Tien Wong, Founder and Executive Chairman, CONNECTpreneur | October 1, 2026
If you’re an experienced founder raising private capital today, somebody has probably told you to “go after family offices.”
On paper, it sounds like great advice.
Family offices have enormous capital, few of the structural constraints that slow down traditional VC funds, and the ability to make decisions that would never survive an institutional investment committee.
In practice, though, most founders discover that family offices are among the hardest investors in the market to find, qualify and engage. I have been in private capital for more than four decades, and the reason is pretty simple: most founders are approaching family offices completely wrong. They treat them like small venture funds. They are not.
Once you understand what they really are, how they think, and what actually gets them to move, the fundraising playbook changes dramatically.
Before going further, I want to be very specific about what I mean by family office investing here. Family offices obviously allocate capital to public equities, bonds, real estate, hedge funds, private equity funds, venture funds, private credit and all kinds of other managed investments. That is not what this article is about. I am talking specifically about a family deciding to invest its own capital directly into a private operating company, whether that is a startup, a growth company, a minority investment, a buyout, or a co-investment alongside another investor.
That distinction matters because direct investing is fundamentally different. The family is no longer simply selecting a manager. It is deciding whether it wants to own a piece of your business, live with the risks, follow the company over time and, in many cases, rely heavily on its own judgment rather than a pre-existing institutional mandate.
This is the first thing founders get wrong. We talk about “family offices” as if they all behave in roughly the same way, but family office is really an organizational description, not an investment strategy.
Take two families that are each worth $1 billion. One built its fortune by selling a medical device company after spending 30 years dealing with hospitals, surgeons, distributors, reimbursement and the FDA. The other built its wealth through commercial real estate. Now walk into both rooms and pitch the same early-stage medtech company.
You are not really making the same pitch.
The medical device family may immediately understand the sales cycle, the regulatory risk, clinical adoption and the importance of specific key opinion leaders. A generalist investor might require several meetings just to become comfortable with those issues. The real estate family, looking at the exact same opportunity, may decide that the business is too difficult to understand and pass before the economics even become relevant.
This is why one of the first things I look at is not what the family office says it invests in, but where the money came from in the first place. If a family made its fortune in logistics, software, distribution, healthcare, manufacturing, financial services, energy or consumer products, that history often tells you more than a generic database field saying the family invests in “technology” or “healthcare.”
People trust what they understand, and successful entrepreneurs especially trust industries they have lived through. They know the customers, the cycles, the failure modes, the margins and the people. That familiarity can dramatically reduce perceived risk.
I saw a version of this with a founder raising capital for a specialized healthcare business. He had been pursuing broadly defined “healthcare family offices” and getting nowhere. One of the more promising investors turned out not to be on any obvious healthcare investor list at all. The family’s wealth had come from building and selling a business that served the same end customers the founder was targeting. The discussion changed almost immediately because the family did not need to be educated on the market. They already understood the buying behavior, the economics and the pain point. What looked like a weaker match in a database was actually a much stronger match in the real world.
This is one of the shortcuts I think experienced founders should use much more aggressively: follow the source of wealth, not just the stated investment thesis. The family office that looks mediocre in a database may be the one that understands your business instantly, while the one with a perfect sector label may have no real conviction or operating context at all.
If you are looking for a VC, it is usually not difficult to figure out what the firm does. Venture firms have websites, announce funds, publish portfolios, appear in databases, give interviews and actively market themselves because they want deal flow and eventually need to raise another fund.
A wealthy family does not have those incentives.
In many cases, the family would actually prefer that you know less about them. Some of the best family offices I have encountered have virtually no public presence. Some do not use the family name. Many operate through holding companies, trusts, or investment entities whose names reveal nothing about the people behind them. The family office that looks least impressive online could, in fact, be the one with the most discretionary capital and the greatest flexibility. Conversely, a highly visible family office with a polished website, multiple investment professionals and a detailed mandate may behave much more like an institution than a family.
That is not poor marketing. It is intentional.
If you have already made more money than you need, have a family to protect, and are already being shown more investment opportunities than you can possibly evaluate, there is very little benefit in making yourself easier for thousands of strangers to find. Privacy is not an accidental obstacle in the family office world. It is often part of the architecture.
