Raising the Brand with Yasmine Lacaillade - Founder of Sinefine

Speaker A: Welcome to Raising the Brand, brought to you by Private Equity Marketeer. This is where we uncover the stories and strategies of the leading brand builders and capital raisers in private markets. Each episode highlights the creative minds and strategic thinkers who are redefining how private market firms connect with their audiences, build trust and tell their stories. Learn more@privateequitymarketeer.com

Speaker B: hi everyone. Welcome to Private Equity Marketeers 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 Cartolo, a longtime LP and an advisory council member here at Private Equity Marketeer. Today we're extremely excited to chat with Yasmine Lacklade, the founder and managing partner at Cinefine, a, uh, trailblazing venture investment platform that champions women led firms. Prior to founding Sine Fine, Yaz was the COO at Drive Capital, a Columbus, Ohio based venture firm, uh, 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, um, among many other things. Uh, so through this conversation we'll explore her journey, her insights on building Cinefine, and how she's shaping the future of women in private markets. So welcome.

Speaker A: Yes, thanks for having me, Matt.

Speaker B: Awesome. Well, uh, that was the script part I wanted to read. The rest of this will be a conversation. Um, I've had the pleasure of getting to know you over the last decade or so across a variety of roles. Um, and I didn't touch on all the places you've been, but you've had a really awesome career. Um, 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 Sinafine.

Speaker A: Yeah, um, taking the entrepreneurial plunge was something that I always, I always had in me. And I think that's, that is very, like, personal. Um, my mom was an incredible, incredibly entrepreneurial woman. Um, she and I both grew up in the, uh, middle of nowhere Belgium. Um, her parents were prisoners of war and teachers thereafter. My grandmother actually was, you know, one of the only full time working women in like the 40s and 50s. Um, and so maybe it's in our, like, long, long term bloodline DNA. Um, but they, they told my mom, you have to go to teachers 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 herself through business school. And I still remember being, you know, 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, uh, for her mba, um, while, you know, I'm begging her to read me, like, Brothers Grimm, because that's what you read dime stories in Europe, um, while going to bed. And I was always very inspired by her, her grit and her persistence. And that's, like, 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. Um, and when Drive got to went from zero to two and a half billion, um, that was sort of the right time. I had the finance, 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, you know, they can understand if mom has to work till 11:00pm um, and go ahead and take the plunge. It was the hardest thing I've ever done and continues to be. Um, and I love every minute of it because to me, that, like, we are. The pain of starting your own, um, thing and being completely in control of your own destiny, like, kind of losing control of everything is. It makes you feel alive. And that's really at the crutch of it for me.

Speaker B: Yeah, well, it's scary and liberating, for sure, in both of those contexts. But, you know, it's launching your own business, right? It's. It's not easy by any means. Um, you know, you talked a little bit about, you know, 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 is? You know, from Cinefine's inception to now, it's been kind of building that brand.

Speaker A: This is really funny. I chuckle 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 Yasmin Lacklade that no one ever gets that right. So why should the name of my firm be so something really simple. Um, but I do remember so being raised in Europe, I had a classical education and I took Latin for a decade, um, which I loved and I wish they did in the US but um, sine fine, just the day that I decided to build this firm, it popped into my head within five minutes. Um, but then when I took my first roadshow to meet some of the pensions in Austin, I remember sitting across uh, the table from a um, uh, one of the LPs and he goes now, yes, sign fine. What's that all about?

Speaker B: Oh no.

Speaker A: Oh no, no. This is not how people are going to butcher this, um, all day long. So from a brand perspective, um, I was told by many people that it should have been something different. But uh, I'm going to embrace it and I don't ever want to change the name now.

Speaker B: Absolutely.

Speaker A: I mean that's a very, that's a very um, that's a vanity brand, um issue. I think the hardest thing about building your own firm and, and building your brand is like those first 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, uh, number of products for them, we've helped them hire, we've helped them in institutionalize uh, 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, um, you don't have any of those talking points and, and you have to you know, rely on your past experience which isn't part of that brand. So it's like that's always. And a hard. I find that the hardest part of the journey because you're selling a dream and you're not selling data.

Speaker B: It's completely um, true. But I do think uh, particularly, and I'll give you a second to say, you know what sine fine 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.

