The gap wasn’t a lack of capital, it was a lack of conviction.

When I was consulting for family offices, I kept seeing the same pattern: real appetite for venture, but hesitation around emerging managers. Not because the opportunity wasn’t understood, but because the underwriting felt uncomfortable: limited track record, access challenges, and no clear framework to assess them.

At the same time, when I looked at where outsized returns were actually coming from, it was consistently early, small funds.

That’s when the disconnect became obvious: the part of the market generating the most alpha was the least institutionalized and therefore the least accessible.

It clicked that the issue wasn’t quality, it was packaging. LPs weren’t wrong to hesitate; they were structurally missing exposure.

Amkan was built to bridge that gap, not by changing the underlying risk, but by structuring access to it in a way that works for institutional capital.

Most people think fund of funds is about broad exposure; ours is built around being highly selective.

At Amkan, the manager is the investment. We’re not outsourcing conviction, we’re concentrating it. Instead of spreading risk across a wide set of funds, we focus on identifying a very specific type of manager with an asymmetric return profile, and building a portfolio that preserves that edge.

We focus exclusively on emerging solo GPs, which means underwriting individuals at a much deeper level: judgment, drive, ownership mindset, and how they make decisions when there’s no one else around the table. What matters to us is how someone thinks under uncertainty, how they construct a concentrated portfolio, and whether they have a clear, repeatable point of view.

We operate in a part of the market most LPs structurally can’t access - small, early - where a disproportionate share of venture alpha has historically come from.

One of the hardest decisions is often passing on managers who are good, very good even, but not aligned.

There was a fund I spent a lot of time on last year. Strong network, credible early access, and the kind of profile that would have been easy to get comfortable with.

But the portfolio construction didn’t hold up. Too many companies, not enough concentration, and ultimately not set up to generate venture-scale returns.

Walking away from something “good” is always harder than passing on something clearly wrong, especially when your pace has slowed and you start questioning whether you’re being too selective.

In hindsight, it reinforced something important: in venture, the cost of being slightly wrong compounds over a decade.

Our job isn’t to fill the portfolio. It’s to protect it.

Saying no is often where the real discipline shows up.

One pattern that keeps reinforcing our thesis is how much outcomes are driven by concentration at the fund level.

We’ve seen this play out directly. One of our portfolio funds generated meaningful DPI as early as year two from a ~$100M exit, simply because they owned ~10% of the company.

It sounds simple, but it’s surprisingly rare in practice.

What’s striking is how consistent that relationship is. Managers who concentrate capital and decision-making tend to have clearer judgment and stronger conviction.

On the flip side, more diversified early-stage funds may smooth volatility, but they also cap upside.

That data didn’t change our thesis: it sharpened it.

Backing emerging managers isn’t enough. You have to back the right type: those building portfolios designed for outliers, not averages.

The next shift is how quickly solo GPs are moving from rare to mainstream.

Not long ago, solo GPs were the exception, almost an edge case in venture. Today, they’re becoming a real category, and that’s only accelerating.

Part of it is cultural. There’s a growing recognition that great investing doesn’t require a partnership, and in many cases, it benefits from not having one.

But the bigger unlock is tooling.

With AI and better infrastructure, a single manager can now operate with a level of leverage that simply wasn’t possible before, across sourcing, diligence, and even portfolio support.

That changes the equation.

What used to be a constraint, being solo, is increasingly becoming an advantage: complete ownership, clearer accountability, and more concentrated thinking.

Over the next five years, I think we’ll see a meaningful increase in the number, and quality, of solo GPs. And the challenge will shift from “should you back them?” to “which ones actually matter?