We’ve Been Thinking About IR All Wrong

People hear “investor relations” and picture one of two things. Either it is someone behind a keyboard producing quarterly reports, or it is someone on a plane heading to a nice dinner. Both are true, and both miss the point entirely.

IR is really two jobs stitched together, and every firm divides the stitching differently. There is the back-office role: handling requests, running the numbers, keeping portfolio updates accurate and on time. And there is the visible role, the one people assume is the whole job: travel, fundraising, meeting new people over good wine.

The visible part gets all the attention. It is the wrong part to fixate on.

Your best client is the one you already have

New capital matters, obviously. But the healthiest version of this business is built on repeat investors, the ones who have underwritten you before, watched you perform, and want back in. That kind of trust does not come from a great pitch. It comes from years of accurate reporting and honest conversation, which is why the unglamorous back-office work is not a warm-up act. It is the foundation everything else stands on.

Institutional LPs are not naive. Many of them sit inside large organizations and answer to their own committees, boards, and stakeholders.¹ They are doing a job, carrying information back to people who will ask hard questions, and they do not have patience for being managed instead of informed.² The number one thing you can offer them is transparency and respect. Not charm. Not polish. Transparency and respect.

Responsiveness is a form of respect

Here is what a good IR experience actually looks like in practice. An email comes in and gets confirmed within the hour. It gets passed internally and pushed forward. And if there is no real update yet, you send the update anyway: I have not forgotten about you, I do not have the answer yet, I am working on it.

That last one might be my favorite habit in the whole job. It costs almost nothing to send and it means everything to receive. People do not need constant good news. They need to feel seen, remembered, and heard.

Telling someone the truth, even when it costs you the meeting

Some of the best conversations I have had with LPs were the ones where the answer was no. An investor describes exactly what they are looking for, and it becomes clear partway through that it simply is not what we do. The instinct in a fundraising conversation is to stretch the story a little. Resist it.

A professor once told me that the most important thing you can do for someone is be honest when your product is not right for them. There is real integrity in saying: that makes sense, I understand why you want that, it is not what we offer today, but let’s stay in touch, and let me introduce you to someone who does. That kind of honesty builds more trust than a forced yes ever could, and it tends to be remembered longer too.

The helpers you never asked for

Some of the most meaningful relationships in this job come from LPs who never write a check. They report to a hierarchy, budgets shift, allocations freeze, and none of it is in their control. And yet some of them will still say: I am not allocating this year, I have been fighting for it internally and it is not happening, but I know people who are looking for exactly what you offer. Send me the deck. I am going to put this in front of my network myself.

That is not a favor. That is trust, expressed in the only currency some people have to give at that moment.

The dating problem

Too many firms treat capital raising like courtship and everything after like an afterthought. The early stage is all wine and good conversation. Then the raise closes, attention moves to the next meeting, and the relationship quietly turns into something colder: less responsive, less forthcoming, harder to reach.³ The LP did not sign up for that shift, and they usually notice it faster than firms think.

What most firms get wrong is not strategy. It is responsiveness, transparency, and forgetting where they started. LPs are investing on behalf of other people, which means your job is to make their job easier. Give them information that is accurate and timely, because they are the ones who have to carry it back to their own table.

The unglamorous, human parts

A lot of what actually builds a relationship has nothing to do with performance data. It is remembering that someone’s daughter just turned one, or that a colleague recently got married, or noticing a promotion on LinkedIn and sending a quick note. It is birthdays and milestones tracked somewhere other than memory, because memory alone will not hold it all.

Sometimes it is flowers when appropriate, or a handwritten thank-you note instead of another email. There is a prospective investor I have an ongoing chocolate chip cookie bake-off with, entirely unrelated to any deal, and I intend to keep bringing my batch every time I see her. None of this closes a fund. All of it builds the kind of relationship where honesty becomes the default setting.

Relationships over everything

Working in IR reinstalled something I already believed but had not tested at scale: relationships are everything. Not in a soft, greeting-card sense, but as an operating principle. When you actually build the relationship, you get honesty and openness that no amount of reporting can manufacture on its own.

At the end of it, this is people doing work with other people. The humanity of it is not a nice side effect. It is the whole point.