Jessie Guo had no connections at Legacy Venture when she decided to reach out. She had just moved to the United States, finished her MBA at UC Davis, and knew exactly the kind of work she wanted to do. So she wrote a cold email to Russ Hall, the co-founder of Legacy Venture, introduced herself, and waited. He responded the same day.
That exchange, now 12 years ago, set in motion a career that sits at an unusual intersection: rigorous venture capital investing in service of large-scale charitable giving. Every investor in Next Legacy Partners’ flagship fund-of-funds has committed to donating 100 percent of their distributions to nonprofit causes of their choosing. The firm picks the best venture managers it can find, generates real returns, and those returns go directly to charity. The total amount distributed to date has crossed three billion dollars.
Jessie is an investment partner at Next Legacy, the firm formed when Legacy Venture merged with Next Play Capital in 2023. She spoke with Marcos Hernandez, host of LP Uncovered, about how the firm thinks about portfolio construction, what she looks for in emerging managers, and why she believes the best GP relationships are built long before a term sheet is signed.
From Beijing to the Bay Area
Jessie began her career in Beijing, not in investment banking, though that was the original plan. As a finance major in 2008, she assumed her path would lead to a traditional banking role at CICC, China’s largest investment bank. Once inside, though, she found the standard banking work less interesting than a newer initiative taking shape within the firm. CICC was building a wealth management business, and a small team was tasked with exploring whether it could offer fund-of-funds products to high-net-worth clients.
The timing was significant. In 2007, China had officially legalized the limited partnership structure, which had previously existed in a murky, informal state. Once the law was in place, venture capital funds began forming rapidly across the country.
“Back then, seventy percent of the LP base in China were individuals. I remember thinking, wow, all these individuals who are interested in venture funds, how can they select all these VC funds?”
Jessie became one of four people who helped CICC launch what became a fund-of-funds business. They started in an advisory capacity, helping wealthy clients evaluate and access venture managers, then built out an internal business plan for a dedicated vehicle. This experience proved to be an early lesson in manager selection at scale, and it shaped how she thinks about the job today.
In 2012, Jessie left Beijing for California, where her husband had taken a postdoctoral position at Stanford. She drew a 100-mile circle around the university, applied to programs within it, and landed at UC Davis, which sits exactly 100 miles from Stanford. Unlike many of her classmates who used the MBA to change direction, Jessie had no interest in pivoting.
“I feel like I was lucky enough to find my career aspiration and passion in LP. I knew when I came to the US that I was not looking for a pivot.”
After graduating, she searched for organizations doing the kind of work she cared about. Legacy Venture, with its model of philanthropic investors channeling venture returns to charity, stood out. She sent Russ a cold email. He wrote back the same day. Twelve years later, she’s still there.
The Merger and the Mission
Next Legacy was formed when Legacy Venture and Next Play Capital merged in 2023. The two firms had known each other for over a decade before that, and the idea of combining began taking shape during the pandemic, when both teams started asking whether there was a more structural way to work together.
Legacy Venture, founded in 1999, had spent two decades helping philanthropists and nonprofits invest in early-stage venture. Next Play Capital was built around a community of athletes, cultural luminaries, and sports industry leaders who wanted access to the same asset class. Both firms were impact-oriented in their own way, and that shared positioning made the eventual combination feel natural.
“Both prior firms are very mission-driven. Even though if you look at the room of the investors, they can be very different, but very mission-driven and value-aligned.”
The firm deliberately avoided putting the words “venture” or “capital” in the new name. Next Legacy Partners was chosen to signal that the community came first. Today, that community includes philanthropists, nonprofit organizations, professional athletes, and changemakers. They’re connected through a shared interest in early-stage technology, and a common purpose of giving back.
Marcos noted during the conversation that very few firms in the allocator space actually follow through on the philanthropic commitments they describe on their websites, pointing to a figure he had seen of over two billion dollars in total distributions. Jessie updated the number.
“We just crossed over three billion dollars.”
How the Portfolio Is Built
Next Legacy invests exclusively in venture capital, which means Jessie does not have to navigate across asset classes or shift allocations based on the macro environment. The entire portfolio is early-stage technology, and within that, the firm divides its exposure across three types of managers.
Roughly one-quarter of the capital goes to what Jessie calls platform venture firms: large, multi-stage managers with broad market coverage whose portfolios include companies like Anthropic, SpaceX, and OpenAI. These funds are not cheap to access, and the question of whether a billion-dollar fund can still return venture-scale multiples is one the industry debates constantly. Jessie says it’s possible.
“Certain investments and deals, if you actually bet on the right company, the return profile can still look pretty attractive even at the billion-dollar fund size. It’s a hard math problem, for sure. But we’ve also seen our billion-dollar fund size managers, if they are really the top ones, can still continue to perform well.”
A second portion of the portfolio goes to what she calls classic venture firms: focused, early-stage managers with long track records in specific domains like enterprise infrastructure, fintech, or consumer technology. These are not generalists chasing every trend. They have a defined area of expertise, and founders in those sectors tend to seek them out specifically.
The third bucket is emerging managers. Next Legacy runs a dedicated emerging manager fund-of-funds for funds in their first, second, or third cycles. Initial commitments here typically range from one million to five million dollars, with the expectation that successful managers graduate over time into the flagship fund, where the firm can write commitments of 15 million to 20 million dollars or more.
For emerging managers, Jessie says the ones she finds most compelling have built a genuine community around themselves, whether that is a tight network of technical operators, or a following built through consistent, substantive thought leadership.
“They are taking a very community-driven approach. They craft a very trusted community around themselves. That can help them to identify and get into the next generation of AI applications at a very early stage.”
What Do Good GP Relationships Actually Look Like?
Jessie is direct about what she finds frustrating from managers on the fundraising trail. With AI tools making it easy to automate outreach and generate templated follow-ups, she sees a growing gap between volume and quality in how GPs communicate with LPs.
A growth-stage manager sending quarterly updates to a seed-focused, venture-only LP is not staying in touch. It is creating noise.
“If the LP talked about being venture-only and early-stage focused, it doesn’t make sense for growth-stage managers to continue to give monthly or quarterly updates.”
What she values instead is genuine curiosity about why Next Legacy does what it does. The conversations that have stuck with her over the years are not the ones about fund size or portfolio count. They are the ones where a manager took the time to understand the firm’s mission and asked about it seriously.
“I really appreciate genuine curiosity from GP managers who want to understand why we are doing this. What matters for the long term when we are really discussing not just the fund investment, but the partnership that lasts over a decade or decades.”
In the end, Jessie’s advice is straightforward: listen during meetings, track what you learn, and let it shape every conversation that follows.
Orientation toward long-term partnership, built through events, co-investments, and community rather than quarterly updates, is ultimately what drives everything at Next Legacy. The returns fund the giving. The community sustains the returns. And for Jessie, the work continues to be exactly what she hoped it would be when she sent that first cold email 12 years ago: a career she actually cares about.
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