That is why I think founders overvalue family office databases. They are useful, and we use data ourselves, but they are only a starting point. If your entire strategy consists of buying 2,000 names and emailing everybody whose profile includes the phrase “family office,” you are solving the wrong problem.
The more useful question is not, “Where can I find family offices?” It is, “Which families have a real reason to care about this company?”
That shifts the entire exercise from list building to research, and that is where the real edge begins.
Suppose you are raising money for an industrial technology company. The obvious move is to search for family offices that invest in industrial technology. Nothing wrong with that, but I’d go much further and look at entrepreneurs and families who built meaningful companies in industrial automation, manufacturing, distribution, logistics, specialty chemicals, machinery, industrial software or supply-chain technology.
Then I would ask what happened after the liquidity event. Did the founder sell? Did the family retain ownership? Did they form an investment company? Is the founder still active? Did one of the children take over investing? Does the former CFO now manage family capital? Who sits on the boards? Who are their attorneys, bankers and accountants? Who do they co-invest with?
That kind of work is slower than buying a list, but it produces much better intelligence.
I know of one case where the initial target looked almost invisible. There was no flashy family office website, no obvious direct-investment team, and very little that would have caused the family to show up on a standard startup investor search. But the founder of the original operating company had sold years earlier, remained active in the industry, and still had deep relationships with former executives and suppliers. Once those relationships were mapped, the path in became obvious. The “family office” was hard to find only if you started by searching for a family office. It was much easier to find if you started with the family’s business history.
This is why I think the family office market rewards context more than coverage. Everyone has access to databases, LinkedIn and AI now. Building lists is easy. The information advantage from merely knowing that an investor exists has collapsed. The advantage comes from understanding the story behind the capital, the people around it, and the relationships that actually influence decisions.
Amateurs collect names. Professionals map relevance, influence and timing.
Founders often assume that wealthy families are sitting around waiting for attractive private-company opportunities to show up. That is rarely the problem.
Once a family becomes known for making direct investments, deals start arriving from everywhere. Lawyers, bankers, friends, other families, former execs, etc. all send deals, and VC and PE firms send co-investments.
The problem is not a shortage of deals. It is filtering. And that’s why the source of the introduction matters so much.
Founders talk constantly about getting a “warm intro,” but that phrase can mean almost anything. There is a huge difference between someone saying, “John, meet Steve. Steve has a company and I thought you two should connect,” vs. someone saying, “John, I have known Steve for ten years, I invested in his last company, I am invested in this one, and I think you should seriously look at what he is doing.”
Both are introductions, but only one carries real weight.
The second one includes something much more important than warmth. It includes transferred conviction. The person making the introduction is putting his own credibility behind the opportunity.
A few years ago, I watched a founder spend months trying to get in front of a particular family. He had tried email, LinkedIn and a couple of weak introductions with no success. Eventually, someone who had previously done business with the family made a very different kind of introduction. He did not just forward a deck. He explained why he believed in the founder and why he thought the opportunity fit the family’s history. The family took the meeting almost immediately. Same founder, same company, same round. The only thing that changed was who carried the message and how much credibility came with it.
That matters because family offices and flooded with deals, and they value filtered deal flow from people whose judgment they already trust. In my experience, the strongest family office relationships often come from people who have already made money together, operated businesses together, served on boards together, or simply spent enough years together to know whose judgment is worth listening to.
So the goal is not simply to find someone who can make an introduction. The goal is to find someone whose judgment matters to the family and give that person enough confidence that he is willing to advocate for you.
That is a much higher bar, but it is also why the right introductions work.
Another mistake is assuming the person with the biggest investment title is the person who controls the decision.
Sometimes that is true, but sometimes it is completely wrong.
I know family offices where the CIO runs the process but the person who created the wealth can kill a deal in one sentence. I have seen younger family members become the de facto tech investors because the older generation knows real estate, manufacturing or distribution but has no interest in learning AI. I have also seen outside advisers with enormous influence because they have worked with the family for 20 or 30 years.
And, of course, there are highly institutionalized family offices that operate very much like professional investment firms with investment committees, staff and formal processes.
There is no single model.
The practical lesson here is that founders need to understand not only who has the title, but who actually causes an investment to happen, and who can kill a deal. Those are not always the same person.
