Are you not entertained?

You are reading this because you find it interesting, right? Maybe even helpful.

But let us be honest about what this is. Talking about the work is not the work, and reading about the work is not the work either. We can fool ourselves about what we are doing.

Many of us are blessed that our jobs overlap with our interests (speaking for myself), so we happily consume work-related content as entertainment. But consumption always gravitates to whatever is easiest.

When I have to get through something dense, I print it out, because a physical forcing function is the only way it gets read. Online, that same dense doc lives alongside hot takes, buzzy news, and World Cup highlights (come on, England!).

The screen flattens everything, forcing “useful”, "interesting" and "entertaining" to overlap completely.

That means entertainment is no longer a stylistic choice; it is a structural requirement of distribution.

We no longer consume what we choose; we consume what the algorithm serves us, and the algorithm is a ruthless Hollywood producer. It does not care about truth, nuance or sadly, accuracy. It cares about retention and watch time.

Any content that wants to be seen must pay the entertainment tax.

This is exactly what Neil Postman warned us about 40 years ago in Amusing Ourselves to Death, except instead of ruining television, it is allocating global capital.

So what does that mean for venture capital, its marketers and its content?

Narrative is temporarily the product

Venture differs from almost every other industry in 1 structural way - narrative itself has economic value.

In most markets the product can be evaluated today, so narrative decorates it. A good story about a bad restaurant survives exactly 1 visit.

In VC the product is unverifiable for 10 years, so the narrative temporarily is the product. Nothing else exists to evaluate.

This is why storytelling is the great filter for funds - the product (cash returns), takes a decade to show up, and everything a fund sells in the interim (the quarterly update, events, LP conversations) is narrative.

That inverts the standard marketing model:

• good product → marketing → customers

in venture it runs...

• narrative → capital → talent → customers → product.

But to sit at the centre of that loop, you have to survive the screen.

The entire game of modern VC marketing is the relationship between narrative and entertainment… how do you put a compounding belief inside a consumable wrapper?

Entertainment does not mean humour

Entertainment does not mean humour. It does not mean spectacle. It means content that successfully competes for human attention. That is the whole definition. Two ideas below…

The theatrical end

attention is won with drama…. We saw this in covid with the insanities around Cathie Wood and Chamath.

Cathie published a $3,000 Tesla price target, discloses ARK's trades daily, and was permanently on television defending both, which turned a fund into a serialised show with cliffhangers. Chamath cast himself as the next Buffett, wrote Buffett-styled annual letters, and launched SPACs almost like episodes…

It worked, in the narrow sense this piece cares about. These shows moved tens of billions of dollars, largely from people who consume investing the way they consume everything else.

Both obviously ended pretty badly… because the entertainment works even when the substance underneath it does not. Hold that thought. It is the entire problem with the spike, and we will come back to it.

The cognitive end

This is where capital-related content is unusual. A good VC podcast episode is not competing with Netflix. The entertainment is intellectual - you listen to uncover other intelligent people, and the pleasure is recognition and discovery rather than drama.

This is the register most funds should play in. It is also the register they mistake for permission to be boring.

The sophistication of your audience changes what entertains them. It does not exempt you from entertaining them. An LP reading your update at 9pm is still deciding what deserves their attention next.

The wrong question

When funds think about content at all, they tend to ask whether it should be educational or entertaining. That is the wrong distinction, and it reliably produces content that is neither.

There are 2 questions that matter:

1. Is this entertaining enough to be consumed?

2. Does it leave behind a more valuable belief?

Viral junk food clears the attention bar but forgotten, usually within the hour. Engagement farming lives here, along with most of what the timeline rewards on any given day.

Academic rigour is the opposite failure. It is right, rigorous but largely unread. Content here can earns citations, peer respect and credibility within a niche. But it struggles to attract capital, because capital moves on stories, and there is no story attached. Being right is necessary. It has never been sufficient…

Bottom left quadrant is where most fund content often lives. Basic quarterly updates - written for nobody, remembered by nobody.

Narrative content is the only quadrant that truly compounds.

The format is not the quadrant

Here is the mistake you could make with this framework - grade the format instead of the payload.

A "day in the life" reel looks like the junk quadrant by definition.

Take Kate McAndrew on Erica Wenger's podcast recently describing how her TikTok and Instagram presence, which started as fun, easy, get-ready-with-me style content, became a real sourcing engine.

50,000 followers on Instagram, 40,000 on TikTok, and her last 3 investments came from founders who found her through social media, including a cold DM from a founder who had previously sold a company for $200 million. It has brought inbound LP interest too.

This format may seem ‘junk’ but Gen Z founders search TikTok and Instagram before they search anywhere else, and almost nobody is talking about investing there in an authentic register - the same gap the funds doing something different keep exploiting, distributed where the competition is not.

The quadrant is decided by what gets left behind, never by what the content looks like, something I have made the case for before with venture capital memes.

I can show you this working with real numbers too, because I have spent the last 9 months doing it deliberately with GP’s YouTube channel.

We picked a lane that would be “entertainment first” but within it have substance around strategy, deals, and VC.

The rule we work to is entertainment first. Every video needs a hook, a title that earns the click, editing that holds attention. Not because the content is throwaway - the entertainment is the delivery system for it.

In 9 months the channel has gone from 0 to 10,000 subscribers. It has directly brought 2 net-new LPs, people who had never invested in venture before, and it now is regularly referenced by other VCs in conversations.

A Trojan horse, if you want the old metaphor… the viewer shows up for the story and leaves carrying a belief about how the GP thinks.

The Trojan horse

Entertainment is the distribution vehicle. The narrative is the payload. The viewer/reader shows up for the former and leaves carrying the latter.

The payload sticks because a narrative is valuable to the person consuming it. It reduces cognitive load. In uncertain markets, holding someone else's coherent story is cheaper than forming your own view. As Jeremy Giffon put it on Invest Like the Best recently…. “when everyone is uncertain, people look for the most compelling story to rest on”.

LPs and founders rarely adopt a fund's narrative because they were argued into it. They adopt it because holding it is efficient. Most persuasion is a story about convenience.

If you want evidence this is more than a metaphor, look at Citrini's 2028 intelligence crisis piece. It framed itself as speculative, closer to fanfic than research, and it moved public markets anyway. A consumable wrapper delivered a durable belief, and billions of dollars repriced around it. That is the Trojan horse operating in the open.

Entertainment decays, narrative compounds

But every metric funds use, impressions, likes, opens, subscriber counts (guilty), measures the spike.

The decay curve applies to whole firms too.

Look at the long tail of funds that were genuinely relevant a two decades ago. Strong performance, seats in the defining deals of their era, names that carried weight in any room. A surprising number of them are arguably fading, and the fade rarely shows up in returns first. It shows up in relevance. They drop out of the conversations, then the competitive processes, then the deals.

A fund's reputation only compounds while people keep consuming it. These firms assumed the work would speak for itself. They kept the content corporate, treated the timeline as beneath them, and never built the bridge between content that is true and content that is consumable....

Again, Jeremy Giffon has a frame for this: Institutions now survive only if they are timeline native.

Most of the fading funds are not. Their content was true but was never entertaining, so it was never consumed, so the belief was never renewed.

Being early to a generational company buys you 10 years of narrative. It does not buy you 20.

Laurie, Refinery Media

If you made it all the way through, thanks so much for reading! Several hundred 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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