Oper8r

Oper8r is a San Francisco-based firm that operates a cohort-based educational program and community designed to prepare emerging venture capital (VC) fund managers for institutional investment. Often described as a "Y Combinator for funds," the company's core offering is an eight-week intensive course that provides training on fundraising, operational fund management, and building relationships with Limited Partners (LPs). The program's curriculum is taught by institutional LPs, family offices, and other industry experts, giving participants direct access and insights into what institutional investors look for. Participants, or General Partners (GPs), learn to institutionalize their operations, covering aspects like selecting service providers and establishing organizational structures that attract institutional capital.

Oper8r was co-founded in 2019 by Winter Mead and Wellington Sculley, who were high school friends and later classmates at Harvard University. Mead's background includes investment roles at Hall Capital Partners and Sapphire Partners, a venture capital fund of funds, where he was involved in building an investment portfolio from the ground up. Sculley previously worked as a business development director at Ripple. The founders identified a key friction point in the market: institutional LPs were overwhelmed by the growing number of emerging VCs and lacked scalable systems to evaluate them, while new fund managers often lacked the operational expertise and network to secure institutional funding. The first cohort was launched in 2020.

The company's business model is centered on its paid cohort programs. It selects a group of high-potential emerging VC firms for each cohort through an application process. In addition to the structured curriculum, Oper8r provides ongoing access to a community for networking and continued learning after the program concludes. The platform serves two main client types: emerging VC fund managers (GPs) who want to scale their firms and fundraise from institutional investors, and institutional investors (LPs) who gain a curated and vetted pipeline of potential fund investments. By not taking a stake in the funds of its participants, Oper8r positions itself as a pure-play educational and network-access platform.

Keywords: emerging fund managers, venture capital training, LP GP relationship, institutional investors, fund management education, venture capital accelerator, micro-VC, limited partners, general partners, fund fundraising, cohort program, venture capital operations, investment manager incubator, VC fund back-office, investor relations, asset management startup, venture capital community, fund of funds, family offices, seed investing