--- title: "VC Platform and Value Creation Takeaways for Funds | Findem" description: "Takeaways from London's UK Value Creation Exchange and Amsterdam's VC Platform European Summit on how funds help founders hire and put their networks to work." url: "https://www.findem.ai/blog/funds-value-creation-vc-platform-takeaways" --- # Why the next era of company building runs through the fund ← Back to blog Manish Nageet VP and GM, Funds and Networks October 30, 2026 The fund is becoming part of the company-building team. Capital still matters, but the firms pulling ahead now treat their network and their talent bench as something they deliver to founders. I spent two weeks this October in rooms full of people whose job starts after the check clears. On October 8, I was in London with operating partners and value creation leaders at Private Capital Global's [UK Value Creation Exchange](https://privatecapitalglobal.zohobackstage.com/2026LondonOperatingPartnerValueCreationSummit). A week later, I was in Amsterdam with venture platform leaders from across Europe at the [VC Platform European Summit](https://www.vcplatform.com/europeansummit). PE and VC came at it from different angles and landed in the same place. Right now, the most valuable thing a fund can give a founder is people: the next key hire, and a warm intro to someone who has already solved the problem in front of them. Here's my recap of both rooms, and what I'd change about how funds spend their time. At the Findem stand, UK Value Creation Exchange, London. ## London: Value creation is a people problem The UK Value Creation Exchange is an invitation-only room of senior operating partners, value creation leads, and portfolio executives. The agenda moved across finance, technology, AI, and human capital. The conversations kept coming back to human capital. That shift is the one I'd underline. A few years ago, people work sat in the back half of a value creation plan, behind pricing and procurement. In London it was at the front. Operating partners want [the leadership call](https://www.findem.ai/blog/pe-vc-every-deal-executive-search) made early in the hold period, because a portfolio company with the wrong CFO or a thin sales bench can't execute the rest of the plan. AI came up in nearly every conversation, framed as an operating problem. Which roles change, and who can lead a company that runs this way? A playbook won't answer the second question. You need to know who's out there, and you need someone in your network who has worked with them. ## Amsterdam: Platform is growing up The VC Platform European Summit ran October 15 and 16 at Capital C in Amsterdam. It's members-only, for people who work full-time on platform at venture firms, and it still hit capacity, with a waitlist. The agenda showed [where platform is heading](https://www.findem.ai/blog/vc-platform-summit-ai-takeaways). Lucia Cerchlan of Backed VC opened with "From AI Experiments to an Agentic Fund." Keji Mustapha (Partech), Jane Reddin (AlbionVC), and Carolina Küng (Bessemer Venture Partners) followed with a panel on what's now expected of platform teams as AI changes the work. Two sessions went straight at how companies staff up. Frankie Greenwell (EQT) spoke on how AI is changing the leadership teams companies need. Michelle Coventry (Creandum) and Elena Pantazi (Northzone) looked at how it's reshaping portfolio org structure. Dale Chang (Scale Venture Partners) turned the same question on funds themselves: what changes when platform becomes a team instead of one person. The thread I kept pulling on was intelligence. Keji Mustapha's "From Events to Intelligence" and Marianne Bulger's (True Search) "Your Network Needs Maintenance" made the same case from two directions: a network is an asset, and it decays when nobody keeps it current. I spent most of my time in the talent breakout led by Leah Sutton (Balderton Capital) and Myron Lising (Sequoia). The questions were practical. How do you help a Series A founder hire a first VP of Sales without a search fee that eats into the round? And how do you get the right candidates in front of dozens of portfolio companies at once, then show your partners it worked? ## Funds are shaping how startups build teams Founders are building smaller teams than they did five years ago, so each hire carries more weight. In a lean company, the first ten hires decide most of what it can become. A wrong leadership hire can cost a year. That raises the stakes for the fund. At seed or Series A, most founders don't have a recruiting team. They have their own network, which runs out fast, and a board that expects