VC Was Banned From Marketing for 67 Years

In October 1948, Louis Engel, an executive at Merrill Lynch, ran a full-page newspaper ad containing 6,000 words of solid, unillustrated text.

It was a compelling line-by-line explanation of how the stock market worked, ending with a small coupon offering a free booklet.

It generated 10,000s of replies, and Merrill went on to distribute over 1,000,000 booklets over the years it kept running - building the customer base of modern retail finance.

Engel didn't publish this as “thought leadership”. He wrote it because Merrill Lynch's business model depended on converting ordinary Americans into first-time investors.

If the ad didn't pull, the firm didn't grow.

Across public finance, persuasion was load-bearing. Brokerages, insurers and investment trusts split-tested headlines across newspaper runs, counted physical coupons, and built rich, battle-tested archives of craft.

But Venture Capital sat out this entire era.

From the Securities Act of 1933 until the JOBS Act in 2013, funds raising privately were prohibited from public solicitation.

Strictly, the ban only covered the ask - a firm could always muse publicly about markets. So, for 80 years, thought leadership was the only marketing venture was allowed.

This both enforced silence, and made performance marketing irrelevant. Capital came through warm intros and deal flow through private networks.

So when VC marketing's scope expanded post-2013, it was still just done because other firms did it - and it's often relegated to box-ticking today, with little measured.

Now, that era is over.

Fundraising is brutal, LPs are selective, founders have infinite choices. For the first time in venture history, marketing is becoming load-bearing for funds.

The problem is the industry is walking into this era with habits formed when nothing was at stake, and zero native reference points to draw from.

The reference material that does exist was therefore built next door, by the public finance firms whose survival depended on every line they published.

This week: 6 lessons from that book - what fund marketing looks like when it actually has to carry the firm.

No archive means no reference points

This explains VCs' criticism of "sameness".

When a category has no reference points, everyone copies the only thing available - each other. You can even see the old rule fossilised in the content itself. VC writing almost never mentions the fund - the metrics, the vehicle, the terms. That's not modesty. It's 80 years of legal habit.

2 things made it worse.

1.  The audience problem. Funds perform for other funds, so fund marketers perform for other fund marketers. Work that's judged by peers never has to pull, and few funds have measures in place to track marketing effectiveness.

2. Most people in VC marketing arrived from comms, PR and journalism - not from ads, product or performance marketing. Nothing wrong with those backgrounds, but they're backgrounds where the work was disconnected to dollars. The disciplines the ad archive was built from - tests and data - never carried over into venture, partially because of the hired skillset.

So the industry is missing both an archive of work, and the habits that build one.

So what did venture funds do with their marketing pre-2013?… almost nothing you could see. It lived in private-placement memoranda, partner letters, annual meetings, books, portfolio directories, research reports, speeches and introductions. Most of it was never intended for public preservation. It sat in LP filing cabinets and maybe disappeared.

Because fund marketing's problems are not new. Earning trust from strangers with money, standing out among near-identical competitors, turning attention into capital.

Every one of them was solved decades or centuries ago, by firms that died if the solution didn't work - it’s worth learning from.

1. A ritual publication

Interestingly, “the first venture firm” was never private - ARD, 1946 - was a publicly listed venture company - so had that legal obligation to explain itself.

Georges Doriot turned that obligation into theatre, the annual report and the annual meeting - sometimes described as the first high-tech trade shows - were the firm's owned media, decades before anyone used the phrase. They had to be, a public venture company lives on shareholder confidence, and the meeting was where confidence got re-raised every year.

Aside from the famous events, the reports were filled with bangers such as,

• “An average idea in the hands of an able man is worth much more than an outstanding idea in the possession of a person with only average ability.”
  
  and
  

• “I don’t consider a speculator constructive. I am building men and companies.”

As you know, Buffett ran the same play from 1965 - 1 candid letter a year, compounding into the biggest trust asset in finance, and a huge conference. On the fully Venture side, Greylock partner William Elfers retained a series of analysis reports alongside the material used for the firm's 1995 history book, “Greylock: An Adventure Capital Story”. But I couldn’t find any evidence they had any cult following like the two previous e.gs.

The modern version: your LP letter and annual review are not admin. They are the campaign. Lux Capital gets this - Josh Wolfe's quarterly letters circulate far beyond their LP list because they're written as arguments about the world, not portfolio updates. Ribbit Capital has run the play for over a decade - 1 thesis letter per theme, Bitcoin in 2013 through to Power this week… teach the category, distribute, gate the artefact, count the raised hands.

2. Silence is a luxury strategy

In a selective category, not marketing can be part of the product - it's luxury logic applied to money.

Coutts, the private bank founded in 1692, went roughly 3 centuries without running an advertisement. Clients, place, ritual and controlled access carried the signal, because mass visibility would have cheapened it. Scarcity of communication signalling scarcity of access - the same reason Hermès doesn't run sales, for a private bank the restraint was load-bearing too.

When they finally did an ad in 1970 they leaned into that exclusivity and 1692 energy.

I've written before about the firms that "don't do marketing" - Thrive, Greenoaks and Benchmark run the luxury-house version of this play today. The catch is the same as it was in 1692 - silence only signals if it's chosen and held consistently. Silence as a default just reads as absence.

