How to Model Venture Funds

9.3

(15 ratings)

·

2 Weeks

·

Cohort-based Course

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

Hosted by

Taylor Davidson

I've helped over 48,000 founders and investors as Founder/CEO of Foresight

This course is popular

4 people enrolled last week.

Course overview

Understand how the economics of venture funds work

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 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 downloaded for viewing on your own time.

Who this course is for

01

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

02

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

03

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

Key outcomes

Model fund capital budgeting and deployment

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

Create a portfolio construction model

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.

How to model proceeds and distributions

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.

Present key metrics and key reports

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.

Bonus: Model a management company

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.

9.3

(15 ratings)

See what people are saying

        Taylor is very clearly a seasoned expert and passionate teacher. The course is a great way to get your hands dirty building a venture model. I would recommend for emerging managers or those looking to augment their skillsets and up-level their thinking as it pertains to capital allocation, cash flow modeling and downstream impact of early decisions
Kyle O'Brien

Kyle O'Brien

Venture Capitalist
        I thoroughly enjoyed the course! Taylor made it incredibly interesting, yet still managed to keep it simple. ... the free templates that Taylor provided were incredibly helpful - they pushed me to go further than what I'm used to. Taylor's "start small and scale" approach really helped me to understand and appreciate the models.
Lukas Grodl

Lukas Grodl

Legal Counsel, Purple Ventures
        I have followed the content of Taylor on how to model VC funds (blog posts, templates, videos) and this course wraps it all up. Excellent for understanding the basics and the most important concepts.
Joaquin Stephens

Joaquin Stephens

Partner
        Excellent course. It is a difficult topic to present as attendees will have different experience levels - and Taylor did a great job making this work for all attendees.
Howie Schwartz

Howie Schwartz

Serial Entrepreneur & Angel Investor
        This course was great because you could get real-world practice with a realistic VC fund model and work through some of the issues you would face in actually building your own from scratch. Very helpful for my growth.
Brett Long

Brett Long

        This is training that you actually get to take home with you and implement - a rare thing in business education. Taylor is very good at answering project-specific follow-on questions and the course materials deserve proper attention: reading and implementing via spreadsheets.
Simon Haworth

Simon Haworth

Partner, Tramsline Fund
A pattern of wavy dots
Join an upcoming cohort

How to Model Venture Funds

Cohort 5

$579 USD

Dates

Oct 11—20, 2023

Payment Deadline

Oct 11, 2023

Meet your instructor

Taylor Davidson

Taylor Davidson

Founder and Managing Director, Foresight

Taylor Davidson is the founder of Foresight, which helps entrepreneurs use financial models for business decisions.


Through his template financial models and strategic advisory services, he has helped over 48,000 entrepreneurs from 116 countries on financial planning, projections, fundraising, valuations, and business strategy.


Taylor has also worked with over 600 angel investors and venture funds on investment strategy, portfolio tracking, capital planning, and fundraising.


He created this workshop to help first-time founders and junior venture capitalists learn the fundamentals of modeling cap tables.


He created the Cap Table and Exit Waterfall Masterclass to help founders and VCs learn how to understand and build cap tables and exit waterfalls for their financing rounds.


He partnered with Chris Wattig to create Finance for Founders to help founders learn how to build an FP&A function at their companies.


Contact him at hello@foresight.is or @tdavidson on Twitter.

A pattern of wavy dots
Join an upcoming cohort

How to Model Venture Funds

Cohort 5

$579 USD

Dates

Oct 11—20, 2023

Payment Deadline

Oct 11, 2023

4 sessions + downloadable tools and instructional videos

01

How to model fund flows

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

02

How to model portfolio construction

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

03

How to model performance metrics

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

04

Optional Q&A

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

Course Schedule

3-4 hours per week
  • Live sessions and Q&A review

    12:00pm - 1:30pm EST

    Each session is 1.5 hours, 12 to 1:30 PM Eastern, with the live sessions on October 11, 13, and 16 plus an optional review Q&A on October 18.


    The time between classes is for questions, review, and practice.

  • Join live, watch anytime

    All sessions are recorded, so you can watch them at your own time if you can't attend.

  • Practical Case Study

    If desired, you have the option to work through a case study, practice what we learn, and get direct feedback on your work.

  • No required homework or prereading

    Structured to be manageable for busy professionals with actionable takeaways that you can use in your businesses today.

  • Optional case studies

    Opportunity for you to practice and apply the workshop to building your own models. I'll review all models you create.

A pattern of wavy dots
Join an upcoming cohort

How to Model Venture Funds

Cohort 5

$579 USD

Dates

Oct 11—20, 2023

Payment Deadline

Oct 11, 2023

Frequently Asked Questions

What happens if I can’t make the live session?
How do I know if this will be valuable for me?
What’s the refund policy?
Will my employer pay for this course?
I have questions, who do I contact?
A pattern of wavy dots
Join an upcoming cohort

How to Model Venture Funds

Cohort 5

$579 USD

Dates

Oct 11—20, 2023

Payment Deadline

Oct 11, 2023

$579 USD

9.3

(15)

·

2 Weeks