The Solo GP Playbook Nobody Talks About

The solo GP model is having a moment. Hundreds of new single-person venture funds launched in the last three years. Most of the writing about this trend makes it sound exciting and aspirational. Here is the version nobody publishes.

The economics are brutal at the start

A solo GP with a $25M fund earns $500K per year in management fees. That sounds great until you subtract reality.

Fund administration: $60K-$100K per year. Legal and compliance: $40K-$60K. Accounting and tax prep: $30K-$50K. Office space or coworking: $12K-$24K. Travel to meet founders and LPs: $20K-$40K. Software (CRM, portfolio monitoring, cap table): $10K-$20K. Insurance (E&O, D&O): $15K-$25K.

That is $187K-$319K in overhead before you pay yourself. On a $25M fund, you are taking home $181K-$313K. In San Francisco. Where your LPs expect you to live because that is where the deals are.

You are making less than a senior software engineer at Google, with more stress, no benefits, and the knowledge that your carry is worth nothing unless your investments return 3x over the next decade. You chose this life.

The carry math

Here is the part that keeps you going. On a $25M fund with 20% carry, if you return 3x ($75M), your carry is $10M. On a 5x return ($125M), it is $20M. The management fees are how you survive. The carry is how you build wealth.

But carry takes 7-10 years to materialize. Your seed investments from Fund I will not exit for years. You will watch paper markups go up and down and try not to think about it. Your friends in tech are getting liquid RSUs every quarter. You are betting your thirties on a decade-long coin flip.

Is it worth it? I genuinely do not know yet. Ask me in 2033.

The loneliness nobody warns you about

You have no partners to argue with. No investment committee to pressure-test your thinking. No associate to delegate the reference calls to. When you make a bad decision — and you will make bad decisions — you sit with it alone.

The conversations you have with other solo GPs help. But there is something specific about the loneliness of being the person who writes the check. Your founder is stressed about their startup. Your LPs are stressed about their allocation. Nobody is thinking about whether you are okay.

I started doing two things that helped. First, I joined a group of emerging managers who meet monthly on Zoom. No agenda, just talking. Second, I started writing about what I was learning. Not for marketing. For sanity. Putting your thinking on paper forces you to examine it. That matters when you do not have a partner doing it for you.

The leverage is enormous

Here is the other side. The solo GP model has leverage that partnerships do not.

You can make an investment decision in 48 hours. Partnership firms take weeks. When a founder needs an answer on a Friday, you can give it. That speed is a genuine competitive advantage at seed stage, where the best deals close fast.

You keep all the carry. In a two-partner fund, you split it. In a three-partner fund, you are arguing about who sourced what. As a solo GP, the math is simple: 20% of everything.

You control your own thesis. Nobody is overruling you because they have a different opinion about AI or because the last investment in that category did not work out. Your judgment, for better or worse, is the fund.

And you build a brand that is inseparable from your own. Fund I becomes Fund II becomes Fund III, and the reputation is yours. You are not a replaceable partner at a firm. You are the firm.

What I have learned about portfolio construction

Running a solo fund forced me to think about portfolio construction differently than the textbooks suggest. With $25M, you cannot do 30 investments at $500K each and have reserves for follow-ons. The math does not work.

What works: 15-20 initial investments. Reserve 40% for follow-ons in your winners. Accept that you will not be able to exercise pro rata in every company that does well. Pick the 3-4 where you have the most conviction and double down.

The hardest skill is not picking companies. It is deciding which of your portfolio companies to follow on in. You have the information advantage of being inside the company. Use it. When a founder is outperforming every metric they projected, write the follow-on check. When the story has changed, pass and put the capital into your next winner.

Should you do it?

If you are thinking about becoming a solo GP, here is my honest assessment. Do it if you have a genuine edge — a network, a sector expertise, or a geographic advantage that gives you access to deals the big firms miss. Do it if you can fundraise your first $15-30M from people who trust you personally. Do it if you are comfortable with ambiguity, loneliness, and delayed gratification measured in years.

Do not do it because it sounds cool. Do not do it because you are tired of your current job. And definitely do not do it because you think the management fees are easy money. They are not easy. They are barely enough.

The best solo GPs I know share one trait: they would do this job even if the economics were worse. They love finding companies, helping founders, and making bets on the future. Everything else is overhead.