Pale Blue Dot: Tips & Tricks to Raise your 1st Climate Fund with Hampus Jakobsson

Hampus Jakobsson is a General Partner at Pale Blue Dot, a Swedish seed-stage ClimateTech fund investing in startups that reduce and reverse the effects of climate change.

He was previously at BlueYard Capital, before that an angel with >100 angel investments. And before that, a serial founder.

This is an EPIC conversation between two European Climate Tech fund managers. Hampus shares a TON of insights and opinionated views. You don’t want to miss out! 

• Fundraising for a fund vs fundraising for a startup
• How to do fundraising the right way
• Why smaller funds are better than large ones
• How they run investment decisions internally and invest when they fall in love with the founders

Listen and Learn

• Pale Blue Dot’s fund structure, scope and geography
• The reasons why fundraising wasn’t actually that painful for them
• The importance of filtering out the wrong LPs up front 
• Why emerging Climate fund managers need to specialize today to raise their fund
• How to steal deals from bigger brands generalist funds 
• Why fund managers should actually ‘reverse pitch’ entrepreneurs to convince them they are good investors
• How they’ve designed an entire investment process around PASSION, PRIDE and LOVE
• The surprising simplicity of their investment decision process (with a voting scale: Hell Yes, Yes, No, Hell No) and the absence of Investment Committee
• Great founders have some super power and extreme skills to sell to anybody or build anything that makes it hard to say no
• Why Hampus thinks it’s way nicer to raise for a fund than to raise for a startup
• The gold question to help investors commit:  ‘What can I do to help you decide?”
• The #1 tip to raise a fund: start small and show a track record as a fund manager
• The reason why emerging fund managers outperform
• Your fund size is your strategy and it’s important not to balloon your fund size
• Pale Blue’s ideal portfolio construction: 30 deals with 10% shareholding
• How Pale Blue opens up their entire DD process to founders via a Notion Page
• Why they originally intended to do a €40m fund and created two scenarios: €40m or €80m funds to test the market
• WHEN and HOW to do a fund announcement in the media
• Never announce when you’re not ready to absorb inbound (investors, media, job seekers, customers)
•  Main advice to emerging fund managers: figure out your unique angles (niche, vertical, geography, belief system) and set up a hyper local or hyper verticalized fund
• Why fund managers should NOT be capital allocators and instead people that care about people and businesses

Show Links

• Pale Blue Dot portfolio companies’ jobs https://paleblue.vc/jobs 
• Connect with Hampus on Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hampusjakobsson
• Causal App for portfolio modeling https://causal.app 

Final Note

Make sure to subscribe to our newsletter to get notified when we publish Part 2. If you liked Part 1, you will LOVE Part 2 !

Another epic conversation to dig into Hampus’ macro views on how to crack this climate fight and how we should deviate from a pure capitalistic system.