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Matt Burk
Founder & CEO, Verivest
In this conversation, Ahmad Ashrafi interviews Matt Burk, founder and CEO of Airyvest, who shares his extensive experience in fund administration and private capital. They discuss the complexities of fund management, common mistakes made by new managers, and the importance of capital raising.
Most managers shouldn't launch a fund — yet. After 300+ advisory engagements, Matt Burk's most frequent advice is 'don't': a fund only makes sense when deal frequency, asset duration, and investor base match the pooled structure — short-term lending fits; two big deals a year usually doesn't.
A fund is an order of magnitude more complex than a deal. Multiple assets and multiple investors entering at different times make allocations of income, depreciation, and gains genuinely hard — which is why structure must match the asset model from day one.
The institutional-capital myth kills new funds. Pension funds won't write checks under $50M or exceed 10% of a fund; start with friends and family and work outward in concentric circles — and build a real capital-raising function, because a fund is a business, not a side hustle.
People spend hundreds of thousands and never launch. Ask where the money is actually coming from before drafting documents — and remember tokenization and digital rails are coming, but timing the bleeding edge is its own risk.
