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.

It’ll Never Be Perfect, So Just Jump In [S3E8]