3. Write for the reader's wants

Even before Merrill Lynch, Phoenix Mutual's 1929 headline, "To Men Who Want to Quit Work Some Day," never mentions insurance - it sells the daydream, and lets the product be the way to get there. The headline does 80% of the selling, and it sells the destination, not the vehicle.

After all, a reader's self-interest is first, the firm a distant second. This is the same of LPs and founders.

Perhaps we see this today with educational content for founders - First Round Review is of course the gold standard here. But educational content gets you read; destination content gets you picked - and that's the bigger lesson for firms: sell the destination, the outcomes, in how you show up to the market.

Terrain Cap, Founders Fund, Families Fund and indie.vc have versions of this - More on that here.

4. Sell the mood of the cycle

Engel and Phoenix sold a product by selling the want. This move drops the product entirely.

In 1971, Ogilvy & Mather gave Merrill Lynch the bull logo and "Merrill Lynch is bullish on America." Nobody was buying a brokerage - they were buying optimism about the country. For ML optimism was the business model - a retail brokerage only eats when the public feels like investing, so the bull was demand generation for the entire firm.

The fund version exists - a16z's "It's Time to Build" and American Dynamism is Bullish on America for venture.

But more funds should do this across sentiments. In 1979, with investors still burned from the 1973-74 crash, Smith Barney put the patrician actor John Houseman on screen…

"They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it."

Same play, opposite emotional temperature - venture has its own version. In October 2008, Sequoia presented "R.I.P. Good Times" to its portcos and it leaked everywhere, Sequoia became the voice of the downturn - and did it again in 2022 with "Adapting to Endure."

Neither said "disciplined." Smith Barney cast a stern actor; Sequoia stacked slides of evidence. In a downturn, restraint has to be shown, not claimed… perhaps a16z owns the boom, so Sequoia went to own the correction.

5. Manufacture status instead of claiming it

Moods work on the whole market at once. The subtler play works on 1 person at a time - by changing what choosing you says about them.

E.F. Hutton's famous TV campaign never explained the product at all: a crowded restaurant goes silent because 1 person is about to repeat what their broker said.

The ad dramatises other people straining to hear the advice. American Express ran the mirror image on the customer side - "Membership Has Its Privileges," 1987 - conferring status on the holder rather than the firm. And status was load-bearing: Amex charged a fee its competitors didn't, and the campaign is what made the fee feel worth paying.

Weak marketing tells the audience how smart the firm is. Strong marketing makes the founder feel smart for associating with the firm. Venture already has 1 proof at scale… the YC badge and alumni network are “Membership Has Its Privileges” via demo day.

The fund version is being the memo people screenshot (being quoted is the modern hush in the restaurant), and if you're going to say "community," define what belonging visibly confers. Most funds do neither.

6. Let the vehicle make the argument

Foreign & Colonial, 1868, promised the investor of moderate means what only the rich could get - access as the entire pitch, and still the emerging manager pitch 158 years later.

Vanguard, 1976, made the structure itself the ad: mutual ownership and no loads, so the customer could see exactly which incumbent cost had disappeared. And Capital Group, 1958, marketed its "multiple portfolio counselor system" - the machine that produces judgment, not the star holding it - which is the historical answer to a problem I've written about before: partner brands eclipsing the firm.

The lesson from all 3: none of them out-wrote their competitors. They out-structured them. The access, the fees, the process - the difference was built into the product itself, where nobody could miss it and nobody could argue with it.

Which means the biggest marketing decisions a fund makes aren't made in the deck or on the website. They're made when you set your fees, your carry, your structure, your process. Innovation there makes marketing's job mcuh easies - it just reports facts.

If your marketing has to work hard to make you sound different, that's usually the tell that you aren't.

The parade moves

2 final reasons the archaeology matters.

1) None of this expired.

Techniques leave circulation because they become unfashionable, not because they stop working - long copy, direct mail and the daydream headline still pull whenever anyone runs them, and there is a version of this for venture.

2) The audience refreshes.

The founder audience turns over almost completely every maybe ~4 years. A new cohort is arriving right now that has never read the canonical memos, never seen the plays, and has no idea what worked on the cohort before them.

Which means you don't always need net-new ideas. You need proven ideas in front of new founders… and its okay to repeat yourself!

Is Venture’s Marketing Era Now?

1 final difference between that archive and your fund… audience.

Engel needed millions of ordinary Americans. You need maybe 30 LPs, a few hundred founders a year, and a handful of hires - and even now, most funds aren't (and shouldn't be) soliciting the public.

But lessons from direct response are not about reaching the masses. But about accountability.

That discipline transfers to any audience size - it even gets easier as the audience shrinks. Merrill had to sample; a fund can know, by name, every LP who read the letter and every founder they interact with. Only the ask changes shape: not "send us your money" but "take the meeting", "send us the deal", "reply to this email".

So the takeaway isn't the format… You already use the formats. Ask what in your model really depends on being known and trusted - by LPs, by founders, by talent. Wire the marketing to that. Then count whether it pulls.

Fund brands today are the first generation in venture history working with a more open rulebook - especially with AI its easy to just look forward at what to do next, but there are many valuable lessons in the history of this craft.

I am compiling a much larger archive - the artefacts above and a many more, each with the move a fund can steal - is coming as its own thing soon. Reply "archive" and I’ll send you the first iteration.

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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