Founder-First is Not a Content Strategy

Spend enough time in venture and you'll hear the same lines on repeat.

"Founders are the main character." / "We work for you." / "It's their journey, not ours." / "Our founders are the main character."

It might be true. But none of it is a marketing strategy.

For GPs, founder-first is a value system - work hard, be available.

For platform teams, it's an operating principle - help portfolio companies hit milestones.

But for anyone responsible for building the firm's brand…

How do you build a recognisable firm when you're philosophically committed to not talking about yourself?

As a result, being ‘founder-first’ produces a sea of identical content. Firms either erase themselves entirely or they lurch into awkward portfolio announcement or "proud to have backed" posts.

Last week I wrote about Sequoia’s revered brand, and one detail I keep coming back to, by the time a company IPOs, ~15 investors have been involved. Yet the cultural association of almost any iconic company, only remembers one or two firms.

It’s not always about the first check either, but who built themselves into the story.

Many firms miss this opportunity by mistaking founder first for reason not to have a content strategy.

But instead, there are a few distinct modes to work within that constraint.

Mode 1: Curation

This mode isn’t aggregation. Reposting founder content, sharing portfolio news, signal-boosting wins. That is not really a platform.

A real platform is curated. It means having a specific point of view about what matters, and what the ecosystem should be paying attention to - and then building a home for it that carries your portfolio companies’ names.

One example of this is an editorial act -

First Round Review has done this better than almost anyone, if you want to go deep into that, our First Round breakdown is here

The TLDR is First Round is not a character in its own content. But what they have built over the last decade is genuinely useful long-form operator playbooks, and frameworks.

And critically, it is not just founders. It is the CPO, the CTO, the head of growth - the people doing the work inside the company. That editorial choice tells you something specific about what First Round values and who they are trying to reach.

Kleiner Perkins are recently attempting a similar direction with their new Builders podcast, which centres product and engineering voices rather than the known founding narrative.

A lighter version of this is a market map or the annual list.

These operate on the same logic.

Creandum's Euro Seed 50, FOV's 10 Startups to Watch, or even highly domain specific mentor list or job boards e.g. IndieBio (SOSV).

These are firm-owned objects that get cited, shared, and strategically platform their own portfolio companies to then be referenced by journalists and other VCs.

The key is that they are specific enough to be useful and recurring.

Mode 2: Specificity

Most VC content is about outcomes. Follow on rounds, updates, things you are "proud to announce." This is the weakest form of association because 1) many others can celebrate it too and 2) it says nothing about your role in it.

The more durable play is to tell a specific chapter in the company's journey - and document it in a way nobody else can, because, well… you were there!

• Y Combinator is the obvious example

Their mythology is almost folklore… Stripe manually installing code on a user's laptop, Airbnb selling themed cereal boxes to survive.

YC then has just hammered these specific stories relentlessly and across every format for over two decades.

The underlying message is "we were there first, when it was scrappiest." That is a completely different brand position, and it has compounded to the point where the YC origin story is now just part of how the internet tells the story of those companies.

• Sequoia too (we covered their content in depth last week) does a version of this, focusing on “Crucible Moments”, the inflection points that nearly ended iconic companies. Sequoia is never the protagonist. But they are embedded in every episode as part of how the company survived.
  

• Elevation Capital, an early-stage fund in India, is a good example of how this works without a big media machine.

They anchor their content in tangible proof of being there early. They go back to a company’s first office, surface the first email a founder sent, review early decks, and other early scraps of history that normally disappear once a company is successful. The effect is completely different from a retrospective interview - you’re placed back inside the moment when nothing was obvious yet.

• Founders Inc takes a real time angle on the same idea.

Their content is built around the act of building - prototypes, failed experiments etc etc. But while the firm is never the subject, their building is. Over time, the brand accrues by being the environment where this kind of work visibly happens.

• Then there is Thrive Capital… Ah yes, the firm with no content strategy at all.

Khosla was OpenAI’s first check, but the reporting around the board crisis focused on Josh Kushner’s role in that week when the company’s was at risk, have stuck. Yes, ofc they wrote a billion dollar check, but that comms effort has effectively hijacked OpenAI's venture involvement and has branded Thrive as materially helpful (a PR masterclass!)

It's a reminder that content strategy is always downstream of real moments... But it's also proof that moments only compound into brand if someone decides to make them public.

Thrive let that story get told, and most firms have had equivalent moments (relative) and doing nothing with them.

Mode 3: Observability

Most funds claim the same things. Hands-on. Value-add. Founder-first. Network. These words have been repeated so many times they have stopped meaning anything.

The firms that have broken out of this have done it by replacing words with evidence.

• Sapphire Ventures is a systematic example.

Their portfolio growth team explicitly tracks customer introductions, and instead of blogging about their "GTM support," they produce impact studies - how they connected a specific portfolio company to a specific Global 2000 CIO etc etc.

• Bain Capital does something similar using consulting-style case studies, which makes sense given their heritage.

The format in both cases is specific, outcome-focused, and framed entirely around what happened for the company. The firm's role is observable rather than stated.

For earlier-stage funds there is a significant untapped opportunity here, and the raw material is already sitting in your operations. These are the moments that actually differentiate one firm from another in the years before a company becomes a success story.

It’s also worth being honest about scale and incentives…

A lot of funds are not trying to build big brands. They are small by design.

Their job is to get into good companies, not mess up ownership, and let power laws do the work.

But even those funds still need tangible association. “not being loud” ≠ “invisible”

For a small fund, it might be as simple as surfacing early team members who never get the spotlight, or telling the story of a particular region or operator network you sit inside. You’re not trying to win attention at scale but help your reputation compound.

The Irony of Founder First Content

As founder-first content has become the dominant philosophy, a specific format has taken over: founder in a conference room, telling their story to camera, prompted by questions from an investor they want to be nice to.

It is, at this point, one of the most saturated and least differentiated things in venture content…

It is the same founding story the founder has told on four other podcasts, rehoused on the firm's channel with different lighting, or blog with different photos.

The irony is that there's an increasing blue ocean for firms to be more direct about themselves.

Celebrities are entering venture specifically because cultural visibility creates deal access. They're using public profiles, audiences, and personal association as investment leverage.

Meanwhile most traditional fund managers are suppressing their own visibility in the name of being founder-first.

The honest reason to invest in content is not primarily to distribute your portfolio companies. Unless you are operating at 20VC or YC scale, that is largely not how it works anyway.

And both of those firms, it is worth noting, have built explicitly pseudo-celebrity GPs as a core part of the model. The distribution is not separate from the personal brand.

While conference room founder interview has never been more crowded, the fund that has a perspective, a chapter they own, a platform people return to - is still an uncrowded position.

But don’t confuse founder-first does with firm-invisible.

Laurie, Refinery Media

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