- Refining VC
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- Billion Dollar PDFs
I have now published over 200,000 words about Venture Capital Marketing.
That’s a deep body of work about the nichest topic within the niche of venture capital.
I’ve learned there are two ways to win attention with words.
You can accumulate a body of work until it becomes undeniable.
Or
You can compress judgment until it becomes unavoidable.
I have been playing the first game, but lately I’ve been thinking about the documents that played the second.
Bitcoin's whitepaper (9 pages), The Tesla Master Plan (3), Attention Is All You Need (10).
Jeremy Giffon coined a name for these - Billion Dollar PDFs. Single documents with (tr)illion dollar impact, literally.
I compiled some at billiondollarpdf.com. That site has over 100,000 visitors now - just eclipsing my most read blog. Partly because the subject is interesting, mostly because the name is.
I’ve written before about the importance of naming your ideas. Good names compress an entire worldview into something founders or LPs can remember and repeat.
Likewise, those documents work the same way. Compression made them sticky. Stickiness made them spread. Ideas that spread change how people allocate capital.
The irony isn’t lost on me.
My original aim for this blog was for 4 minute reads. I often stray to 7. More words don’t always create more understanding, and they can create more work for the reader.
In many ways, that contradicts the very idea behind “Refinery Media” A refinery doesn’t create more raw material. It removes everything that doesn’t matter.
One of our clients, among the oldest in the valley, holds brevity as a written internal value. Another firm’s we’ve worked with anchor LP believes every great tech business can be described in just 2 words.
An incredible marketing challenge - every word carries 10x the weight when you only get 2.
Looking back, I don’t think the biggest lesson from 200,000 words is about content strategy, distribution, newsletters, X, podcasts, or websites.
It's the point I landed on last week from another angle - the best VC marketing has zero distance betwen the work and the marketing.
So if I had to compress 200,000 words into two:
Publish proof.
Laurie, Refinery Media
If you made it all the way through, thanks so much for reading! A thousand VCs now open this every week. If it's helped you think differently about marketing, Venture, or storytelling, please send it to someone in your orbit.
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