Episode summary
Why Venture’s Best Opportunities Are Moving to the Edges
Swimming With Allocators
· · Hosts: Alexa Binns, Earnest Sweat · Guests: Kate Simpson, Nick Cassin
Summary
Kate Simpson traces her path from a history major at the UNC endowment to leading venture strategy at GEM, emphasizing how institutional investing was learned through repetition, mentorship, and a steep grounding in finance, accounting, due diligence, and reference work. She says Parish Capital taught her the mechanics of manager selection and the importance of raising capital before investing it, while TrueBridge deepened her understanding of venture as a platform business with secondaries, co-investments, and a compounding network effect.
At GEM, she says the firm is extending its OCIO base into adjacent fund and fund-of-funds offerings in venture, and that the role appealed because it combined leadership, alignment, and room to grow. Her core advice for building a venture program is to align stakeholders on goals and timeline, recognize the resource intensity of access, and be intentional about when to build internally versus with external partners.
She argues that venture is bifurcating into two attractive games: access to scaled platforms and discovery of emerging managers, while the crowded middle is increasingly difficult. The team’s process centers on source, pick, and win, with heavy attention to fund math, ownership, and the ability to produce at least one strong outcome that can return the fund.
Key takeaways
- Kate Simpson says GEM is focusing more time and capital on discovering the next generation of venture managers, not just gaining access to scaled platforms.
- She argues that venture investing is increasingly a barbell market, and that firms in the middle face the hardest competitive pressure.
- Kate says LP diligence starts with source, pick, and win, because sourcing quality networks is the foundation for everything else.
- She says fund math matters: target ownership, reserve strategy, and portfolio construction have to support a realistic path to a 3x or 5x fund return.
- Kate says building a venture program from scratch requires patience, stakeholder alignment, and enough internal resources to sustain relationship-building over multiple fund cycles.
Notable quotes
“I was a history major in college. Um so I was very green, very clean slate”
“I think anyone who is building any per you know person or organization um that may be building a venture program from from scratch”
“it requires um you know it's it's a bit it can be labor intensive right”
“we're trying to understand how they how they source how well they pick and how they win”
How the episode opens
Welcome to Swimming with Alligators, — The VC podcast from the LP perspective — With your hosts Alexa Bins — And Ernest. You ready? Let's dive in. Thank you, Kate, for being here. — You're welcome. Thanks for having me. When you started your career at the UNCC endowment, you mentioned that you didn't really know what to expect or what you were getting into. Um, and and what did that open up for you? just would love to sort of start at the beginning.
Sure. Um yeah, in hindsight it was such an amazing starting opportunity. Um but I was a bit naive at the time.
I didn't know what I was getting myself into, but um I mean I was a history major in college. Um so I was very green, very clean slate. Um the folks at UNCC management definitely took a chance on me, which which I appreciate.
But I I did have, you know, a deep and and steep learning curve. I remember taking um sort of the introductory finance and accounting classes at at UNC to supplement my training. I felt just like a sponge all the time.
Um but what a great opportunity to to learn from the people I was working with, learn from all the managers that we were meeting with. I definitely listened more than I spoke. Um but importantly I was really lucky to have a boss and a mentor who encouraged me to ask a lot of questions entertained those questions you know starting with the basics like what's an IRRa and how do you calculate an IRRa but um but you know it did open up sort of this world of institutional investing that um and a career path really that I really I didn't know existed at the time but I've really ended up liking and and enjoying
When you started um was there a certain uh asset class that you focused on?
From the episode’s captions: roughly the first two minutes, lightly cleaned. Keep watching on YouTube →
Topics
- venture investing
- private markets allocations
- fund-of-funds diligence
- private-fund secondaries
- continuation vehicles
Companies and tickers mentioned
- GEM
- Parish Capital
- Truebridge
- Sidley Austin LLP
Watch the episode
Watch “Why Venture’s Best Opportunities Are Moving to the Edges” on YouTube
Summary, takeaways and quote selection by Octagon. Quotes are short excerpts; the full conversation is in the episode.
More from Swimming With Allocators
Swimming With Allocators, this episode and its artwork belong to Earnest Sweat, Alexa Binns. Octagon is not affiliated with the show; this page is an independent summary.