the plan to hold. The fund usually has the wider view of the market and the deeper bench of relationships. The firms I spoke with are turning that view into something founders use every week. It starts with distribution. A [portfolio job board](https://www.findem.ai/products/portfolio-job-boards) puts every open role in front of candidates already drawn to the fund's brand, so one audience serves the whole portfolio. The hires that shape a company still need a person on them. [VC/PE talent teams](https://www.findem.ai/solutions/vc-pe-talent) are putting their hours into executive and critical searches, and using market data to tell a founder what a role really takes before the search starts. Routine hires are moving to self-serve. With [ReadySlate Lite](https://www.findem.ai/studio/startups), a founder pastes a job posting, reviews the requirements the agent drafts, and picks a shortlist. The agent reaches out from the founder's own mailbox and runs a five-minute AI voice screen. The founder decides who moves forward. Put together, the fund becomes talent infrastructure for its portfolio. Founders keep the hiring decisions. The fund gives them reach and warm paths they couldn't build on their own. ## Where funds should spend their time Most platform teams are a handful of people supporting dozens of companies, and their scarcest resource is hours. The best operators in both cities had a clear rule for spending them: do the work only the fund can do, and systematize the rest. The work only the fund can do is the network: partners, advisors, operators, alumni, LPs, and co-investors who take a call because the fund asked. It's the fund's real edge, and at most firms nobody can see it. It lives in partners' inboxes, a few spreadsheets, and the memory of whoever has been there longest. Intros get lost in email, and nobody can say which relationships produced a hire or a customer. The funds getting this right start by making the network visible. [Network Intelligence](https://www.findem.ai/products/network-intelligence) maps who the firm knows across the whole team. When a founder asks for a CFO or a first enterprise customer, the platform team can find warm paths quickly instead of polling partners on Slack for a week. Then they keep it current. People change jobs and relationships go cold, so a network mapped last year is already partly wrong. Enriched, regularly refreshed data is what keeps the map usable. They also count what the network produced. Events and newsletters are easy to count. Intros that turned into hires, deals, and revenue are what partners and LPs ask about. Network-powered teams make [40x more intros](https://www.findem.ai/solutions/vc-pe-platform), and a fund that can trace an intro to an outcome has a much stronger platform story to tell. That's where the VC/PE platform or value creation role is heading. The fund's relationship graph gets run as an operating asset, with AI doing the mapping and people making the calls. Talking warm intros and portfolio insights with the Private Capital Global team at the Findem stand in London. ## Start with your last five founder requests Capital gets a fund into the deal. People are what founders remember it for. In London, that looked like operating partners making the leadership call early in the hold. In Amsterdam, it looked like platform teams moving from events to intelligence. If you run platform or talent at a fund, pull up the last five hiring or intro requests your founders sent you. For each one, note how long it took to find a warm path, and whether you know what happened after the intro. If you can't answer the second question for most of them, your network is doing work you can't see. That's the first thing to fix. See how Findem supports [VC/PE platform teams](https://www.findem.ai/solutions/vc-pe-platform) and [VC/PE talent teams](https://www.findem.ai/solutions/vc-pe-talent), or send your founders to [ReadySlate Lite](https://studio.findem.ai/recruiting/new) for their next hire. I'm always glad to compare notes. Thank you to the Private Capital Global and VC Platform teams for two excellent events, and to everyone who shared a coffee or a hard question. ## Recommended next reads November 2, 2026 ### [Recruiting metrics: 15 KPIs to track, with formulas](https://www.findem.ai/blog/recruiting-metrics) Austin Belisle October 28, 2026 ### [How to hire without a recruiter or an ATS](https://www.findem.ai/blog/how-to-hire-without-a-recruiter) Austin Belisle October 28, 2026 ### [Fetcher alternatives after the shutdown (2026)](https://www.findem.ai/blog/fetcher-alternatives) Austin Belisle