Any experienced CEO who has sold into large companies understands this. The person running procurement may control the process, but someone else owns the budget, someone else has political influence, and someone else may have the authority to say yes or no. If you have built and sold a company, managed a board or spent years navigating large customers, this should feel very familiar.
Family offices are no different.
Family offices want to make money. That part should not be romanticized. Sophisticated families are not writing big checks simply because they want to help entrepreneurs.
What makes family offices interesting, though, is that their reasons for owning a private company can be broader than the mandate of an institutional fund.
A VC is managing somebody else’s capital inside a defined structure. Check size, ownership, sector, stage, geography, fund life and return requirements all matter, and are governed by GP/LP agreements. A family office may care just as much about returns, but it can also care about things that do not fit neatly into a fund model.
For example, the family may know the industry extremely well, It may own another company that could benefit from the technology, or it may want exposure to a sector where the family originally made its fortune. The next generation might be interested in AI, climate, defense or life sciences. The family might also want to invest alongside another family it knows and trusts. Not uncommonly, there could be a personal connection to a disease, a geography or a social issue. The investment may create access, learning or relationships that have value beyond the return.
Sometimes, frankly, the family simply likes the founder.
That may sound soft, but successful entrepreneurs spent decades making judgments about people. They hired executives, backed managers, acquired companies, made bets under uncertainty and developed strong instincts about who can execute. Those instincts do not disappear after they sell the business. If anything, many cashed-out founders trust those instincts more because they have seen the difference between a great PowerPoint and an operator who actually gets things done.
That’s why the right question is not simply, “Is this a good investment for them?” The better question is, “Why would this family actually want to own a piece of this business?”
That question forces a founder to think like the investor instead of simply thinking about the financing round.
The VC world has trained founders to think in terms of portfolio fit. That is useful, but with family offices I think the broader concept is family relevance.
The first kind of relevance is operating relevance. Does the family own or understand businesses adjacent to yours? A family that built a distribution company may immediately understand a logistics technology that a generalist investor finds abstract.
The second is knowledge relevance. Founders often underestimate comprehension risk. A deal can look unattractive just because the investor does not understand it well enough to become comfortable. This is especially true in biotech, medtech, advanced manufacturing, deep tech and some areas of financial services. On the flip side, if the family already knows the industry, you are starting the discussion several steps ahead.
The third is relationship relevance. Who else is involved? Is another family investing? Is there a board member the family knows? Has a trusted entrepreneur or co-investor already committed? In private markets, the social architecture around a deal can materially reduce uncertainty.
The fourth is personal relevance. This should never be manufactured, but when it exists, it can be powerful. A healthcare investor may care more deeply about a disease that affected someone in the family. A family may care about investing in its home region. A next-generation family member may be particularly interested in education, climate, defense or another specific area.
All of those things create context, and context is what separates another random pitch from something that feels worth examining.
This is where the best founders begin to separate themselves. Most founders stop at sector fit. The better ones ask whether the family has operating knowledge, a trusted relationship, a strategic reason, a personal connection, or some combination of those factors that makes the opportunity unusually relevant.
This may be the part founders underestimate most.
Investor fit is only half the equation. The other half is what I call activation.
A family may have been interested in healthcare for 20 years. That does not mean it is ready to invest in your healthcare company today. Something usually has to move the opportunity from theoretically attractive to actionable.
Some possibilities: Maybe the family just sold a business and has new liquidity, or maybe another investment returned capital. Maybe a new CIO has decided to increase direct investing. Maybe the second generation is taking over and changing the portfolio, or another family they trust is investing in your round. Maybe one of their operating companies has a problem your technology can solve. Maybe the valuation is finally attractive. Maybe a regulatory or technological shift has changed the economics.
There are lots of potential triggers.
Most databases are reasonably good at telling you who might fit. They are much less useful at telling you who has a reason to act now.
That distinction matters because a family office with perfect sector fit but no activation can waste six months of your time, while a family with only moderate fit but a strong trigger may write the check. For an experienced CEO, that time cost matters enormously. Losing six months talking to investors who were never really going to move is far more expensive than focusing on other likely investors or failing to add another 200 names to the pipeline.
If I were building a family office target list today, I’d rank prospects not only by “fit”, but I’d also build what I think of as a Family Office Activation Map.
For each serious prospect, I would want to understand four things:
Origin: Where did the family’s wealth come from?
