Raising the Brand with Yasmine Lacaillade, Founder & Managing Partner at Sinefine
Welcome to Private Equity Marketeer’s Raising the Brand, where we delve into the stories and strategies behind the leading brand builders & capital raisers in private markets. In this series, we highlight the creative minds and strategic thinkers who are redefining how private market firms connect with their audiences, build trust, and tell their stories.
This week we’re joined by Yasmine Lacaillade, Founder & Managing Partner at Sinefine. Sinefine connects limited partners with best-in-class venture firms. Their core focus is on firms with women in leadership roles delivering superior returns.
Prior to founding Sinefine, Yasmine was the Chief Operating Officer at Drive Capital, launched by two Sequoia partners in 2013. She helped build Drive from an early stage venture fund into a multi-billion dollar private equity platform. Yasmine led key strategic operating decisions and investments and managed Drive’s limited partner relationships. She also built her own investment track record with the emerging manager scout program she launched at the firm.
Prior to Drive, Yasmine spent four years at TPG-Axon, a global multi-strategy hedge fund anchored by TPG, leading European marketing and investor relations. She started her financial career at a single family office and learned the art of the sale at Gruss & Co, a global merger arbitrage hedge fund. She graduated with honors from Princeton University in 2005.
Yasmine is the proud mother of three daughters to whom she imparts her Belgian heritage and love for travel.
Transcript
Matt Curtolo
Hi everyone. Welcome to Private Equity Marketeer's raising the brand series where we'll highlight the stories and strategies behind the leading brand builders and capital raisers in private markets. The series showcases the innovative thinkers and creative minds who are redefining how private markets firms build trust, engage your audience, and craft compelling narratives. I'm Matt Curtolo, a longtime LP and an advisory council member here at Private Equity Marketeer. Today we're extremely excited to chat with Yasmine Lacaillade, the founder and managing partner at Sinefine, a trailblazing venture investment platform that champions women led firms. Prior to founding Sinefine, Yas was the COO at Drive Capital, a Columbus, Ohio based venture firm with more than $2 billion in assets. During her tenure there, she built and managed much of the firm's infrastructure, operations, marketing, and fundraising among many other things. So through this conversation, we'll explore her journey, her insights on building Sinefine and how she's shaping the future of women in private markets. So welcome. Yas,
I've had the pleasure of getting to know you over the last decade or so across a variety of roles, and I didn't touch on all the places you've been, but you've had a really awesome career, family offices, big firms, small firms, growing firms, now founding your own firm. So the place I'd like to start is just understanding what was the turning point maybe for each of those transitions, but more importantly, going from your role at Drive to founding Sinefine?
Yasmine Lacaillade
Yeah, taking the entrepreneurial plunge was something that I always, always had in me, and I think that is very personal. My mom was an incredibly entrepreneurial woman. She and I both grew up in the middle of nowhere, Belgium. Her parents were prisoners of war and teachers thereafter. My grandmother actually was one of the only full-time working women in the forties and fifties, and so maybe it's in our long-term bloodline, DNA, but they told my mom, you have to go to teacher's college because that's what we do. And she did begrudgingly, but she was like, this is not what I want to do with my life. And so she taught until she had enough money to put herself through business school. And I still remember being six, seven years old and going to bed. I was an only child of a single mother at this point, and she's sitting by my bedside table and she's studying for MBA while I'm begging her to read me Brother's Grim because that's what you read.
Read them stories in Europe while going to bed. And I was always very inspired by her grit and her persistence, and that's very central to who I am too. And I think I always, I love working with and for super smart people and I love making them successful, but there was this part of me that also wanted to make myself successful in that way and build out my own dream. And when Drive went from zero to two and a half billion, that was sort of the right time, honestly. I had the financial independence to be like, okay, I can do this for a couple of years. My kids are also old enough that they can understand if mom has to work till 11:00 PM and go ahead and take the plunge. It was the hardest thing I've ever done and continues to be. And I love every minute of it because to me, that pain of starting your own thing and being completely in control of your own destiny, kind of losing control of everything is it makes you feel alive. And that's really at the crutch of it for me.
Matt Curtolo
Yeah, well, scary and liberating for sure in both of those contexts. But launching your own business, it's not easy by any means. You talked a little bit about what drove you to do it, but what have been some of the challenges? And in this context, we talk a lot about building a brand. So what would you say have been the early challenges from Sinefine's inception to now it's been kind of building that brand?
