JORDAN SILBER
Books on the fund industry — written from inside it.
Fund formation partner at Cooley LLP. Founder of Vanilla.
Twenty-five years of building private funds — now writing down how the industry actually works.
Two Books on the Fund Industry
Two books, one subject: the bargain at the heart of every private fund — and the firms that live on it. Written for GPs, LPs, allocators, fund CFOs, and fund counsel: the people who actually live inside these documents.
The Blind-Pool Bargain
Coming 2027 · Now with early readers
Hand a manager your capital, locked up for a decade, to invest in deals neither of you has seen yet. On paper it sounds unreasonable. In practice it is the engine of a multi-trillion-dollar industry. The Blind-Pool Bargain takes apart the deal at the center of every private fund — why sophisticated investors agree to it, what keeps it honest, and where it strains — from a lawyer who has spent a career negotiating both sides of the table.
The Firm Behind the Fund
Coming 2027 · Now with early readers
Everyone analyzes the fund. Almost no one writes seriously about the firm that runs it. The Firm Behind the Fund turns the lens on the management company itself — how a fund sponsor is actually built, owned, governed, and passed on, and why so many of the industry's real dramas happen not in the portfolio but inside the GP. The second half of the bargain, and the half nobody puts in the pitch deck.
The Deliberate Counselor
A legal career doesn't happen to you — it gets built, decision by decision. The Deliberate Counselor is a practitioner's field guide to building one on purpose, in two volumes: one written on the bank, one written in the water.
Law Student Edition
Coming 2026 · Now with early readers
Law students rarely choose BigLaw — they are chosen by it, and the relief of being chosen does the rest. Prestige, rankings, and classmate noise stand in for diligence, as if an offer were evidence of fit. This volume applies lawyer-grade diligence to the career itself: reading firm ethos, weighing litigation against business, testing practice areas against temperament, and treating the summer — and the offer — as the diligence events they are. Do not drift. Choose.
Associate Edition
Coming 2026 · Now with early readers
By the associate years, you are in the water — the forces shaping you now have partners, deadlines, staffing systems, and recruiters. In law school, drift looks like choosing prestige; as an associate, drift looks like competence. You can drift while being praised. This volume maps the deliberate associate years: building momentum instead of resetting it, reading firm ethos from the inside, keeping money from silencing the right questions, and behaving like a partner years before any vote.
About Jordan Silber
Jordan Silber is a fund formation partner at Cooley LLP, where he has spent twenty-five years forming venture, growth, and private equity funds and advising the firms that manage them. He is also the founder of Vanilla, Cooley's fund-subscription platform, which has processed more than $100 billion in subscriptions across 1,200+ funds and 50,000+ investors — a story covered by WSJ Pro Venture Capital — and he's talked about the practice, and the life around it, on the Hsu Untied podcast. He writes a weekly series, 25 Primers for 25 Years, on the mechanics of the fund industry, published on LinkedIn and TheFundLawyer. The books grew out of the same conviction as the primers: that this industry is best explained by the people who work inside it, in plain language, with the details left in. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.
