What family offices ask that funds do not
Single-family capital underwrites differently from a fund. The questions change, the timeline changes, and materials built for a partnership meeting can land badly.
A different mandate
A venture fund is deploying someone else's capital against a fund life and a portfolio construction model. It needs a plausible path to a fund-returning outcome and it needs that path within the fund's window.
A family office is often deploying its own capital with no fixed horizon. It can accept a slower outcome and a smaller multiple, and it will underwrite downside more carefully than a fund does, because there is no portfolio to average the loss into.
The questions that appear
How does this business survive if the next round does not happen. Funds ask this occasionally. Family offices ask it first.
What is the cash conversion, and when. A path to profitability that a fund treats as optional is frequently the central question for family capital.
Who else is in, and on what terms. Structure preferences vary widely across single-family capital, and a founder who has only prepared for a standard priced round can be caught out.
What is the operating relationship. Many family offices bring commercial access in their own industry and want to know whether the company can use it.
How this changes preparation
The model needs a downside case that is genuinely modelled rather than a percentage haircut on the base case. The cap table needs to show what the proposed structure costs at exit under several outcomes.
The appendix carries more weight, because the reader is often an individual rather than a partnership and will work through detail alone rather than in a meeting.