Yasmine Lacaillade
This is really funny. I chuckled because I'm like, first mistake I made in retrospect, I'm like, did I call it the wrong thing? And I absolutely don't think so because my name is Yasmine Lacaillade that no one ever gets that right. So why should the name of my firm be something really simple? But I do remember, so being raised in Europe, I had a classical education and I took Latin for a decade, which I loved and I wish they did in the U.S. but Sinefine just the day that I decided to build this firm, it popped into my head within five minutes. But then when I took my first roadshow to meet some of the pensions in Austin, I remember sitting across the table from one of the LPs and he goes, now, Yas, Sinefine. What's that all about? And I was like, oh no. Oh no, no. This is not how people are going to butcher this all day long. So from a brand perspective, I was told by many people that it should have been something different, but I'm going to embrace it and I don't ever want to change the name now.
Matt Curtolo
Absolutely.
Yasmine Lacaillade
I mean, that's a vanity brand issue. I think the hardest thing about building your own firm and building your brand is like those that first year when you spend half your time really explaining who you are and having to use what you were to justify your existence today versus having a track record where you can say, we've worked with top tier firms, we have raised X amount of dollars for them. We have built Y number of products for them. We've helped them hire, we've helped them institutionalise their middle and back office. That's the story you want to tell, but when you first start out, you don't have any of those. You don't have any of those talking points, and you have to rely on your past experience, which isn't part of that brand. So that's always, I find that the hardest part of the journey because you're selling a dream and you're not selling data.
Matt Curtolo
It's completely true. But I do think particularly, and I'll give you a second to say what Sinefine means too, because I think that is the important part. The name is something you can chuckle about, but it is important and embodies everything you do. So maybe you could just tell us what Sinefine means
Yasmine Lacaillade
Yeah. So Sinefine is Latin for limitless, and when I thought about the mission of bringing more capital awareness network, all the good things to women led and co-led venture, which is woefully under-invested in undervalued, the thing that immediately popped into my head was the idea, all the ideas around DEI, woke , just in life. The quote unquote glass ceiling, A glass ceiling is the thing that really stuck in my head. And it bothers me so much because I think the people that impose the glass ceiling the most are women themselves. And so I wanted to think about something that on a meta level was expansive. I don't ever want to engage with someone because they want to break the glass ceiling, some sort of apologetic or defensive posture. And so to me, limitless seemed much more generative. And that's I think why I chose it before I even realised why
Matt Curtolo
It's so great because when people go to the Sinefine website that either the first or the second click in is it's the quote, it's a venture platform that backs women because they generate alpha, right? Yes. So it does encompass exactly what you're driving there. And I mean, I wholeheartedly agree with that statement, but maybe to double click on something you said, just focusing out on how much education you had to do within the industry around that subject, connecting female-led firms with Alpha and maybe too how you use data in that process.
Yasmine Lacaillade
Yeah, I mean, look, the market isn't as exposed to women because I don't think so, there are less of us. So I'm never going to say that women led firms need to be invested in on parity with men. There are less women led firms than there are not. And so parity is not what we're going after, but the women led market, the female GPs don't often have the access to the same networks or exposure to really what an institutionalised sales process, fundraising, really just managing a venture firm, what that looks like. And so I love to come in and provide them with that data, and you start at the high level and really try to look inside their current LP base and see where over the next five to 10 years it should go, because I only want to work with women who want to create institutionalised platforms that go much beyond just the one person unit product.