Speaker A: Yeah, so. So sine fine is Latin for limitless. And when I, when I thought about the mission of you know, bringing more capital, awareness, network, all the good things um, to women led and co led ah venture, um, which is woefully under invested in undervalued I, 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, that's the uh, glass ceiling is the thing that really stuck in my head and it bothers me so much because I think the only the people that impose the glass ceiling the most are women themselves. And so I wanted to think about something that like on a meta level was expansive. Um, I don't ever want to think about, I don't ever want to go, I don't ever want to engage with someone because they want to break the glass ceiling. Some sort of apologetic, um, or like defensive posture. And so to me limitless seemed much more generative. Um, and that's, that's, I think I, you know, I chose it before I even realized why it's, it's so great

Speaker B: because when people go to the CNA Feene website, I think that either the first or the second click in is um, it's the quote. It's a venture platform that backs women because they generate alpha. Right. So it does encompass exactly what you're driving there. And I mean I, I wholeheartedly agree with that statement. But maybe to double click on something you said, just focusing on how much education you had to do within the industry around that subject, connecting female led firms with alpha and maybe to how you use data in that process.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean look, the, the, the market isn't as exposed to women because I don't think so. There's, there are less of us. Right. So I'm never going to say that women led firms need to be invested in on parity with men. There are, there are less women led firms than there are not. And so parity is not what we're going after. But uh, the women led market, the, the, the female GPs don't often have the access to the same networks or exposure to really what an institutionalized sales process, fundraising, really just managing a venture firm, um, what that looks like. And so I love to come in and provide them with that data. And you know, you start at the high level, um, and really try to look inside their current LP base and see where over the next 5 to 10 years it should go. Um, because I only want to work with women who want to create institutionalized platforms that go much beyond just, just the one person unit product. Um, and so that institutionalization is like super central. But then in terms of like 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. Um, but there, these centralized databases are I think completely useless until you know how to leverage them. And so of course like personal relationships and the network that you build over time is the most important. And I want to double click on that because um, I think people over index on that. Um, but when you, 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 you know, something pretty simple like a Google sheet or an airtable, um, 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, um, she's like the one thing I don't want to build Yaz, is a CRM. And I was like, well, we're building a CRM. And I think that's because um, the way that the data, the LP data is you, is, is aggregated is super useless. And the way to push things, the way to push through a funnel is very much like, alike to. Akin to enterprise sales and what. Enterprise sales, what the, what makes the engine really turn is to know who you gotta talk to, when and why. And so our CRM is called Shira, um, which. A name that I like a lot, but much more tangible than cna. Uh, fine. And I actually hope to productize it for managers within the next year or so so that people can just, you know, they'll have their own data silos and they can use it themselves. But what it, what it means is it's not just a list of. Here are the endowments and 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, that you either have before a fundraiser, 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, and you can, 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, who should I call next? Which is really what like the most of the world does. And I think that like that date like aggregating the data that way, super differentiated. And even um, our managers that, that use our CRM as sort of a mirror of their own right now, have reshaped their tables, um, databases, platforms, etc to mirror that engagement first.

Speaker B: Um,

Speaker A: like not attitude but. What's the word I'm looking for? Ah, process. Because it makes everyone much more efficient.

Speaker B: Absolutely. And it's so data right now. I completely agree with you. From the richness that you can get from a, from a third party versus what you can develop on your own versus what you can put your own insights into. Um, that's right. That's the fun, that's the tip of the spear that's going out and raising capital from folks and understanding the ecosystem. Yeah. How does that flow through as you think about, you know, we, we talk about marketing as you know, not just fundraising but off cycle. Treating your own investors a way that you know, feels like they're getting sold to or they're getting exactly what a, a new prospect might get. How do you think about leveraging the information you know about your existing LPs into ongoing communication and engagement with them?

