues and clients. That made the outreach much easier.
— A fund on iConnections
The same point holds in reverse. The fund manager who runs Search on the platform with 200+ filters can find the allocators with a mandate that matches their strategy, the allocators with prior co-invest history, and the allocators with alumni or prior-employer overlap. The cold outreach problem is not solved by writing better cold emails. It is solved by routing the outreach through relational signal that Search and Violet can surface in a few minutes.
Route 4: The Service Provider and Consultant Layer
The fourth route is the quietest. Service providers (administrators, prime brokers, auditors, law firms, placement agents) and investment consultants sit in the middle of the LP and GP universes and pass names back and forth in the normal course of their work.
This route does not produce volume. It produces the highest-quality referrals in the business. For instance, a consultant who has watched a manager through a full reporting cycle and an LP who already trusts that consultant’s read is a referral path that is functionally pre-vetted on both sides. The fund manager who is professional with the service providers around their fund (administrator, auditor, legal) is investing in this channel whether they realize it or not.
The iConnections platform reflects this layer directly. Service providers are integrated members of the network alongside LPs and GPs, and iConnections built the Get Verified program on a direct integration with fund administrators, where performance data flows from the administrator into the manager profile with a visible From Administrator badge. The administrator-to-allocator credibility signal is automated and ambient, instead of being a back-and-forth conversation at the start of every diligence process.
What This Means for Fund Managers Raising in 2026
- Invest in the allocator-to-allocator referral path. That means showing up consistently in the network where peer allocators are already trading names, and giving them a reason to trade yours. iConnections designed Allocator Pro, Coffee & Connections, and the Allocator Roundtables to be that surface.
- Treat the conference as a culmination, not a starting point. Use the iConnections platform, Roadshows, Coffee & Connections, and Digital Gatherings to build allocator familiarity in the six months before a Global Alts event, so the pre-scheduled meeting is the next step in a conversation, not the first one.
- Build the profile around the work Violet is going to do. Strategy tagging, recent activity, uploaded materials, and Get Verified are the surface area Violet uses to surface you in an LP’s search. A weak profile is a missed allocation.
- Be professional with the service-provider layer. The administrator, auditor, and legal relationships around your fund are also referral relationships. The Get Verified integration makes the most important one of those, the administrator, ambient and continuous.
The bigger story under all four takeaways is that institutional manager discovery in 2026 is a network problem before it is a marketing problem. The fund managers who are getting found are the ones operating where the discovery actually happens, and they are doing it on the platform that was built for the way the work already happens.
8 min
Perspectives
What Makes a Capital Introduction Conference Worth the Calendar Block
There are over 250 alternative investment conferences a year. Most fund managers attend the wrong ones, in the wrong order, with the wrong preparation, and then conclude that conferences do not work. The selection problem is especially acute when it comes to the capital introduction conference — the format most directly tied to your raise.
The conferences are not the problem. The selection is. And the selection problem is solvable if you start evaluating them by the only metric that actually matters during a raise: meetings with allocators who can write a check inside your fundraising window.
This article walks through the three questions that separate a conference worth the calendar block from a conference that quietly costs you a week of fundraising time you cannot get back.
Question 1: Who Will Actually Be in the Room
The right question is not “who is presenting.” It is “what percentage of the LP attendees are currently allocating, in my strategy, in my fund-size band.”
This is one of the reasons Global Alts Miami is built the way it is: 1,500 institutional allocators and 1,200 fund managers, vetted before they get a credential. iConnections schedules over 21K+ expected one-on-one meetings pre-scheduled through the iConnections platform before anyone arrives at the Miami Beach Convention Center. Registration is complimentary for qualified institutional allocators who commit to taking 12 onsite meetings, and pricing is tiered for fund managers based on AUM. The structure is intentional. The math is the headline.
The signal to look for at any capital introduction event: does the conference share LP attendee data in advance, in enough detail to qualify the trip before the registration check is written? Events that operate on a real platform can answer that question with data, including allocator firm type, seniority, and active mandate signals. Events that operate on networking momentum alone usually cannot.
Question 2: How the Meeting System Actually Works
Conferences live or die on their meeting mechanics. The good ones run on infrastructure. The bad ones run on hope.
A meeting system that earns its keep does three things in plain sight. It surfaces fund managers to allocators with relational and mandate signal, not just demographic filters. It gives both sides a way to prepare with materials uploaded ahead of time. And it gives the work continuity beyond the event itself.
“If a manager doesn’t upload documents or if they’re outdated, I cancel the meeting. If they aren’t organized, I don’t waste my time.
— An allocator on the platform
iConnections built the meeting system around this exact behavior. Fund managers upload pitch decks, DDQs, track records, and investor updates once and share them everywhere. Allocators evaluating ameeting request see strategy, AUM, fund documents, Get Verified administrator-sourced returns when applicable, and the full profile context before the credential check is even scanned. The result is a meeting where the first ten minutes are about substance, not about explaining the basics.
In fact, nearly half of all Global Alts onsite meetings are allocator-initiated, which is the clearest single signal that the meeting system is producing real intent rather than calendar density.