And so that institutionalisation is super central. But then in terms of the data that we use, it's interesting. There's so much data out there about the LP community that of course you have to pay for, but these centralised databases are, I think, completely useless until you know how to leverage them. And so of course, personal relationships and the network that you build over time is the most important. And I want to double click on that because I think people over index on that. But when I look at these CRMs and I look at the internal CRMs that people are using, whether it's something super sophisticated like a Salesforce or something pretty simple like a Google sheet or an Airtable, they're all, in my opinion, not the right way to activate data. And so we built, I have an engineer in the house who worked with me at Drive as well, and when she joined me, she's like, the one thing I don't want to build Yas is a CRM. And I was like, well, we're building a CRM. And I think that's because the way that the data, the LP data is aggregated is super useless and the way to push things, the way to push through a funnel is very much alike to, akin to, enterprise sales. And what enterprise sales, what makes the engine really turn is to know who you got to talk to, when and why. And so our CRM is a, it's called Shira, which I name it that I like a lot,
Yasmine Lacaillade
Much more tangible than Sinefine. And I actually hope to productize it for managers within the next year or so so that people can just, they'll have their own data silos and they can use it themselves. But what it means is it's not just a list of here are the endowments in the foundations and the pensions that you need to be in front of. It's like, who do you need to talk to when? And that's so different because everyone can send a drip campaign to everyone who could potentially want to invest in venture. But at the end of the day, there's a humongous amount of data that you either have before a fundraise or develop during a fundraise that forces you to tier people into probability, like a weighted probability, like a likelihood to invest the sizing, et cetera. And you can create an engine that forces you to stay on a cadence of engagement that is much more effective than just looking at a bunch of accounts and being like, who should I invest? Who should I call next? Which is really what most of the world does. And I think that aggregating the data that way, super differentiated, and even our managers that use our CRM as sort of a mirror of their own right now have reshaped their tables, databases, platforms, et cetera, to mirror that engagement
First, not attitude, but what's the word I'm looking for? Process. Because it makes everyone much more efficient.
Matt Curtolo
Absolutely. And it's so, data right now, I completely agree with you from the richness that you can get from a third party versus what you can develop on your own versus what you can put your own insights into. That's the tip of the spear that's going out and raising capital from folks and understanding the ecosystem. How does that flow through as you think about, we talk about marketing as not just fundraising, but off cycle, treating your own investors in a way that feels like they're getting sold to or they're getting exactly what a new prospect might get. How do you think about leveraging the information about your existing LPs into ongoing communication and engagement with them?
Yasmine Lacaillade
So the one thing that everyone knows or should know is that LPs can't service all the communications that they get. And so it's not also when you communicate to people, it's what and how you communicate it. I think in email, and this is also a product of the way our brains are now wired. We live in a Twitter/X Instagram world where we want to consume sound bites, and then if we're super interested in something, we want to dig deeper. And I always advise my managers to take that approach when you are trying to communicate, when you're communicating with your existing LP based perspective, LP base, give them the option to read a longer narrative, but don't force it because their eyes will gloss over and they'll go to the next thing and you'll miss that opportunity to deliver something valuable to them in terms of how you communicate or when you communicate with your LPs.
You know, the funds that we work with, I think I'm busier. I've just completed two fundraises last year. One was oversubscribed to the hard cap and the other one raised the largest fund by 60%, which is really I was really proud of them for because it is one of the toughest venture environments that we are in today. And so that's an incredible feat. I was really just hoping to get them to target, but I actually find myself even busier off cycle because now I'm like, now we have the benefit of two years of pipeline building and stacking up our prioritisation in a way that when we go to market next, there's no such thing as preloading your fundraise and knowing who's going to invest before you actually are in market because people's priorities change. And the really interesting thing about LPs is you only know 1% of the data, 1% of the information that you need to really understand why they're making the decision, not because they don't want to tell you about it, because LPs are depending on who you're talking to, they're either managing multiple asset classes, they have, who knows what their liquidity profiles look like, their budgets, what's going on in other sides of the portfolio that's affecting how they're thinking about venture.
And so there's so much data that you inherently don't know. And as much as I would love to say that you can perfect fundraising, you cannot because at the end of the day, it's only going to be like, does the square fit into the hole or is it not the right match? And the only thing you're in control of is what do I do? Well, what's my superpower and what am I exposed to? And the other side just literally needs to need that exposure. And you can't game whether that you're not going to change an LP's mind in a conversation if that's not on their priority list. I'm kind of going off on a tangent.
Matt Curtolo
I was going to take what you said and have you do a little trip down memory lane of just when you were there, when drives first fund, or even if you want to go back further, how the fundraising environment has changed. You alluded to it a little bit in terms of how people can consume information.
Yasmine Lacaillade
Oh, I love thinking about this.
Matt Curtolo
And maybe Yas too just on sizing, when you were raising a fund that was a fund one or a fund two at a hundred or 200 million versus a fund five that was multi-billion, maybe that would be an interesting juxtaposition as well.
Yasmine Lacaillade
Yeah, the changes in the fundraising environment, when I started in 2013 in venture, I came from the hedge fund space, and those are very different sales cycles because liquidity profiles are different and the duration and lockups are very different. But venture was sort of in the early, oh god, it's more than a decade ago. It was sort of in the early stages of institutionalisation, I thought. I think the market felt a lot smaller to me. Again, I was also new so I didn't have as much tribal knowledge yet. But there has been an incredible institutionalisation of the market and quite frankly, just explosion of number of funds, size of funds.