Speaker A: Yeah. 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 the, when you communicate to people, it's what and how you communicate it. Um, I think in email. And this is also a product of our, you know, the way our brains are now wired. Like 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 with, when you're communicating with your existing LP base. Perspective. LP base. Give them the option to read a longer narrative but don't force, 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. Um, um, in terms of how you communicate or when you communicate with your LPs, you know, fun. The funds that we work with, I think I'm busier. I've just completed two fundraises last year. Um, one was over subscribed to the hard cap and the other one, um, raised the uh, largest fund by 60%. Um, which is really, I was really proud of them for, because it's is one of the toughest venture environments that we are in today. Um, and so that's an incredible feat. I was really just hoping to get them to target. Um, 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 prioritization 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, um, 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, you know, depending on who you're talking to, they're either managing three multiple asset classes, they have, you know, who knows what their, like, 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. Um, and so there's so much data that you like that you inherently don't know. Um, and as much as I would love to say that like 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 like 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 want, need that exposure. Um, and like there's, you can't, you can't game whether that like, you're not going to change an LPs um, mind in a conversation if that's like not on their, uh, their priority list. I'm kind of going off on a tangent.

Speaker B: Not.

Speaker A: This is.

Speaker B: I was going to kind of 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 consume information.

Speaker A: Oh, I love, I love thinking about this.

Speaker B: Yeah. And maybe as too just on, on sizing. Right. When you were raising a, a fund that was a Fund 1 or Fund 2 at 100 or 200 million versus a Fund 5 that was multi billion. Like maybe that would be an interesting juxtaposition as well.

Speaker A: Yeah. Um, the changes in um, the l, you know, the, the fundraising environment. I, what I, when I started in 2013 in Venture, I came from the hedge fund space and um, it's. Those are very different sales cycles because liquidity profiles are different and the duration and lockups, um, are very different. Um, but Venture was sort of in the early, like, you know, a decade. Oh God, it's more than a decade ago. It was sort of in the early stages of institutionalization. I thought the market, I think the market felt a lot smaller to me. Again, I was also new, so I wasn't, you know, I, I didn't have as much tribal knowledge yet. But there has been an incredible institutionalization of the market, um, and quite frankly just explosion of number of funds, size of funds. Um, and it went from, you know, in 2000, venture capital was a cottage industry and had a very like 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, um, to today. The endowment model, let's call it, is very much in vogue. Um, and the private equity allocations, even despite the fact that Venture is going through a really rough period, are net, net, you know, orders of magnitude larger than they were even a decade ago. And that means that, you know, the historic LP base, the early adopters of uh, venture are rarely the people that I go to, the endowments that have been investing since the 70s. I don't think they touch their books all that often. Right. They don't, they don't need to. Um, and so to me, like, just statistically speaking, the probability of being able to um, put a new manager in there is pretty low. So why go for. Why, why start there? But there are so many new entrants from a category perspective and from a regional perspective that are, uh, that make it super interesting. And look, if we have this conversation five years from now, it'll be like something totally new. But like, 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 the day off the table because I'm like, you should talk to that which is the democratization of Venture. And that to me means like we're really far, far along in the curve of adoption. If, if High street is going to get, um, access, um, to Venture. It's really common, right? It's on S P index, but that's essentially what we're trying to say there. Um, but banks, RIAs, um, regions like Asia and the Middle east that just historically not had the access, not the access, the appetite. Um, 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 program that I want to align with. Um, the only, you know, the, the one, um, the. The one subsection, the sector of the LP base that hasn't really adopted yet are corporates, um, because I think they. Not rightfully so, um, thought they should create their own corporate venture programs. But guess what? The best venture capitalists are not going to go work for, for corporate. They're going to do it themselves. And so they, you know, what corporates should be doing is having, is, is allocating to the best managers that express views and, and innovations that they want to be a part of in the next ten years. Um, so that's like one, um, part of the like wealth spectrum that I think isn't yet involved. But for the rest, um, there's all these, these new entry, these new wealth channels are huge. A great leading indicator of this is always like when I talk to my buddies at Apollo and they're hiring like 20 people to open up RIA channels, I'm like, oh, that means there's a lot of wealth there. And, and if it starts at like the lowest end of the risk curve in pe, you bet that's going to come up. Um, that'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, uh, down the line and we see that when today like I'm getting a lot of, we get a lot of allocations from the IRAs, um, and wealth channels of the.

Speaker B: It's, 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, there's this. What was a closed club historically is now getting more broad in terms of how you can reach folks, um, 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 it, when I look at it having been on the other side of the table, it's a different game now. And, and it, what it means is the marketer, um, has to have a, um, more diverse set of tools in their toolkit to be able to address all these diverse spaces. And usually it's um, one or maybe two people in most firms, so.

