Seven Things People Get Wrong About AGMs

It’s almost that time of year again: AGM season. The magical stretch of the calendar when investment firms gather their LPs into a hotel ballroom and inundate them with how amazing the firm is and how smart the LPs were to give them money. Everyone has to do it, and everyone treats it like a chore: the firms putting it on and the LPs attending.

It doesn’t have to be that way. Here are seven things people get wrong about AGMs, and how to do them better.

1. “Location doesn’t matter.”

Wrong. The physical space dictates how people feel and how they interact, which means you need to be intentional about how you want your guests to feel while they’re there and, more importantly, how they feel when they leave. Hotel ballrooms are the default for a reason: LPs fly in, stay upstairs, walk down to a room where the AV is already rigged, then walk to the hotel bar. Simple. Here is the thing, a hotel ballroom is not meaningfully cheaper than a venue with an actual point of view. Your LPs attend a dozen of these a year, and they blur together: the same carpet, the same uplighting, the same chicken. Psychologists have a name for what cuts through: the Von Restorff effect. It’s a finding that’s held up since 1933. When everything in a set is similar, the one distinctive item is the one people remember. Twelve ballrooms and one converted recording studio: your LPs remember the recording studio. For a fund, being remembered is the whole game.

2. Two hours of on-stage content.

Please don’t. Your AGM is your opportunity to tell the story of the firm and the fund. And in venture, that story has to carry you a long way. The gap between raising your first fund and real results coming in can run ten years or more. What gets you from Fund I to Fund II before you’ve returned capital? Early traction, yes. But how you tell that story matters just as much. Keep it moving. The psychologist Nelson Cowan’s research on working memory puts the real number of things a person can hold onto at about four. Four. Not forty slides. Bash your guests over the head with two hours of presentations and you don’t get retention, you get a coin flip on which four things they walk out with. Choose the four for them. I craft on-stage content like a rock show: short bursts of energy, the most critical material hitting mid-set, and an opening that hooks the audience into staying by alluding to a big reveal at the end.

3. “We’ll just run it ourselves.”

Live productions have a thousand moving parts that no one notices when everything goes right. The moment anyone notices is the moment one of them doesn’t. Pay for professional production management. You want a professional at the soundboard and the video switcher, professional lighting, and one person whose only job is coordinating transitions and getting your speakers mic’d, so that people remember what you said, not the ten minutes you spent fighting your slides. There’s a second reason, and it’s the first rule of throwing any good party: better mediocre pizza from a happy host than fabulous hors d’oeuvres from a frazzled one. A GP sweating the clicker reads, to an LP, exactly like a fund sweating the portfolio. Buy your own calm.

4. “Let’s invite everyone.”

The makeup of the room matters, because the real AGM happens after the presentations, around the food and the drinks, when your LP base starts cross-pollinating. Read that again: the real AGM is the mingling. Your guests will compare notes, so be intentional about who’s comparing them. The LPs of Fund I aren’t automatically the room you want assembled right before you raise Fund III. Gather the people who are most excited about the fund, and seat your prospects among them. The LPs who’ve soured on you or your strategy? They can get a video of the presentations afterward. And once you’ve built the right room, don’t fight the mingle: fewer chairs, longer breaks, food on one side of the room and drinks on the other, so everyone has an excuse to cross the floor and land in a new conversation.

5. Burying the opening and the ending.

The psychologist Daniel Kahneman found that people don’t judge an experience by averaging the whole thing. They judge it by its most intense moment and by how it ends, and they largely forget the duration in between. He called it the peak-end rule. Now look at the standard AGM through that lens: it opens with the wifi password, the fire exits, and the compliance slide, and it closes with a thank-you list and directions to the bar. The two moments doing almost all the work in your LPs’ memory, spent on logistics. Instead: open cold, the way a film does. A founder on screen, a number that shouldn’t be possible, the question the whole day will answer. Build one deliberate peak into the program. And land the ending on the reveal you promised in your opening. Send people out with the one sentence you want them repeating to their investment committee, and then to the bar. The housekeeping can live on a card at every seat.

6. Letting newcomers fend for themselves.

Somewhere at your AGM, a prospective LP is standing alone at the break, deciding what your fund is like. Hosts assume that leaving guests alone means guests will be left alone; in reality they’re left to one another, and to the loudest guy in the room. Hosting is a job, not a vibe. Assign every prospect a partner or an enthusiastic Fund I LP as their host for the day. Make the introductions yourself. The five minutes a GP spends walking a newcomer into the right conversation will outperform any slide in the deck.

7. Letting it all evaporate at 5 p.m.

This is the one that kills me as a filmmaker. Your AGM is the one day a year your fund’s entire story is physically in the room: the partners, the founders, the believers, the momentum. Most funds let all of it walk out the door. Film it properly (not a locked-off camera pointed at slides; that’s surveillance footage, not storytelling) and the AGM stops being a day and becomes an asset: the video that goes to LPs who couldn’t attend, the proof points for the prospects you’re courting, the raw material for a year of updates, the first artifact of your next raise. The AGM is a chore only if it dies at cocktail hour. Captured well, it compounds.

That’s the real reframe. An AGM isn’t a reporting obligation. It’s the highest-leverage storytelling day on your fund’s calendar. And how you tell your story influences the capital you raise.