It went from in 2000, venture capital was a cottage industry and had a very small subset of LPs who wanted access to it, mainly because there was only a small set of LPs who really understood and were willing to take the illiquidity risk to today, the endowment model, let's call it, is very much in vogue and the private equity allocations, even despite the fact that venture is going through a really rough period, our net net orders of magnitude larger than they were even a decade ago. And that means that the historic LP base, the early adopters of venture are rarely the people that I go to, the endowments that have been investing since the seventies, I don't think they touch their books all that often. They don't need to. And so to me, just statistically speaking, the probability of being able to put a new manager in there is pretty low.
So why start there? But there are so many new entrants from a category perspective and from a regional perspective that make it super interesting. And look, if we have this conversation five years from now, it'll be something totally new. But there's a couple of things that I think are really interesting, one that you're closer to. So I'm going to leave that one on off the table, like you should talk to that, which is the democratisation of venture. And that to me means we're really far along in the curve of adoption. If High Street is going to get access to venture, it's really common. It's not an S&P index, but that's essentially what we're trying to say there. But banks, RIAs, regions like Asia and the Middle East that just historically not had the access, not the access, the appetite. And honestly, the way that I define that is do you have internal resources dedicated to this asset class?
If the answer is yes, you have a programme that I want to align with, the one sector of the LP base that hasn't really adopted yet are corporates because I think they, not rightfully so, thought they should create their own corporate venture programmes, but guess what? The best venture capitalists are not going to go work for corporate. They're going to do it themselves. And so what corporates should be doing is allocating to the best managers that express views and innovations that they want to be a part of in the next 10 years. So that's one part of the wealth spectrum that I think isn't yet involved. But for the rest, there's all these new entry, these new wealth channels are huge. A great leading indicator of this is always, when I talk to my buddies at Apollo and they're hiring 20 people to open up RIA channels, I'm like, oh, that means there's a lot of wealth there. And if it starts at the lowest end of the risk curve in PE, you bet that it's going to come up market, down market. I don't know how you look at the graph, but higher up on the risks curve down the line. And we see that when today I'm getting, we get a lot of allocations from the RIAs and wealth channels of the world.
Matt Curtolo
It's only in the beginning, and it's a great call out to all of the different pockets that as a fundraiser, as a marketer, you have to be aware of, right? I think there's this, what was a closed club historically is now getting more broad in terms of how you can reach folks, how you can market the story. You have to tell the length of the snippet that you have to show and the content you're providing. So when I look at it, having been on the other side of the table, it's a different game now. And what it means is the marketer has to have a more diverse set of tools in their toolkit to be able to address all these diverse spaces. And usually it's one or maybe two people in most firms.
Yasmine Lacaillade
Oh yeah, for sure. You also asked about sizing, but I brought up something that I wanted to double click on earlier, which is knowing who to talk to and the value of relationships and Rolodexes. I find that a really fascinating topic because to your point, when I start, and I can weave this into changes of LPs, the LP environment over time and the changes as you change in size, there are no two fundraises where you have identical sales cycles where you are talking to the identical same sub cohort of LPs, LPs priorities change, and they don't always want, they may be full up on a certain amount of exposure, and then you're not going to really talk to them for six years closely. And then things could change. That doesn't mean they don't allocate, they're just maybe not allocating to the same assets in sub-asset classes in the same way.
And so I find someone who comes to me and says, I know so and so and so and so, and I haircut that pretty hard because to me it's like the value. I don't want to know who I want to know. How do you get to the next 10 people that you don't know yet, and are you willing to do that? And is that something that you're willing to do all the time? Because I'm not saying that I don't have people that I absolutely love, yourself included, that I've kept in touch with for decades. But there is the actual sales process and due diligence process that you go through. I've never, you know, existing LPs aside because a lot of those hopefully re-up. But the net new LP base is always different, every fund cycle. So by design, you are going to have to expand into a network that you did not previously have. So to me, the skillset isn't the network that its skillset is the networking and the ability to make that cycle indefinite. And so weaving that into sizing drive's first fund was an early stage 250 million fund. When I completed the last fund cycle before I left, we were raising a billion and then growth funds and actually also our first small co-invest vehicle. And you are a hundred percent speaking to different folks. And that really comes down to there are are LPs who love taking the early cycle, early life cycle risk.
