How do you design a VC AGM that creates value for LPs, founders and the portfolio?

Design the AGM around meetings, not slides. Keep the fund update short and backed by data, put founders on stage to tell their own stories, and spend most of the day on matched LP-founder and founder-founder conversations. The platform team owns the prep: the matching, the portfolio data and the follow-up afterward.

The AGM is the event platform teams dread most and the one partners care about most. It's the one day a year your LPs, your founders and your partners are in the same room. And most firms spend it in a dark ballroom watching a 60-slide deck that could have been an email.

I get why. The AGM started as a reporting obligation, and the format never caught up. But the people in that room flew in. They're giving you a full day. If the main thing they take home is a slide about fund performance they'd already seen in the quarterly letter, you wasted the rarest thing you have: everyone, in person, at once.

Start with what each group needs from the day

Before you touch the agenda, write down what each audience should leave with. It sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it, and that's why the day ends up built for the partners presenting rather than the people listening.

Notice that LPs show up twice. A lot of your LPs aren't only LPs. A family office might also own operating businesses. A corporate LP has buyers inside it. A fund-of-funds manager knows dozens of other GPs who might lead a portfolio company's next round. The AGM is the one day you can use all of that.

Keep the fund update short and backed by data

Give the fund update 20 to 30 minutes, not two hours. LPs already got the numbers in the quarterly letter. What they want in the room is the partners' read on those numbers: what's working, what isn't, and what you're changing.

The platform or IR team usually builds this section, and the prep is where the time goes. Someone pulls the latest metrics from 30 portfolio companies, reconciles them with what the fund admin has, and turns it into slides the night before. If your data lives in a dozen inboxes and decks, the AGM is when that hurts most.

So prep from clean data, and make every number traceable. If an LP asks "where does that ARR figure come from?", the answer should be a source document and a date, not a shrug. A good fund update has three parts:

1. Portfolio momentum. A one-page view of which companies are growing, which raised, which are struggling. Honest about the struggles.
2. What we learned. Two or three decisions the partners would make differently, and why.
3. What's next. The strategy for the next 12 months in plain language.

This is the part Cura helps with. It pulls portfolio signal from board decks, email, LinkedIn, X and news into one feed, extracts metrics from founder replies and documents, and drafts the LP update so your team reviews instead of retyping. The same clean data feeds the AGM deck. The LP update guide covers the format.

Put founders on stage

A founder telling the story of how the firm helped is worth ten partner slides saying the same thing. LPs hear a VC describe its value-add every quarter. They rarely hear it from the founder, unprompted, in their own words.

Pick three or four founders. Mix them on purpose:

• One company that's clearly working.
• One that went through something hard with you, like a down round, a pivot or a co-founder split. LPs trust these stories most, because every LP knows most companies hit a wall.
• One early company the LPs haven't heard of yet.

Give each founder 10 minutes and a light brief: "Tell them what you're building, the hardest thing in the last year, and where we were useful or weren't." Don't script them. If a founder says "the firm wasn't much help on hiring," that's fine. It makes the rest of what they say believable.

Then thank them properly. Founders are giving up a working day for your fundraise. Pay for travel, put them in the 1:1 schedule with the LPs most useful to them, and tell them afterward what came of it.

Book the meetings weeks ahead

This is where the value is, and it's almost all prep. The matching that makes any event work (covered in designing VC events with lasting impact) matters even more at an AGM, because the guest list is so unusual.

Six weeks out, build a simple matching sheet:

• For each LP: sectors they care about, whether they co-invest, whether they or their network buy software, and who they asked about last year.
• For each founder: their current ask. More customers, a next-round lead, a senior hire, a specific intro.

Then propose matches by email, double opt-in. Something like this:

Hi there, one of our LPs runs a logistics business with a large warehouse network and asked about supply chain tools at last year's AGM. Would a 20-minute slot with them on the 14th be useful? Happy to set it up if so.

Book 20-minute slots in a quiet room, not on the main floor. Aim for every founder to have three to five meetings and every LP who wants one to have at least two. Fewer, better matches beat a crowded schedule.

A sample agenda

Here's an illustrative one-day shape. Adjust the times and swap sessions to fit your fund.

The two booked-meeting blocks and the seated meals are where most of the outcomes come from. Protect them when the partners want to add another presentation.

Run the follow-up like a pipeline

Most of the AGM's value appears after everyone flies home, and most firms drop it. Within 48 hours, send each founder a short note listing who they met and any promised next steps. Send each LP a recap of the companies they met with one line on each, plus a link to the founders' sessions.

Then track it. Every match becomes a row: who met, what was promised, what happened at 30 days and at 90 days. LPs who ask follow-up questions or want to meet a founder again are showing real intent, the same conviction signals that matter in LP pipeline health. Pass those straight to the partner who owns that relationship.

What should an AGM agenda include beyond fund updates?

Beyond the fund update, include founder-led sessions, small topic tables where LPs hear directly from operators, one-on-one meetings booked in advance, and a session where partners share how they see the market. Leave real unscheduled time too, because the hallway is where a lot of the value happens.

A few other formats work well if you have room:

• A founder panel on one shared problem, such as selling to enterprises in a tight budget year. LPs learn how the portfolio thinks, and founders learn from each other.
• A portfolio walk. Short demos at tables, so LPs can move around and talk to the founders directly.
• A closed-door LP session with the partners, no founders, no slides. LPs ask the questions they wouldn't ask in a room full of other people.

How do you measure whether an AGM worked?

Measure what happened after it, not attendance or the survey score. Count the meetings booked, the intros made, the LPs who asked for a follow-up, the co-investment or re-up conversations started, and the founder asks that got answered. Check the count again at 30 and 90 days, because most outcomes show up later.

Write the targets down before the day, so you're not grading yourself after. Say you expect 40 booked meetings and want a quarter of them to lead to a second conversation. At 90 days, report how many did, and pull out two or three stories: the LP who became a customer, the founder who met their next-round lead. Those stories also go into the value-add record you'll use in the next fundraise, and how LPs evaluate a firm's platform covers why that record matters. The survey can still go out. Just don't let "4.6 out of 5" stand in for what the day actually produced.