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Matthias Knab, Opalesque for New Managers:

An institutional search may start with roughly 500 managers. One gets funded. Most of the rest are eliminated long before anyone reads their deck, and many never find out they were in the running.

That gap between a good strategy and a successful raise is the subject of the Capital Growth Summit 2027, a live online event presented by Opalesque from 11 to 14 January 2027. Over four mornings, twelve speakers - allocators, capital raisers, launch and branding specialists and an editor - explain how fund managers actually get screened, met, funded and talked about.

Live attendance is free. Each session is a standalone 60-minute hour with live Q&A, so attendees tick only the sessions they need and register once. Every booked session comes with its own join link, a calendar entry, email reminders and a single SMS reminder 15 minutes before the start.

Why January

The dates are deliberate. Mid-January is when allocators set their pacing plans for the year and when managers decide how hard to push their raise. The summit runs just ahead of Davos and iConnections Global Alts Miami, so managers can go into the year's first big round of meetings with a sharper plan, and allocators can compare notes on how their peers screen and select.

Sessions run back to back from 10:00 to 13:00 ET each day (7:00 PT, 15:00 London, 16:00 CET).

Monday, 11 January: The allocator's lens

The week opens on the other side of the table. Francois-Serge Lhabitant, PhD, CEO and CIO of Kedge Capital, which invests over $5 billion in hedge funds for the Bertarelli family, makes the case against "diworsification" in Fewer, Better: Selecting Hedge Funds in the Age of Passive and AI. He explains how a concentrated allocator screens hundreds of proposals, why almost none get through, and what a hedge fund allocation must deliver that passive and AI-driven products cannot.

Don Steinbrugge, CFA, of Agecroft Partners follows with From 500 to 1: Understanding the Allocator's Elimination Process, walking through each stage of an institutional search - the silent quantitative screen, the first meeting, investment and operational due diligence - and showing where managers are lost and why great managers so often fail to raise assets.

Lucy Meiland of After Yellow, who raised $4.7bn for hedge fund strategies over ten years, closes the morning with Chosen Before the Meeting: Winning the Fifteen-Year Allocator Relationship. Her argument: preference is usually decided long before the first meeting, often before the manager knows they are being considered.

Tuesday, 12 January: Building a firm allocators can back

Brian MacDougall of Thrive Academy, an executive coach and former hedge fund co-founder, opens with The Stress of Working for God, a look at the hidden costs of firms built around one extraordinary founder: whether truth can travel upward, whether dissent survives hierarchy, and what that means for key-person and succession risk.

Tilo Bonow, founder and CEO of PIABO, follows with If AI Doesn't Recommend You, You're Not in the Deal. Allocators now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Claude about a manager before taking the call. Bonow shows managers how AI forms its view of a firm, why consistency across every public source has become essential, and how allocators should stay sceptical of what the machines tell them.

Clayton Heijman, founder of Privium Fund Management, completes the day with Your Own Fund, or Someone Else's Platform? What Launching Actually Takes: standalone structure versus hosted platform, how jurisdiction shapes who will allocate, what launching really costs, and which structural details surface in operational due diligence.

Wednesday, 13 January: Winning the relationship

Claudia Quintela, CFA, founder of Vibe Advisors, opens with The First $100 Million: The Brutal Maths of an Early Raise - how many meetings it takes to produce one allocation, realistic conversion rates at each stage, how long a first close really takes, and which investors actually write early tickets.

Benjamin Ball of Benjamin Ball Associates, who has coached pitches for IPOs, M&A mandates and private equity fundraises for more than twenty years, follows with In the Room: Why Most Manager Pitches Lose Before They Begin - including the "anonymity test," why "uncorrelated" differentiates nobody, and how to prepare for the Q&A where most pitches are won or lost.

Danielle Patterson, Executive Director of Family Office Access at ISS Market Intelligence, closes with Foster. Offer. Align.™, her relationship-led framework for approaching family offices: why access does not equal trust, and how to build a family office strategy that compounds rather than relying on transactional outreach.

Thursday, 14 January: Visibility and measurement

Dana Tonkin, founder and creative director of BasisPoint Group, which serves more than 250 investment managers, starts the final day with First Impressions Before a Word Is Spoken: what allocators read into a manager's website, deck and LinkedIn presence before the first conversation, and which first-impression mistakes are cheap to fix.

Opalesque founder Matthias Knab follows with PR Without the Retainer: The $0 Media Strategy for Boutique Managers, drawing on 23 years on the receiving end of the industry's press releases and pitches to explain, from the editor's side of the desk, what actually gets a fund covered.

Paul Das, founder and managing director of ProFundCom, closes the summit with From Open Rate to Allocation: Measuring What Marketing Actually Does - how to connect content and outreach to real pipeline movement, where AI genuinely helps, and how to build a marketing budget case with numbers a CIO will trust.

Who should attend

The summit is built for fund managers across asset classes - from emerging managers preparing a first raise to established firms reviewing their marketing - as well as institutional investors, family offices, wealth managers, capital raisers, founders and the service providers who work with them. Allocators get a rare look at how their peers screen and select; managers get a stage-by-stage view of how they are being judged.

Free to attend, with an optional VIP Pass

Registration is free for every session booked. Attendees can add further sessions later by returning to the site and registering again with the same email address.

For those who cannot attend every morning, or who are joining from Asia-Pacific where the sessions fall late in the evening, an optional VIP Pass at $99 provides unlimited replays of all twelve sessions, booked or not, a full transcript of every session, a one-page practical checklist from each speaker, and a Certificate of Participation per session for CPD/CPT records.

How to register

Visit www.capitalgrowthsummit.com, tick the sessions you want, and complete one short form. Your join links arrive by email straight away.

Choose your sessions and register free.

Can't make it live, or want the full set? The VIP Pass ($99) gives you:

• Unlimited replays of all 12 sessions, including the ones you didn't book, to watch whenever and as often as you like


• A full transcript of every session, so you can search, skim and quote instead of rewatching


• A one-page checklist for each session with the speaker's key steps, ready to use with your team


• A Certificate of Participation for each session, for your firm's CPD/CPT records