To win the best pre-seed deals, investors should engage high-potential talent during their 'founder curious' phase, long before a formal fundraise. The real competition is guiding them toward conviction on their own timeline, not battling other VCs for a term sheet later.

To truly understand a potential financial partner, the Chomps team went beyond the supplied references. They found a founder whose company didn't succeed under the PE firm's investment. His positive review of the partner's character, despite the negative outcome, provided the most powerful signal of trust.

To source proprietary hybrid capital deals, avoid the capital markets teams at PE firms, as their job is to minimize cost of capital. Instead, build relationships directly with individual deal partners in specific industries. This allows you to become a trusted, go-to provider for complex, time-sensitive situations where speed and certainty are valued over price.

In a world of commoditized capital, offering a full suite of solutions creates a competitive advantage. By providing fund investments, co-investments, secondary liquidity, and portfolio company debt, a firm becomes an indispensable strategic partner to PE sponsors, generating proprietary and superior deal flow.

To win highly sought-after deals, growth investors must build relationships years in advance. This involves providing tangible help with hiring, customer introductions, and strategic advice, effectively acting as an investor long before deploying capital.

Instead of a traditional 100-day plan, TA Associates' value creation process begins by defining what the business must look like in five years to achieve a successful exit. All subsequent initiatives are then mapped backward from this end goal, ensuring every action is aligned with the ultimate liquidity event.

TA Associates uses a hybrid investment committee. A central group reviews deals but delegates final approval to a small team of four partners (two from the deal team, two from the committee) who conduct deep, in-person diligence. This decentralizes decision-making to those closest to the information.

TA's extensive deal sourcing operation, which contacts 40,000 businesses annually, isn't just for new platform investments. The firm systematically identifies smaller companies within this funnel that are perfect add-on acquisitions for its existing portfolio companies, creating a proprietary M&A pipeline that has resulted in over 1,500 deals.

After discovering that buyers of their portfolio companies were achieving 3x returns, TA shifted its strategy. Instead of selling 100%, they now often sell partial stakes. This provides liquidity to LPs and de-risks the investment while allowing TA to capture significant upside from the company's continued compounding growth.