Ignite VC: Jeffrey Fidelman on Building a Repeatable Capital Engine & Fundraising Wins | Ep209

Ignite: Conversations on Startups, Venture Capital, Tech, Future, and Society

Jeffrey Fidelman is the Founder & CEO of Fidelman & Company, an investment bank purpose-built for early-stage companies and emerging managers. A Harvard graduate who spent a decade at Morgan Stanley and HSBC before helping run a $120–125M venture fund, he’s since scaled a 40-person team that blends institutional process with hands-on fundraising execution. With a productized “fundraising as a service” model and the launch of Fundex, he offers a transparent, data-driven path from deck and model to qualified investor conversations.

With experience across banking, venture, and company-building, Jeffrey offers insights into building an institutional fundraising engine: licensing and compliance that set real advisors apart, a weekly lead-generation and personalization workflow, pricing and incentives that mirror Wall Street, and why consistent follow-through (not a “magic” deck) moves capital. In this episode, he discusses the gap between venture and banking, productizing best practices, when he turns founders away, how GPs should communicate with LPs, and what’s changing in today’s market—from “venture winter” to the rise of AI infrastructure and energy.

In Today’s Episode We Discuss:

00:01 Intro & guest background

00:37 Career path: banking to VC

02:56 Productizing fundraising

04:16 “Do it for us” inflection point

06:58 Licenses, transparency, pricing

09:42 Fundex launch & vision

10:42 Saying no & realistic timelines

12:29 Weekly lead-gen workflow

14:54 Multi-touch outreach cadence

15:49 Targeted spearfishing approach

17:03 Team design for outbound

19:26 CRM evolution to Fundex

20:39 Fee structures by vehicle

28:57 Monthly LP/GP update format

31:48 60–90 day testing windows

35:48 Market shift & venture winter

41:05 What LPs value most

43:06 Personal brand over company page

47:07 Valuation frameworks

52:00 AI infra & energy thesis

58:50 Fundex recap & close

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