Feb 2023

Hybrid course for angels, syndicate leads, and venture investors to learn how to model venture funds.

Taylor Davidson

Founder and Managing Director, Foresight

How to Model Venture Funds

Starting a fund, syndicate, or getting started with angel investing? It's important to understand how to budget for investments and forecast returns for your limited partners. Come for the education, leave with a model you can use. The three sessions&nbsp;can be joined live or watched on your own time. All students will receive the slides, the example spreadsheet, the case study, and the recording of the full workshop, and all of the materials can be viewed on your own time.

Understand how the economics of venture funds work

Emerging general partners and junior venture capitalists working on a venture capital fund.

Syndicate leads and angel investors wanting to structure their investing tracking and reporting.

Founders or executives looking to understand how the economics of venture funds work.

Who this course is for

Key outcomes

How to use assumptions around fund size, management fees, and expenses to create a forecast of called capital, expenses, and invested capital over time.

Model fund capital budgeting and deployment

Cover a few common ways of approaching portfolio construction models and discuss the pros and cons of each, and how to use them in our forecast of investments and proceeds. We will cover simple and complicated ways of forecasting portfolios.

Create a portfolio construction model

Using our forecast of invested capital and our portfolio construction logic, we will cover how to create a forecast of proceeds from investments and a waterfall of distributions, including preferred returns, GP catchups, and carried interest.

How to model proceeds and distributions

Using our forecast of fund cash flows, we will introduce how to calculate unrealized gains and residual values, using our portfolio construction approach to forecast the underlying changes in value in the portfolio not captured in our realized cash flow forecasts.

Present key metrics and key reports

This is a bonus session using prerecorded video, to cover how to model the forecasted revenues and expenses for the management company. If time, will address questions and comments in the session.

Bonus: Model a management company

Using our knowledge of modeling portfolio construction, building out a schedule of capital calls, investments, proceeds, and distributions to limited partners and general partners

How to model fund flows

We will start by building cap tables to understand discrete investment scenarios, and use that to understand the different approaches to modeling portfolio construction.

How to model portfolio construction

Wrapping up our model, we will learn how to calculate key fund performance metrics and use them to create scenarios and communicate fund performance.

How to model performance metrics

Optional session for reviewing content from the class, reviewing the case study, and answering questions not addressed in the previous sessions.

Optional Q&A

4 sessions + downloadable tools and instructional videos

Meet your instructor

See what people are saying

1 module per week with slides, spreadsheet, background readings. Watch the 1.5 hour recording of a class on the material, or join each module's live class for Q&amp;A and interaction.

Self-paced lessons

Practical exercises for you to apply what you learn in class, with a case study to practice building a complete model. The time commitment is manageable for busy professionals, with actionable takeaways to use in your business.

Bite-sized projects

Live session with Taylor and the rest of the cohort for going over the material, Q&amp;A, and exercises to dive deeper into that week's material. Thursdays at 12 PM Eastern time

Live Sessions

Course Schedule

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This course builds on live workshops and hands-on projects

Active learning, not passive watching

You’ll be interacting with other learners through breakout rooms and project teams

Interactive and project-based

Join a community of like-minded people who want to learn and grow alongside you

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