Every VC fund has the same ultimate goal, and that is generating outsized returns. But achieving that goal does not come from following a one-size-fits-all playbook, it's about understanding your fund's unique landscape, strengths, and areas for improvement. 

Coming into the new year, I've been having a ton of conversations with GPs about annual strategic planning and how they can best improve their fund performance.

However, identifying those areas for improvement, the ones that can actually move the needle for your fund, demands true self-reflection (or fund-reflection, if you will). This does not mean gathering your five partners in a boardroom and conducting an echo chamber brainstorm session, nor does it mean blindly mimicking what competitive firms are doing.

What it requires is a holistic evaluation that cuts through the noise and pinpoints exactly where your fund can improve to drive maximum value. To that end, having worked with countless funds on their strategic planning, I've developed and refined what I call the Platform 360, a comprehensive multi-stakeholder assessment designed to zero in on a fund's unique challenges and opportunities. This approach helps cut through the noise to identify exactly where and how platform can drive the most value for your firm.

Let’s dig in:

Stakeholder Surveying

For anyone familiar with 360 reviews in a professional setting, the concept here will feel familiar, but the execution is uniquely tailored to venture. It includes gathering perspectives not just from your immediate team, but from your entire ecosystem. The stakeholder set varies by fund but typically includes:

1. Your portfolio founders (both those thriving and struggling)

2. Founders who passed on your term sheets (these insights are gold)

3. Fund Partners (for an insider view of your funds' dynamics from the veteran perspective)

4. Junior investment team members (they often have their finger on the pulse of market trends and bring a POV that might not surface in standard partner meetings)

5. Limited Partners (who are privy to patterns across numerous funds)

6. Peer funds (both those you co-invest with and those you compete against)

What makes this strategy powerful is its two-pronged approach. When I lead a Platform 360, I combine both qualitative and quantitative research efforts. 

The qualitative part consists of one-on-one interviews across the stakeholder group that are guided, yet free-form, allowing for organic discovery of insights and challenges. The point of these interviews is not only to be an active listener but to ask questions that dig below the surface in order to understand the fundamental intentions and reasonings behind what each stakeholder shares. 

For example, if a partner says that they believe the firm should invest in building a talent team, I always want to understand why. What is the motivation behind this specific idea? Is it because they see peer firms that have talent teams and wish to replicate what seems to work? Or is it because they spend 3 hours a week doing candidate interviews, search calls, and talent work for their portfolio that they want to offload to an expert? 

When it comes to the quantitative component, the goal is to use structured survey questions to validate or challenge your anecdotal findings with measurable insights.

For each firm I work with, I design a bespoke survey to be completed by the entire team (from the most senior to the most junior members). The survey typically includes statements drawn directly from stakeholder interviews, asking respondents to rate them from "strongly agree" to "strongly disagree" to gauge alignment on key themes. Team members also rank the firm's performance across each stage of the investment cycle. This approach doesn't just highlight the obvious gaps, it reveals where your team has the strongest alignment or disagreement about current strengths.

This dual approach ensures you’re not just following hunches - you're validating (or sometimes challenging) your interview findings with hard data.

The core questions you're trying to answer with your stakeholder conversations and surveys are simple but highly revealing, they include:

What are you doing exceptionally well?

When asking your various stakeholders what your fund does exceptionally well, you're mapping your actual strengths against your internal narrative. A junior team member might highlight a deal-sourcing approach that feels routine to you but to them, is extraordinarily effective. A portfolio founder might comment on a unique post-investment support initiative that sets you apart from other funds. This question uncovers those competitive advantages that might have otherwise gone unrecognized and guide you on where to double down.

What efforts no longer add value?

It's easy to continue programs you've run for years without questioning their current relevance. I frequently encounter funds caught in their own bubble, convinced of the value they're providing until external feedback suggests otherwise. This is where hearing directly from founders and co-investors becomes powerful, they'll tell you if that founder summit (or any of your other current initiatives you've run for the last five years) still delivers value, or if it's running on old fumes and should be put to rest to free up resources for more compelling initiatives.

What are you not doing that you should be?

This line of inquiry is aimed at uncovering the strategic gaps that are limiting your fund's potential. Sometimes these gaps are obvious, like not having a platform function or lacking a systematic approach to portfolio support. Other times, they're more nuanced… perhaps you're not providing enough meaningful connections between portfolio companies or not leveraging new data sources and technologies to generate deal flow.

What are your peer funds doing that's working?

Beyond understanding your own operations, you need to map the industry landscape. What are peer funds doing successfully? Where are they winning deals? What needs are already well-served in the marketplace? Most importantly - what white space exists that aligns with your fund's unique DNA? A crucial principle here is that we're not looking to copy others. If another VC is already doing excellent market analysis reports for your region as part of their brand-building efforts, creating a competing product adds more noise than value. 

