The 2nd Largest Solo GP in the World: How (and Why) Salil Deshpande Manages $750M with Zero Employees
The insider story of how (and why) Salil manages $750M across three funds entirely by himself and without any partners, analysts, contractors, or even EAs
Most VCs will tell you it’s impossible to scale a fund past $100 M without building a team, but Salil Deshpande proves them wrong every day (and he’s not even close to struggling).
While mega-funds staff up with dozens of analysts, associates, principals, and partners to handle deal flow, Salil has invested in over 100 infrastructure software companies, maintains relationships with 300 limited partners, and delivers consistent 5- 6x returns.
His historical average is 6x gross. His first fund returned 5.2x gross. His second is tracking at 3x with many years left before harvesting.
Salil’s Uncorrelated Ventures is an institutional fund that co-invests along with top firms such as Accel, Benchmark, Bessemer, Greylock, Craft, Andreessen Horowitz, Insight, Lightspeed, Mayfield, Menlo, Bain Capital, GV, Sierra, Norwest and others, often collaborating as a sounding board and sharing deal flow, which enables him to access more deals than firms ten times his size.
The Solo GP Rankings: where Salil stands
Salil is not a one-off case of a successful solo GP. There are many others, although not quite as large.
I started researching institutional solo GPs managing $10M + in AUM. The table clearly shows a small but growing category of investors who are proving that one person can manage hundreds of millions, even billions, entirely alone.
Note: Elad Gil ($1.5B AUM) is often cited as a solo GP but operates with supporting staff and many FTEs, making him not truly solo in the strictest sense.
This makes Salil the second-largest solo GP by AUM, behind only Oren Zeev at $2 billion+.
The gap between Zeev at $2B+ and Salil at $750M is substantial, but together they prove that the model works well into the billions. Below that, there’s a cluster in the $14-48M range, suggesting two probably different approaches: those building toward institutional scale (Salil, Zeev) and those keeping funds deliberately smaller.
There are other smaller solo-GPs generally in that cluster, such as Ashmeet Sidana, Manu Kumar, Tim Connors, Lui Jiang, John Komkov, Joe Wilson, Shelley Zhuang, among others, but they’re not in the table because I couldn’t find their precise AUMs.
As more tools emerge and track records prove the model, this list will likely grow. But for now, it’s a small group demonstrating what’s possible when you strip venture capital down to its essential elements: judgment, domain expertise, and access to founders.
How does Salil do this?
His contrarian fundraising strategy
Conventional wisdom says emerging managers need to hustle, chase every lead, follow up relentlessly, and build relationships over months or years before asking for commitments.
Salil never did any of that. He never chased a single LP. Each one of them came through introductions, and his process was identical regardless of check size.
When someone expressed interest, he sent them the deck and background materials. Then he gave them an hour on Zoom. During the Zoom, he answered every question they had. Immediately after, he sent whatever additional information they requested.
Then he never followed up again because he wanted to spend his time with people who are the most interested.
This approach delivered conversion rates that sound impossible. Out of roughly 100 conversations with institutional LPs across three funds, he converted better than 75%. The remaining LPs were a long tail of friends and colleagues who invested without formal pitches.
But part of this success could be attributed to his past and background.
Before going solo, Salil spent 14 years building a track record at top-tier firms. At Bain Capital, he completed 42 deals in 7 years (more deals per year than any other partner across PE, VC, or any other business unit in the history of the firm, still).
His strategy was to go somewhat high volume, build positions across multiple rounds, and have no ownership requirements. He was the only partner pursuing this approach, and it worked.
His career track record sits around 6x TVPI with IRRs around 35%.
When he launched Uncorrelated, Bain Capital itself invested $76 million across his first two funds. Multiple Bain LPs followed, giving a strong signal about quality.
His pitch to new LPs was straightforward: “Here’s what I’ve been doing for 14 years. Here are the results. I’m going to keep doing exactly that.”
He even regularly waived the $1 million minimum for individual LPs with interesting positions or backgrounds. If a C-level executive at a portfolio company wanted to invest but couldn’t write a full $1 million check, Salil let them in anyway because if the person believed in the fund enough to put their own money in, they would also think about how to help portfolio companies. So why create artificial barriers?
Basically, Salil’s no chase strategy works because his product is strong enough that interested people close themselves. It leads me to think that perhaps if you need aggressive follow-up to convert LPs, you are expending sales effort to compensate for a weaker product.
How he manages 300 LPs as a one-person firm
300 LPs with no team sounds like a nightmare of relationship management. But for Salil, it’s not.
Salil writes quarterly letters that range from 5 to 15 pages. These are dense, detailed documents with tables, charts, and specific narratives about every meaningful portfolio development. One comprehensive document serves 300 people.
Most importantly, he reports bad news immediately and transparently. Every markdown, every down round, every value decrease gets explained in full context. If a company he invested in at $40 million post raises at $30 million post, he tells LPs exactly what happened and why.
This radical transparency eliminates most LP anxiety. When people have comprehensive information every quarter, their impulse to schedule catch-up calls goes down.
For LPs who do want formal portfolio reviews, Salil funnels everyone to the week or two after each quarterly letter. This ensures people have already read the latest information, so he’s not spending hours repeating the same basic updates across twenty separate calls.
But most LPs never request formal meetings. They send brief emails or occasional calls asking about updates, and he stays accessible.
This structure allows him to dedicate 30% of his time to LP management. The remaining 70% goes to founders and portfolio companies.
The difference from traditional fund structures is evident. Because for them, investor relations becomes its own full-time role, requiring dedicated staff to manage LP requests, prepare materials, and coordinate meetings. Salil eliminated that entire layer through better information architecture.
This efficiency extends beyond LP management into how Salil thinks about the core work itself: picking companies. And here, his approach gets even more contrarian.
His mathematical argument for diversification
Salil’s investment strategy contradicts nearly everything prestigious firms teach about venture capital.