Speaker A: Oh, oh yeah, for sure. You also asked about sizing, but I brought up something that I wanted to double click on earlier, which is like knowing who to talk to and like 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 UM LPs uh the LP environment over time and uh, the changes as you change in size. There are no two fundraises where you are, you have identical sales cycles where you are talking to the identical um co like same sub cohort of LPs and LPs priorities change and you know they, they are don't always want. They may follow 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 um assets in, in sub asset classes in the same way. And so I find someone who comes to me and says like I know so and so and so and so and so and so. I haircut that pretty hard because to me it's like the value like I don't want to know who you know, 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 because. 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. Um, but there is the actual like 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 uh 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 skill set isn't the network. That skill set is the networking and the ability to like be like make that cycle indefinite. Um and so that like weaving that into sizing. You know. Uh, Dry's first fund was an early stage $250 million fund. And by like my. When I completed the last fund cycle before I left was a, you know we were raising a billion and um, and and then growth funds and actually also um, our first small co invest vehicle. Um and you're you, you are 100% speaking to different folks. And that really comes down to there are. There are LPs who love taking the early cycle, early life cycle risk. Um and I think that's um a sub selection of endowments foundations and multifamily uh, offices and um, fund of funds. And then there are a m. The larger, a larger cohort but also larger check riders that just have a lower risk tolerance. So they need to see maturity, they need to say DPI as much as tdpi. They don't, you know, they, they take somewhat a risk averse stance which is kind of ironic. Uh, right, because they don't get paid for the upside.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: Um, when they go to ic but they get, they get fired if it doesn't go well. Which is like not 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. Um because I think that would truly create LPGP alignment and would make the market much more efficient. Um, but the, the LPs that we talk to when you're at the over a billion, like the, the not sub. The over a billion dollar um mark are much more, they're longer diligence cycles. Um, they are, I think the early adopters are equally sophisticated as the later adopters. They just have different risk profiles. Uh, but like once you get uh, 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 you know, it definitely shifts.

Speaker B: 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, right. You need your ideal customer profile for every fund. And it's different when you're a startup versus when you're a mature business which kind of fits this, this continuum. But yeah, as we're coming down the home stretch, I want to get a little bit of advice from you for our audience. Um, maybe as an aspiring capital raiser, like 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.

Speaker A: Work your ass off. Um, but my big, my advice is look, it's less tied to ir. Um, I think like 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 made A lot of them. Um, and that's also allowed me to learn a lot. Um, and so like I, I love iterating through failure because I think that teaches you so much. And then something that I was saying earlier too, like, it's a hard job. It's um. I always tell my managers, when you go to market, our goal is to get to a hundred no's as quickly as possible. That means we get broken up with every day like this. And it could be, it could, that could be. And it was for me, early in my career, such an emotional roller coaster. You take it all so personally. You think it's a reflection of who you are because we're messed up humans. Um, but it's not. And you have to like kind of embrace that sentiment. And once you do, it makes everything you, 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 you know, that snowballs into something great, whatever it may be.

Speaker B: It's tremendous, um, advice because it's um, applicable across all walks, but definitely in our world where, you know, 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, um, the decisions you don't make versus the ones you make are the ones that ripple through. So I love that.

Speaker A: 100%.

Speaker B: Excellent. Well, we always ask folks, uh, our bonus question in the Raising the Brand series. So, um, beyond private markets, what's your favorite all time brand? And what about that brand resonates with you?

Speaker A: Nike.

Speaker B: Nice.

Speaker A: I love Nike. I actually don't own that much Nike. Um, my kids do though. Uh, it's timeless. But what I love about it, oh, 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 realize 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, uh, don't worry, just do it. Like that to me is very different and very much like you be the creator and it gives, it's this like this judgment free just allowance of just just do it. You know that's what I want to tell my kids. Just do it all the time. Um, and so that's why, 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. You know that's where we are. Um, that, that, that they're able to do that and still inspire every nine year old girl who's going out for her first lacrosse practice.

Speaker B: That, that I mean I think you just encapsulated what, what we need to think of successful brands doing and Nike's at the top of the heap for sure.

Speaker A: Yeah. Uh, undeniable.

Speaker B: Yes. 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 uh, thanks again.

Speaker A: Thanks for having me Matt. It's such an honor.