The Solo GP Stack

The solo GP is now a durable category, not a curiosity — and the entire model rests on leverage from software and outsourced infrastructure. One person genuinely can run a fund that would have needed four people a decade ago, but only with a deliberately chosen stack. Here is what that stack looks like, category by category, in the order the pain arrives.

Fund infrastructure: outsource all of it

The existential rule of solo fund management: never do your own fund administration. Capital calls, capital accounts, K-1 coordination, and audit support are undifferentiated work where errors are catastrophic and LP-visible.

• AngelList remains the default full-service rail for US solo GPs — formation, banking, admin, capital calls, and LP portal in one subscription, with Vauban handling international structures.
• Sydecar and Allocations compete hard on speed and price, particularly for managers running SPVs alongside the fund.
• For subscription documents specifically, Passthrough has quietly killed the worst week of fund closing; many admins bundle it.

The build-it-yourself alternative — separate counsel, boutique admin, custom docs — buys flexibility a Fund I solo GP almost never needs at a cost in attention they can't afford.

CRM: the system that is actually your firm

A solo GP's network is the entire sourcing engine, and it has to be captured passively because there is no associate logging calls.

• Attio and folk are the modern lightweight picks — flexible, fast, priced for one seat.
• Affinity is the category's institutional standard; its automatic relationship capture is worth the premium once check volume and LP count justify it.

Whichever you choose, the discipline matters more than the tool: every company seen gets a record and a pass reason, every LP conversation gets a stage. Your future Fund II diligence file is being written in this database whether you maintain it or not.

Deal flow and docs

• DocSend for your LP deck — the engagement analytics on who read what, and for how long, are genuinely useful fundraising signal. Papermark is the open alternative.
• Signal platforms like Harmonic or Specter can wait until your inbound and network flow prove insufficient; they are accelerants for a working process, not substitutes for one.
• Granola or Fireflies for meeting notes — a solo GP takes every call alone, and unrecorded context is context lost.

Portfolio and reporting

Early on, a disciplined spreadsheet honestly suffices for a dozen positions. The graduation point comes with LP reporting duty:

• Standard Metrics, Visible, or Rundit to collect portfolio company updates without chasing founders by email every quarter.
• Your positions themselves mostly live in Carta, since your companies do — expect to consume cap table data more than manage it.

The glue

Notion as the firm's memory — theses, deal memos, LP notes, process docs. One inbox, one calendar, and genuine restraint about adding more. Every additional tool a solo GP adopts is a recurring tax on the scarcest resource in the model: their own attention.

The buying order

1. At formation: fund platform (admin, banking, docs), CRM, DocSend, Notion. That's the whole day-one stack.
2. At first close: meeting capture, and the update cadence tooling your LP letter needs.
3. When the portfolio is real (15+ names): portfolio monitoring.
4. When flow plateaus: sourcing signal platforms.
5. Probably never: enterprise anything. The moment the stack requires an operations hire to run, the solo model has quietly failed.

The honest constraint

The stack solves logistics; it does not solve judgment, coverage, or the fact that a solo GP is a single point of failure — the thing LPs most consistently probe. The best answer to that concern isn't software. It's the visible discipline of a manager whose systems are so clean that the fund would be legible to anyone tomorrow. The stack above, well run, is that answer in practice.