Additionally, the fundraising side benefits from the same infrastructure. Power Scheduler for enterprise managers, calendar sync, one-click meeting requests to LPs, and the Roadshow tool layered on top so that the in-person meetings at Global Alts can roll directly into a focused multi-city week with the allocators who lit up in the room. Conferences with a platform underneath them compound. Conferences without one reset to zero at the closing reception.
Question 3: What Happens After the Meeting
The single most underrated criterion for a conference worth attending is what it does for the relationship after it ends.
This is where most events fail and most managers learn the lesson too late. The conference creates the meeting. The meeting creates the interest. And then the event ends, and if there is no platform layer underneath, the relationship is back to cold email outreach to allocators who shook the manager’s hand three days earlier.
The fast-closing fund managers treat the after-the-event phase as the highest-leverage part of the entire conference investment. They show up to the event with the follow-up sequence already designed. They walk out of each meeting with one specific next step agreed. And they treat the events that give them year-round access to the same allocators as fundamentally different from one-off conferences that drop the relationship as soon as the closing reception ends.
iConnections built Pipelines to close this gap. Visual boards for the full LP-by-LP workflow, meeting notes from Global Alts that carry through to platform interactions, diligence stage tracking, document engagement history, and Violet (iConnections agentic AI) drafting follow-ups from the meeting notes within minutes. Year-round Digital Gatherings (Webinars, Manager Showcases, Meet the Allocator live Q&A) keep the conversation visible between flagship events. Roadshows turn warm allocator interest from Global Alts into focused in-office weeks in the cities that matter. The platform is what carries the relationship between the moments where the rooms are full.
“It changed how we run cap intro. We tell the platform what we’re looking at, the right managers come to us, and the meetings actually fit the book
— An allocator on iConnections
The 40% Question Every Fund Manager Should Ask
The forcing question that separates a worthwhile conference from an expensive social trip is this: at the end of the event, what percentage of my meetings will translate into a real second conversation inside 60 days?
If the answer is below 20%, the conference was not worth the calendar block. If the answer is between 20% and 40%, the conference was a useful investment in network density even if no commitments come from it. Above 40%, the conference is the kind that should anchor an entire fundraising calendar.
The fund managers who hit the higher end of that range do not get there by accident. They get there because they did the math before they registered, used the platform to qualify the room before the trip, prepared around allocator intent, and kept the relationship alive after the event through Pipelines, Roadshows, and year-round Digital Gatherings.
What This Means for Fund Managers Picking 2027 Events
Three practical takeaways:
- Register on math, not on brand. Meetings per allocating LP in your strategy and fund-size band is the only metric that matters during a raise. Use the platform to filter the room before the registration check is written.
- Evaluate the meeting system. Pre-meeting materials, mandate-matched scheduling, mutual interest signal, and post-event continuity are the infrastructure you should be looking for.
- Anchor the calendar around year-round programs, not one-off events. Conferences tied to a platform with continuing engagement convert at materially higher rates than stand-alone events that end at the closing reception.
The events worth attending in 2027 are the ones built for the way relationships actually compound in alternative investments. The four Global Alts flagship events (Miami in Q1, New York June at The Glasshouse, the Europe debut April 2027 at the Carrousel du Louvre) are designed around that compounding by intent. The iConnections platform is what makes the year between them work the same way.
6 min
Frequently Asked Questions
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Fusce nunc ante, tincidunt non elit sed, aliquam fringilla enim. Nullam tristique purus sit amet tellus scelerisque, vitae accumsan turpis pulvinar. Sed porta bibendum neque, sed efficitur risus faucibus et. Fusce vulputate ipsum sapien, vitae placerat ex feugiat pretium. Nunc tempus arcu mollis nibh ultricies viverra. Vestibulum sem ante, dapibus et commodo ut, tincidunt et erat. Quisque quis eros egestas, blandit lorem et, sollicitudin erat. Cras accumsan iaculis efficitur. Nunc quis ullamcorper nibh. Donec ut vestibulum ex. Sed in vehicula turpis, in venenatis felis. Nullam lacinia, sapien ac interdum vulputate, quam sapien dapibus odio, at ultrices nisl justo nec dui. Sed blandit neque id fermentum euismod. Donec in turpis sollicitudin, elementum urna sit amet, gravida est. Curabitur dictum augue sed nibh molestie, a aliquet mi maximus.
- Proin id eros metus. Fusce quis vehicula lectus. In porta nec ex ut faucibus. Orci varius natoque penatibus et magnis dis parturient montes, nascetur ridiculus mus.
- Nullam massa ante, accumsan eu faucibus ac, aliquet et mi. In tristique euismod nibh, non egestas augue aliquet quis. Aenean viverra orci urna, eu pretium mauris malesuada vitae. In sem mi, auctor eu purus iaculis, tempus finibus arcu.
- Phasellus dui turpis, viverra sed ex et, blandit elementum urna.
Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Ut elit tellus, luctus nec ullamcorper mattis, pulvinar dapibus leo.