Affinity: What does the family genuinely understand or care about today?
Trust: Who influences the family’s judgment and whose opinion actually matters?
Trigger: What is happening now that could cause this family to invest?
If I can’t answer those questions, I obviously do not know enough about the family yet.
The most expensive mistake in family office fundraising is not failing to find enough family offices. It’s spending months with the wrong ones.
This is where old-fashioned detective work still matters.
Use the databases, PitchBook, LinkedIn, conference lists, industry directories, etc. But don’t stop there, because the real work starts after the database ends.
Who sold a company in your sector 12 years ago? Who owned it? Who was the CFO? Where is that person now? Who sat on the board? Who advised the transaction? Who co-invested with the family later? Who does their estate work? Which banker has been close to them for 20 years? Which family foundation shares directors with their investment entity?
That is where the family office trail starts to appear.
Look at M&A transactions in your sector over the last 10 or 20 years. Review board memberships, foundations, co-investors, former executives and operating company ownership. Find the lawyers, bankers and accountants who seem to show up around successful entrepreneurial families.
Regional networks matter too. In places like Washington, Boston, New York, Miami, Chicago Silicon Valley, etc., there are circles of successful entrepreneurs who have known (and worked with and invested with) one another for decades. Some of the best family office intelligence never appears in a database because it lives inside those networks.
Anybody who has spent time in YPO, served on boards, built and sold a business, worked with investment bankers or spent 20 years in one industry already understands this intuitively. Business networks are much more interconnected than they look from the outside.
The advantage comes from figuring out which connections actually matter.
Good intelligence gives you context, and context tells you whether the opportunity is worth pursuing, who should make the introduction, what angle will resonate, and whether the timing is actually right.
You do not need to create 50 different decks, but you do have to understand the buyer.
A VC is usually asking whether the company can become large enough to generate the return the fund requires. A family office may ask that too, but it may also be asking whether it understands the business, whether it can add value, who else is investing, whether it wants to own the asset for seven or ten or more years, and whether there is any strategic relevance to the rest of the family’s activities.
There is another question that matters more than founders realize: why is this opportunity attractive enough to justify the complexity of making a direct investment?
Direct investing is work. Somebody has to diligence the company, negotiate the investment, monitor it, deal with future rounds and eventually find liquidity. The alternative is easy. The family can hand another $5 million to a private equity, venture or hedge fund manager and let somebody else do all of that work.
So when you ask a family office to invest directly in your company, you are not only competing against other startups. You are competing against every other use of the family’s capital, including doing nothing.
Your opportunity needs to be interesting enough to justify the hassle.
This is one reason generic fundraising presentations fall flat. If the same deck and the same pitch can be delivered unchanged to a VC, a retired industrial CEO, a multigenerational family office and a strategic corporate investor, the founder has not thought deeply enough about who is sitting across the table.
Yes, the business fundamentals, market, competitive differentiators, protected IP, and the team all still matter. But experienced private investors also want to know WHY this opportunity makes sense for them.
For all the difficulty involved in finding and understanding family offices, there is a reason founders keep pursuing them. When the fit is right, they can be terrific investors.
They can invest earlier, and they can hold longer. They can take smaller ownership positions. They can invest before a VC comes in or anchor a round. They can invest alongside friends. They can follow their money. They can make strategic introductions. And sometimes they can make an investment simply because they believe the founder will figure it out.
There may be no fundraising cycle, no outside LPs and no artificial deadline forcing an exit.
That flexibility is real.
It is also why family offices are harder to model. Institutional money is easier to understand because the rules are explicit. Family money can be more attractive precisely because the rules are personal.
And that is the paradox.
Family office capital is absolutely worth pursuing for founders raising private capital, especially when there is a clear reason a particular family should care about the company. But I would not begin by building a larger list. I’d begin by doing better homework.
As mentioned above, for every family I am serious about, I want to know where the wealth came from, what the family understands or cares about, who they trust, and what could cause them to act now.
Most founders begin the family office conversation with the question, “How do I find family offices?”
That’s the wrong question.
The much better question is this:
Why would this particular family want to own a piece of this particular company, and why now?
If you can answer that convincingly, you are no longer just another founder looking for money. You have given the family a reason to pay attention.
And if your family office strategy begins and ends with a list, you are already one step behind. Start with the family, not the office.
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