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 · The companion volume
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 series is a practitioner's field guide to building one on purpose.
The Deliberate Counselor: Law Student Edition
Now with early readers. The decisions that matter before you ever bill an hour.
The Deliberate Counselor: Associate Edition
Coming soon. The years that compound: how to practice deliberately when the work is coming at you fastest.
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. He writes a weekly LinkedIn series, 25 Primers for 25 Years, on the mechanics of the fund industry. 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.
