GPs rarely talk about fundraising while it’s happening. There’s an unspoken rule: you announce the close, you don’t narrate the process. While founders are pitching to VCs, VCs are doing the exact same thing to their own investors (LPs). I’m going to narrate our version of that.

We are raising FIRSTPICK II, our second Baltic-focused fund, in 2026. Our LP pipeline includes more than 500 potential investors, and we have already reached out to 400 so far. A strong group have already committed and are in the fund, others are still in process, and some have passed. Over 11 months, we have made 45 updates to our deck, major and minor.

The market hasn’t made it easier. European VC fundraising hit its worst annual totals in a decade in 2025. Q1 2026 shows signs of recovery, but only for established names: emerging managers are pacing 18.6% below 2025’s already weak total. A record 35.3% of funds that closed in Q1 raised less than their predecessor, the highest share in ten years. Getting a yes takes longer, and for emerging managers the window is narrowing. (Source: PitchBook, Q1 2026 European Venture Report)

But something unexpected came out of it. Being on the receiving end of capital allocation decisions made me a sharper investor. Here’s what I took away.

Lead the conversation with curiosity

The best LPs we spoke to didn’t arrive with a checklist. They came in asking real questions – why the Baltics specifically, why now, what we’d seen that others hadn’t. They wanted to understand the strategy, not just assess it. And they wanted to understand us as people.

Those were also the most useful conversations, regardless of whether they invested. When someone is genuinely curious about your thinking, you end up articulating things more clearly than you would otherwise. You find the gaps in your own argument. You understand your own thesis better.

I think about this every time I’m across the table from a founder now. The calls I remember are the ones where I went in curious, not evaluating. Where the founder and I figured something out together. A founder who lights up when you push them on the why is showing you something real. That doesn’t happen when you’re running through a checklist.

Look at the larger picture instead of zooming in

One pattern I kept running into: LPs drilling into a specific metric and losing the thread of the argument.

A common one for us: why does a Baltic fund have an unequal spread of investments across Lithuania, Latvia, and Estonia? On the surface it looks like a gap. But the question isn’t about the distribution. The question is whether the strategy is intentional and whether it has produced results. Zoom out, not in.

The LPs who understood our thesis fastest were the ones who asked about our thinking, not just our data. The same logic applies when I’m the one evaluating a company. A single sharp insight from a founder about why their market is broken tells me more than a polished slide on TAM. Details matter when they’re connected to something bigger. When they’re not, they’re just noise.

Never ghost

Being on the receiving end of silence taught me something I already knew but hadn’t fully felt. Silence is not neutral. It costs the other person time and energy they could have spent elsewhere.

The worst experience I had in this process involved the same person across three different events. Each time: greetings, smiles, promises to follow up and send information. Each time, nothing came. After three separate attempts to reach them, I stopped trying.

A clear “no, this isn’t for us” takes thirty seconds and closes the loop. It lets the other person move on and spend their time on things that have a real chance. Staying silent doesn’t protect anyone, it just wastes their time.

I came back from every one of those experiences and thought about our own pipeline. How we handle rejections. Whether we’re giving founders enough clarity to know where they stand. A no with a reason is more useful than six weeks of silence. For founders, it tells them who their right investor is. That loop only works if you close it.

Don’t make an eight-year decision in a thirty-minute call

Some days I don’t have it. My pitch is flat, I’m tired, I repeat myself without noticing.

There’s a version of me who showed up to some of these LP conversations after a hard week and didn’t represent what we’ve built. I know this. I’ve seen it in the feedback.

The calls that moved furthest were almost always the ones where the LP pushed for a second conversation without treating the first one as the final verdict. Because a VC relationship lasts eight to ten years. A first call is one data point, usually caught at an arbitrary moment in both people’s schedules.

I think about this constantly now when I’m evaluating founders. A bad first call is a reason to ask a better question, not close the file. The founders who surprised me most came back with more clarity than they had the first time, not because they changed their pitch, but because they’d kept building in the meantime.

Give feedback on why you’re not investing

The rejections that helped me most were the specific ones. “Baltic opportunity wasn’t clear” is something I can actually use. When LPs told us that, we went back and reworked the deck around what makes the Baltics win, and that feedback shaped the pitch more than most of the yes calls did. “We’re not the right fit” does none of that.

This goes both ways. When we pass on a founder, the reason matters. It tells them what kind of companies we’re excited to back and what kind of investor we are. Some of the most useful conversations we’ve had about improving how we work came out of rejection calls where a founder pushed back, and that only happens when you give them something real to respond to.

So if you’re not investing, say why. The person on the other side is making the same calculation you are, and they deserve the same quality of thinking you’d want if the roles were reversed.

Most VCs never run this experiment. We talk to founders every day about what makes a good pitch, a good story, a good relationship with an investor, but we rarely test our own advice from the other side of the table.

This process did exactly that. It showed me in real time what actually lands: curiosity over checklists, specificity over politeness, a clear no over a slow fade. Not as theory, but as something I felt every time I was on the receiving end of it.

I’m already a different investor than I was 11 months and 45 deck versions ago, and I suspect I’ll keep changing with every new LP conversation.

Andra Bagdonaitė is General Partner at FIRSTPICK, a first-check venture capital fund backing Baltic founders at inception and pre-seed. FIRSTPICK is a generalist early-stage investor with a strong focus on AI-first software, typically writing first checks of €100K–€500K and backing founders with follow-on capital up to €1M. Beyond capital, portfolio companies gain access to a platform of a 250+ founder community, experienced operators, and practical early-stage know-how.