July 24, 2026 · Emerging Managers, Operations
How emerging managers build an institutional process on Fund I economics
By Emily Buckley, founder of SamCIO
LPs judge a Fund I fund on the same process fundamentals they'd expect from Fund IV: a real thesis, a consistent underwriting process, a memo per deal, an accurate cap table view, a clean quarterly report. What they don't expect is a Fund I team to have Fund IV headcount to produce it. The tension for an emerging manager is building that process on a team of one to three people, without either skipping the discipline or burning the fund's early runway on operations instead of deal sourcing.
Here's what that actually looks like in practice.
Write the thesis down before you need it for diligence
The most common gap at Fund I isn't sourcing, it's discipline under pressure. A solo GP with thin deal flow is more likely to talk themselves into a deal that doesn't fit, because the alternative is an empty pipeline. Writing the thesis and anti-thesis down before the fund is actively investing, not during the first hot deal, is what makes that discipline enforceable later. It costs an afternoon now and saves a bad Fund I mark later.
Don't let the process depend on you remembering everything
At a fifteen-person fund, institutional memory can survive one person leaving. At a Fund I fund, the entire process usually lives in one person's head, which means it doesn't survive that person having a bad quarter, let alone leaving. The fix isn't hiring, which most Fund I funds can't afford yet. It's making sure decisions get written down as they happen: why a deal advanced, why it didn't, what came up on the reference call that changed your mind. This is cheap to do consistently and expensive to reconstruct later when an LP asks.
Get comparable memos from deal one
Emerging managers sometimes treat memo discipline as something to add once the fund is bigger. That's backwards: the earliest deals are the ones an LP is most likely to ask about later, since they define the fund's actual thesis versus its stated one. A consistent IC memo structure from the first deal means deal 3 and deal 30 are comparable, instead of deal 3 being a paragraph and deal 30 being a proper writeup because the fund only got disciplined once it had more assets to protect.
Plan for multiple vintages before you have them
Most emerging managers start Fund I assuming Fund II is a future problem. It becomes a present problem the moment Fund II starts investing while Fund I is still active, and now the fund needs to track pipeline, portfolio, and LP reporting separately per vintage without duplicating tools or losing the ability to see across them. Building on a system that scopes cleanly by fund from the start (SamCIO's fund switcher keeps pipeline, portfolio, IC, and LP reporting scoped to the right vintage while still living in one workspace) avoids a migration project exactly when the team has the least time for one.
Price your tooling to the fund's actual stage
A pre-first-close solo GP and a five-person Fund II team have different budgets and different needs, and tooling priced for the latter is often wasted on the former. SamCIO's Solo plan ($199/month, one seat, 14-day free trial) is sized for a fund before or just after first close, with the same underwriting, memo, and reporting engine as the larger tiers, so the discipline doesn't have to wait for the fund to afford a bigger plan. As the team grows past one person, moving to the Fund tier adds seats at $99/month rather than requiring a new system.
Automate the parts an LP will actually check
LPs verifying an emerging manager's diligence rigor tend to look at specific things: is the thesis consistent across deals, are risks documented rather than glossed over, does the return math tie out, is the quarterly report accurate and on time. These are also the parts most likely to slip when one person is doing sourcing, diligence, and fund administration simultaneously. Automating deck parsing, first-pass scoring, and MOIC and XIRR calculation doesn't just save time, it removes the exact failure points an LP's own diligence process is designed to catch.
The real advantage emerging managers have
A large, established fund's process is set and hard to change. An emerging manager gets to build the process right the first time, without years of ad hoc habits to unwind. The funds that use that advantage well are the ones that treat process as part of the pitch to LPs from day one, not as overhead to defer until there's more capital to justify it.
If you're setting this up for a Fund I or Fund II raise, the emerging managers page walks through how the Solo and Fund tiers map to where a fund actually is, from pre-first-close through a growing team.