All Things Fundraising

In Episode 46 of the Emerging Manager Growth Show, Gui Costin is joined by Dakota President Rob Robertson to break down how emerging managers can do more with less. They cover the fundamentals: running a consistent quarterly webinar, structuring cold outreach to keep five cities active on the calendar, and warming up cold emails through research. They also discuss lesser-used channels like bank platforms and funds of funds, why RIAs and family offices should be the first call, and how pairing a CRM with AI-generated meeting notes creates outsized leverage. They close with tips on building a personal brand on LinkedIn.

Welcome to the Dakota Events Playbook — a new series on how Dakota builds the in-person events (Dakota Cocktails, Dakota Conferences, and Data Summits) that drive real relationships with investors and allocators.

In this first episode, Dakota's two in-house events experts, Catherine and Dominique, break down the roadblocks that keep firms from ever getting an event off the ground:

• Answering "who, what, when, where, and why" before anything else
• Why too many opinions and approval layers kill momentum
• Starting small instead of chasing a big vision from day one
• Setting a per-head budget that creates freedom, not restriction
• Deciding who from the team actually attends
• Why no event is perfect — and how a strong team handles it when things go wrong

Practical, hard-won lessons from a team that's run 30+ events a year for five years running.

We cover job changes across the endowment, pension, and family office space, including moves at Brandeis University Endowment, Greater Manchester Pension Fund, and Georgia Tech Foundation. On the RIA/M&A front, we highlight Wealth Enhancement's acquisition of Cloud Investments, an advisor duo's move from Cetera to LPL, and a new independent RIA launch in Durham, NC. We also share updates on commitments from the Metropolitan Government of Nashville & Davidson County, the Contra Costa County Employees' Retirement Association, and the District of Columbia Retirement Board. On the search front, we highlight activity from the Marin County Employees Retirement Association, the Ohio Bureau of Workers' Compensation, and the Illinois Police Officers Pension Fund. We also cover fundraising from KKR, HiDream.ai, and Ábaco Technologies — plus a reminder to register for our next Dakota Cocktails event.

We cover new RIA launches as well as RIA M&A activity, including OneDigital's acquisition of Rosenthal Wealth Management Group and LPL's full acquisition of Good Life Advisors, plus Moors & Cabot's addition of the Coker & Palmer team. We also share updates on commitments from the Los Angeles City Employees' Retirement System, the Delaware Public Employees' Retirement System, and the San Diego County Employees Retirement Association. On the search front, we highlight activity from the Los Angeles City Employees' Retirement System, the Dallas Police & Fire Pension System, and the Medford Contributory Retirement System. We also cover fundraising from Hines, Ant International, and Augustus — plus a reminder to register for our next Dakota Cocktails event.

In this episode of Dakota Insights, Chris and Alex unpack GP stakes investing — buying minority equity interests in the management companies that run alternative asset funds, rather than in the funds themselves, and what that means for both allocators and fund managers.

They cover how a typical deal is structured (10–30% stakes, priced at 10–15x management company EBITDA), the market's evolution from Petershill and Dyal's early days through Blue Owl's rise to a $75 billion platform, and why the center of gravity has shifted decisively toward middle-market managers since 2022. They walk through why GPs actually sell — founder liquidity, succession planning, platform capitalization — and why LPs have piled in, including a performance comparison where Blue Owl's GP Stakes Fund III posted a 3.00x net MoIC and 21.6% net IRR with no J-curve, beating traditional PE benchmarks.

They also dig into the wealth channel's first entry into the strategy through semi-liquid and tokenized evergreen vehicles, the adjacent GP seeding strategy and where the line between the two has blurred, and the live open question hanging over the market: how 2016–2020 vintage put rights will resolve as they begin to vest for the first time.

Master sales with four game-changing principles: Focus on what matters, target the right people, craft the perfect pitch, and follow up like a pro. Packed with actionable tips, this guide helps you turn meetings into deals—fast! 💼🔥

In this episode of the Dakota Insights Manager Interview Series, hosts Chris LeRoy and Alex DeMarco sit down with Stephen Otter, Managing Director and Global Head of Private Markets Royalties at Partners Group. Otter traces his career from energy M&A in London to energy royalties in Switzerland, before joining the Partners Group founders' family office in 2021 to build a cross-sector royalties strategy from scratch. In early 2024, that strategy was formally adopted as Partners Group's fifth asset class — the first new asset class the firm has launched in nearly 20 years — and has since grown to $2 billion AUM.

Otter opens with a foundational explanation of what a royalty actually is: a contractual percentage of revenue generated from day-to-day consumption of assets the investor owns but does not operate. Rather than funding costs or managing operations, royalty investors hold the underlying IP — copyrights, patents, license agreements, land title, or subsurface rights — and receive revenue participation from a third-party operator. Because they bear no cost exposure, royalty investors are insulated from cost inflation and benefit directly when pricing increases.