The goal is to identify opportunities that are both differentiated and authentic to your firm's identity.

Survey Synthesis

After stakeholder conversations and surveys are done and dusted, you're left with an enormous amount of data, opinions, and often conflicting perspectives. This is where the hard work begins.

Synthesis isn't just about aggregating feedback, it's about identifying the systemic challenges that are holding your firm back. The synthesis of this information can be done by your team, however, this part of the Platform 360 process highlights why it’s often helpful to hire an external consultant to support this assessment. It empowers a fund to evaluate ideas purely on their merit and potential impact, free from historical fund dynamics or organizational hierarchy. This outside-in view ignores firm politics and politeness, revealing blind spots that wouldn't be visible from within your four walls.

In synthesizing the feedback, the first task is to separate ideas from core problems. Remember when, during the interviews, your partner suggested building a talent team, and you pushed them to understand the WHY behind their suggestion? 

For now, you will ignore the idea of building a talent team, and look at the root problem: your portfolio companies are all struggling with growing their team and it's a massive time suck for the fund. You need to help your companies build their business in a way that more efficiently utilizes your team's limited time. But don’t go throwing any of those ideas away! Rather, put them to the side in what I like to call ‘our idea parking lot’ (we’ll get back to them soon).

This process of distinguishing ideas from problems reveals the essential blockers that stand in the way of your fund’s success. These typically boil down to one of the five stages of the investment cycle, for example:

• Do you frequently struggle with a dried-up pipeline of deal flow and frustration that you’re not seeing the best investment opportunities in your market?

• Are you regularly putting out term sheets and being rejected by founders who decide to go with a peer fund at similar terms but with a stronger brand or value proposition?

• Are you making great investments only to see them all struggle with the same hurdles months after you wire them cash?

Whether it's strengthening your deal flow in the 'find' stage, improving your ability to 'win' competitive deals, or creating more robust post-investment support to help companies ‘build’, the magic happens when you’re laser-focused on the consistent themes that arise throughout your research and synthesis.

When all is said and done, your Platform 360 isn't about addressing every single piece of feedback. It's about identifying the one or two critical challenges that are genuinely constraining your fund's potential across the investment lifecycle to unlock the most significant transformation for your fund.  

Aligning Solutions

Now that we've identified your one to two primary challenges, it's time to chart a path forward. This isn't about throwing everything at the wall to see what sticks, it's about making focused, strategic choices in line with your fund’s priorities. 

The good news is that through your previous work in surveying your stakeholders, a ton of thinking around solutions has already been done!

Your solutions can emerge from three key areas:

1) Ideas Assessment: 

Remember your "parking lot" where you put all those ideas (good and bad) that come from the stakeholder interviews? Now's the time to revisit that collection through the new lens of your 1-2 identified problems. Some ideas that originally seemed peripheral might now emerge as perfect solutions. But here's the key: even if you've got some brilliant ideas collecting sun in that lot, if they don't tackle your 1-2 critical problems, let them stay parked until your next Platform 360.

2) Competitive Analysis:

Dig into competitor funds that were repeatedly highlighted in your 360 interviews. For funds consistently winning term sheets, dissect their approach - their brand positioning, programming, content strategy, talent initiatives, community-building efforts, and go-to-market support. What unique strategies are they deploying that we can learn from or differentiate against?

3) Blue Sky Thinking: 

Don't limit yourself to existing solutions. The most impactful initiatives might be ones neither you nor your competitors have thought of yet (or maybe, they can even come from that crazy idea thrown out during a stakeholder survey that you initially thought impossible). Give yourself permission to think boldly and differently and enlist the most creative thinkers on your team to contribute a focused set of ideas, sometimes the best answer is creating something entirely new.

The goal is to walk away with a curated set of innovative, viable ideas precisely calibrated to address the 1-2 core challenges we've uncovered.

Looking Ahead

The Platform 360 is your first move to collect the comprehensive input needed for building a strategy that drives real returns. Once surveying is complete, synthesizing has been solved, and solutions are locked in, the next phase is execution.

For most funds, this means making tough decisions about resourcing, whether tapping into existing team capacity, bringing on specialized talent, or partnering with external agencies. Some initiatives might require significant investment, while others could be quick wins.

For more on that, check out this article where I dive deep into what is likely the most challenging part of execution: how to build the right platform team. And keep in mind that a thorough Platform 360 assessment, while time-intensive, will save you countless hours and resources by ensuring you're solving the right problems with the right solutions.

This post is brought to you with the help of Yaffa Abadi of Abadi Brands, a premier personal branding firm for leading executives and VCs.