The Traditional Fund Administrator

Graduate of Rider University. Andrew joined a traditional Fund Administration located in Princeton, New Jersey right out of college. He was there for approximately 10 years helping them scale from 7 employees to 45 and about 30 venture funds to well over 300 venture funds  by the time he exited. Andrew got to work on many name brand venture capital funds during his time there. During his time at this traditional fund administration, Andrew enjoyed the CFO aspect and loved helping clients with more than just debits and credits, however at scale the fund administrator turned into a reactive back office and lost its ability to be a proactive CFO group. Andrew was lucky to meet Carta during his time at the traditional fund administration shop. He fell in love with the team and sent the email that would launch Carta’s Fund Administration services. 

The New Age Fund Administrator

Realizing that fund administration was broken, Andrew came to Carta as a founding member of Carta’s Fund Administration group. The early belief was to apply a ton of automation to venture capital fund administration and with that automation it would empower the human team to focus more on the customer and their needs in a way that the competition could never dream of. For Andrew’s first three years at Carta he was laser focused on building fund administration. This included hiring team members, working with the product teams to build the next generation of fund administration software, helping build and scale functional supporting team, working with marketing to build assets, selling with the sales team, training new hires, onboarding new clients, and doing his best to apply CFO services to as many clients as possible. Andrew helped take fund administration to 0 funds to over 500 funds, while he was on the fund administration team. 

The Need and Ambition For Service

At the three year mark of Andrew's journey at Carta he decided after some soul searching to start a new team called the Pre Close Team. Andrew's passion has always been the CFO responsibilities, he loves helping, mentoring, and guiding venture capitalists. The Pre Close Team’s philosophy was to help clients when they sign up with Carta until their very first capital call. Two core services were created, one being fund formations and the other being advisory services. Andrew would build out the entire offering for both and hire a team to assist with the formation part. Over the next two years the Pre Close Team would form about 350 funds. This would include all legal docs, necessary regulatory filings, and financial modeling to educate managers on how to run their new fund.  Andrew would run his advisory services solely, this would be for clients that were not using Carta for fund formations, but still wanted help. He was able to work with over 100 managers in this way. These services included financial modeling for both funds and management companies, portfolio construction and liquidation, capital call planning, IRR and TVPI planning, limited partner and general partner waterfalls, pitch deck reviews, conversations with limited partners, vendor management, and tons of ad hoc questions. 

The Next Part of the Journey - Brownie Ventures Solutions, LLC

As the last 15 years of Andrew’s career has progressed, it's always been clear to him that helping, mentoring, and guiding venture capitalists was something he’s always enjoyed. The best way to focus on this solely was to build Brownie Venture Solutions, LLC. The core goal of this new venture is to provide CFO services for venture capital funds and only that. Cut out all of the corporate items and stay laser focused on the customer at all times.