What distinguishes Partners Group's approach is its cross-sector construction. Every prior royalty strategy focused on a single sector — music, healthcare, or energy. Partners Group is the only private markets manager to treat royalties as a standalone asset class spanning three core sectors: healthcare and life sciences (post-FDA approved products only), entertainment (music, film and TV, video gaming, books, YouTube, brands, and sports), and energy transition (US natural gas, green metals, carbon, and water). Because there is no meaningful correlation between a music royalty, a pharmaceutical royalty, and a gas royalty, the blended portfolio carries very low correlation to equities, credit, or infrastructure.

The strategy deploys capital through three transaction types: buying existing royalty streams, lending against royalties secured by the revenue stream, and creating new royalties by providing upfront capital in exchange for a negotiated revenue share. On a trailing twelve-month basis, the split has been approximately 40–45% buying, 30–35% lending, and 10–15% creation. Each transaction type carries a different risk-return profile, and the combination helps further stabilize portfolio-level outcomes.

Return targets are built on a conservative underwriting discipline: every investment must generate low-to-mid-teen returns on a buy-and-hold basis, with exits priced as upside only. The strategy targets net returns of 8–10% with a 4–6% annual yield distribution. In seven years of operation, the portfolio has recorded only two negative quarters. Three recent exits have come in at IRRs ranging from approximately 25% to over 40%.

Otter closes by making the case for the evergreen structure as the natural home for royalties. Closed-ended funds force premature sales; listed structures reintroduce public equity correlation. An evergreen vehicle matches the long-dated duration of royalty assets, supports the diversification required across 20–30 investments per year, and allows consistent yield distribution without dependence on exit timing — precisely the characteristics that make royalties a compelling portfolio stabilizer.

In Episode 45 of the Emerging Manager Growth Show, Gui Costin and Tim Dolan focus on family offices as an increasingly accessible channel for emerging managers. They trace the channel's growth to 15 years of private equity, private credit, and alternatives expansion, which has produced a wave of first-generation family offices run more like RIAs, actively seeking deal flow and new managers. Gui and Tim also walk through Dakota's core operating model: city scheduling against RIAs and family offices, the quarterly webinar as free brand-building, and CRM discipline powered by Claude for meeting notes. A key insight: family offices don't compete for capital, making the channel unusually referral-friendly for consistent managers.

We cover new RIA launches as well as RIA breakaways, including the departure of Michael "Mike" Ellis from Sowell Management to launch Ellis Wealth Advisors, and Apella Wealth's split from Symmetry Partners following an ownership change. We also share updates on commitments from the Los Angeles Water & Power Employees' Retirement Plan and the Texas County & District Retirement System. On the search front, we highlight activity from the Denver Employees Retirement Plan and South Korea's National Pension Service. We also cover fundraising from CVC Capital Partners, Proxima Fusion, and Csquare — plus a reminder to register for our next Dakota Cocktails event.

In this episode of the Dakota Insights Interview Series, hosts Chris Leroy and Alex DeMarco sit down with Marius Vigantis and Richard Banks, founding partners of Soling Partners, a boutique advisory firm focused exclusively on the Middle East. Together, Marius and Richard bring over 50 years of combined experience in the region, and they walk through everything a fund manager needs to know before engaging the Gulf — from how to think about the allocator landscape to the patience and partnership required to succeed.

Marius founded Soling in 2015 after a decade at Mubadala, Abu Dhabi's sovereign wealth fund, and three years with HH Mohammed bin Rashid's Executive Office in Dubai. Richard joined in 2016, bringing deep expertise in financial communications and business development across MENA built over 30 years. Today, Soling advises 15 clients managing roughly $4 trillion in assets and has helped facilitate approximately $1.92 billion in capital out of the region.

The conversation opens with a framework that any manager approaching the Middle East should internalize: the four engagement quadrants. These range from passive sovereigns investing into fund structures, to tailoring sovereigns like ADIA, Mubadala, and QIA that actively shape their capital partnerships, to pensions and family offices seeking operational relationships, to regional aggregator platforms that syndicate capital from a long tail of families. Understanding which quadrant a prospective allocator sits in is essential before the first conversation.

From there, Marius and Richard make clear that the entire region operates on two foundational principles: partnership and patience. The GCC is a verbal, consensus-driven culture where trust is built through sustained dialogue over time — not a transactional market where a pitch deck closes a deal. The baseline engagement arc is two years, with two to three in-person visits required just to establish a relationship. Managers who treat the region as a quick capital raise and disappear when results don't come immediately risk reputational damage that is hard to undo.

On the current environment, Richard notes that recent geopolitical events have created near-term drag — allocators who came into the year bullish are now largely in a holding pattern through the summer. Soling's advice to clients is to stay close through relationship management and be ready to re-engage aggressively in the autumn. The disruption is tactical, not structural.

The discussion also covers what separates managers who crack the GCC from those who don't. The answer, consistently, is platform-level engagement. Managers who present their full suite of capabilities and align those capabilities with the region's economic diversification priorities — rather than leading with a single product — are the ones building real, lasting partnerships. Blue Owl, Blackstone, Apollo, and Brookfield are all cited as firms that have done this well.

Finally, Marius and Richard address co-investment and GP stakes, now expected across virtually the entire allocator spectrum, and break down the nuances of Abu Dhabi, Riyadh, Doha, and Kuwait as distinct markets each requiring a tailored approach.