[nostrademons]

What's the relationship between VC funds, VC partners, and VC firms? Are funds typically associated with a specific GP, or are they associated with the firm as a whole? Does the firm offer only a single fund at a time, or does a brand-name VC (say, Sequoia, or Accel, or KP) have multiple offerings with different portfolio strategies?

Also, is there a good way to find out who is about to start raising money for new funds, and where in the lifetime of their fund a particular partner might be? (As in, have they just raised money and are looking for the first couple investments, or is the investment period about to close and the fund's capital has all been invested?)

[surfearth]

Established venture firms may have multiple vehicles (e.g. a seed fund, main fund, or growth fund), but the majority of venture firms tend to invest out of one vehicle at a time (there may be a short period of overlap when new funds are raised).

If you are not an active investor, getting quality access to information about funds can be difficult. I'd recommend the firm's website and crunchbase as free datasources. There are other, higher quality sources, but you need to pay for access (e.g. dow jones venture source).

[lilibalfour]

Yes. You can search Form Ds, which are public information.