And I think that's a sub selection of endowments, foundations, and multi-family offices and fund of funds. And then there are a larger cohort, but also larger check writers that just have a lower risk tolerance. So they need to see maturity. They need to see DPI as much as TVPI. They take somewhat a risk averse stance, which is kind of ironic because they don't get paid for the upside
When they go to IC, but they get fired if it doesn't go well, which is a bad dynamic. They should be tied to the performance, but in a lot of places they're not. And that's a pervasive problem that I wish people would address because I think that would truly create LP/GP alignment and would make the market much more efficient. But the LPs that we talked to, when you're at the over a billion, the not sub, the over a billion dollar mark are much more, they're longer diligence cycles. They are, I think the early adopters are equally sophisticated as the later adopters. They just have different risk profiles. But once you get further down the curve, then you can really unlock pensions and to unlock pensions. That means you're unlocking more consultants though consultants do a lot in the emerging manager space too, but then it definitely shifts.
Matt Curtolo
Yes. Well, I will go back to what you said about network versus networking and then also understanding. I always tell folks the same way. From an enterprise sales perspective, you need to know your ICP, you need your ideal customer profile for every fund. And it's different when you are a startup versus when you're a mature business, which fits this continuum. But ya we're coming down the home stretch. I want to get a little bit of advice from you for our audience, maybe as an aspiring capital raiser, what would be the most valuable piece of advice you'd give to folks who are earlier in their career thinking about roles in business development, IR marketing within the private markets?
Yasmine Lacaillade
Work your ass off. But my advice is, look, it's less tied to IR. I think the one thing that I noticed looking back on my own career where what did I wish I didn't do? It's hesitate,
Make mistakes, iterate. It's the most important thing you can do. You don't remember any of your successes and why they were successful, but you remember your failures and you learn from them. And I've made a lot of them and that's also allowed me to learn a lot. And so I love iterating through failure because I think that teaches you so much. And then something that I was saying earlier too, it's a hard job. I always tell my managers, when you go to market, our goal is to get to a hundred nos as quickly as possible. That means we get broken up with every day like 10 times. And that could be, and it was for me early in my career, such an emotional rollercoaster. You take it also personally, you think it's a reflection of who you are because we're messed up humans, but it's not. And you have to kind of embrace that sentiment. And once you do, it makes everything you don't, if you don't take it personally, you'll never act out of a place of fear. If you're never acting out of a place of fear, you're also always thinking strategically and wanting to execute more and being super generative and that snowballs into something great, whatever it may be.
Matt Curtolo
It's tremendous advice because applicable across all walks, but definitely in our world where the sales cycles are long, the fund lives are long. It feels like there's a lot of time, but a lot of these decisions that you make, the decisions you don't make versus the ones you make are the ones that ripple through. So I love that a hundred percent. Excellent. Well, we always ask folks our bonus question in the Raising the Brand series. So beyond private markets, what's your favourite all time brand? And what about that brand resonates with you?
Yasmine Lacaillade
Nike. I love Nike. I actually don't own that much Nike, my kids do though is timeless. But what I love about it, I love to be inspired. Like everything I've been saying, I love to feel alive. I love to do things that make me feel uncomfortable. I love to go and do it, but what I love, and someone said that actually, sorry, Mel Robbins said this on a podcast, I was like, oh my God, I didn't even realise that. That's what I love about just do it. It's not do it, which sounds like a command, just do It is inspirational but tangible. It's like don't worry, just do it. That to me is very different and very much like you be the creator and it is this judgement free just allowance of just do it. That's what I want to tell my kids. Just do it all the time. And so that's why I love it because even though it's this brand that is about sponsoring the most prolific athletes across all sectors, gross, I can't believe I'm using industry lingo for that. That's where we are, that they're able to do that and still inspire every 9-year-old girl who's going out for her first lacrosse practise.
Matt Curtolo
I mean, I think you just encapsulated what we need to think of successful brands doing and Nike's at the top of the heap for sure.
Yasmine Lacaillade
Yeah. Undeniable.
Matt Curtolo
Yas. This has been so much fun. Thank you so much for joining us. I'm sure the audience is going to really love this. And thanks again.
Yasmine Lacaillade
Thanks for having me, Matt. It's such an honour.