How The Firm With The Best Returns Should Do Marketing.

Last week, the Wall Street Journal published Neo's fund returns.

Fund I: 7.5x net. Fund II: 6.5x net.

One of the highest performing funds of the decade. But Neo has largely left its own story to journalists, press releases, and the occasional Substack post.

Neo has been operating since 2017 but has had less name recognition in the mainstream than a YC, a Thiel Fellowship, or even an Entrepreneur First. Many first registered the name during a public spat with Garry Tan on X in 2023.

That's starting to change. Cursor is valued at ~$30B, Kalshi at ~$22B - Neo was the first institutional check into both. OpenAI also hired every single new-grad engineering hire last year through Neo's recruiting platform (!)

A firm with extraordinary results, a structurally different model, and almost no control over its own narrative. Neo is more talked about than it has been, and it still isn't telling its own story. That’s the marketing problem.

Beyond Neo… Accelerators in particular often undersell how they move the needle on company outcomes. The origin stories, the relationships - this is the content that builds category-defining brands. Most early-stage funds have more of it than they think, and Neo has more of it than almost anyone.

So this newsletter is about what I would do if I ran their marketing.

The lessons are most directly relevant to early-stage funds, but there's something here for later-stage too (scroll to the end if you just want to read those).

Neo’s Paradox

Despite the above returns, and hiring track records, Neo’s website describes themselves "a startup accelerator, recruiting platform, and mentorship community."

Neo has built something structurally unusual and is marketing it as something ordinary.

In terms of owned content, Neo’s Substack sends monthly bullet-point portfolio recaps that get single-digit likes. Ali's post about the Cursor/Graphite acquisition - where he described watching those founding teams meet at Costanoa 4 years before either company existed - got 9 likes.

But Neo has many rich stories, and very unique offering.

YC Comparisons as The Wrong Frame.

The press pits Neo against YC. Every profile, every funding announcement, every feud gets framed as Neo vs. the incumbent. It is the wrong comparison, and Neo partially invites with quotes in the press related to YC (like below) and by leading with terms and programme structure.

YC is a university in scale, throughput, and alumni network.

Their content machine - Startup School, Hacker News, YouTube, cofounder matching - exists to feed that top of funnel (more detail on that here). When Michael Seibel said YC wants to be "a large and successful state university system, not an Ivy League," Ali heard that, called it a window, and then proceeded to market Neo like a better accelerator rather than a different category entirely.

YC's content flywheel is built around volume. More applications means more startups means more success stories means more applications.

Neo cannot and should not copy this. Neo's flywheel should run on depth.

The Venn diagram below is the argument. Thiel is talent-first but has no network infrastructure and no capital engine beyond the grant. EF works at the pre-team stage, HF0 is elite but focuses on a narrow slice: experienced, repeat technical founders. YC has scale, network, and operator depth, but has mostly moved away from the talent-first model.

Neo is perhaps the only firm at all 3 intersections simultaneously.

The Business of Neo

Before writing a word of marketing strategy, it's worth being precise about what's been built.

Neo today is best understood as four businesses stacked together: a scholar pipeline, a recruiting product, a founder formation programme, and an early-stage venture platform that can continue investing over time. That stack is why Neo is differentiated. Most VCs start with capital and bolt on services. Neo starts with people and uses capital to compound the relationship.

Every other firm in the competitive set enters targets founder relationship at a single point in their journey and exits shortly after. Neo through “Neo Scholars” starts at student and stays through Neo Talent ID, Neo Residency, and again with mentorship and growth stage investments. Competing on accelerator terms is mostly wrong.

1. Talent identification. Neo's Scholar selection involves 3,000 reference checks, 1,000 coding tests, and 350 hours of live interviews for 30 spots per year - No equity. No obligation to start a company. The investment is relational - build a connection with the best technical minds before the rest of the market, these either become founders who join Neo, or get placed in Neo companies, or other companies to grow.

2. Early Career Talent Placement. Neo's recruiting platform routes vetted engineers into portfolio companies and high-signal startups through a single intake process. Companies that build on Neo talent develop goodwill and privileged access to future funding rounds. Neo's own logic is explicit here - the next best thing to investing in a company is helping it win talent.

3. Founder formation. Neo Residency backs founders who emerge from this network at $750k on terms no accelerator matches. This is founder-friendly economics, is implied but underutilised as a marketing weapon.

4. Long-duration venture fund - follows the person from student to founder to Series B and beyond. Ali spent 2.5 years mentoring Michael Truell before Cursor existed. The relationship started at a handwritten coding test in a Google cafeteria in 2019. The fund is designed around that sequence.

What I'd Do…

What follows is everything I would do, hopefully this serves as useful to think about your own firms positioning and content.

Move 1: Publish the dossier

Neo has many rich stories. One of the most original pieces artefacts Neo has is Ali's handwritten notes on founders - like this one of Michael Truell - yet they don’t post these themselves, and we have seen from YC (homepage based on it), and from Sequoia (here) how effect these artefacts are as lore builders.

Once a quarter, publish one dossier page. Ali’s original annotation, handwritten, alongside a short piece - what he saw, what he was betting on specifically, what happened.

This does two things.

1. Embeds Neo more into their winners’ stories

Including those that did not go through Neo accelerator - e.g. Kalshi, where more than half of entire team in the early years came from Neo.

This would give a chance to highlight who Neo selected and what they have gone on to do - e.g. Dhruvik Parikh, who then went to found Sequoia backed Mithril - and embed themselves , and for Kaslhi replace their association with 1) YC and 2) Sequoia/a16z

Consider people who apply to the Ivy League - they do not need testimonials, they need to understand the outcomes of attendees.

2. Highlights that Neo’s backs the person, not the company

Everyone “says this” but its rarely true. Neo however, does imply this structurally. Some dossier entries should be people mid-journey. Not everyone becomes Cursor in 3 years. Some of them take 8 years and a failed company along the way. Publishing those entries - is more honest and more differentiating. It proves the commitment is real, YC's alumni content is structurally forced to be a success story archive. Neo doesn't have that constraint, as the investing model allows relationships to outlast the company.

A dossier can become the intellectual spine of the brand the way Paul Graham's essays became the intellectual spine of YC. Revealing about how Ali as the investor thinks about people - no other firm can replicate it, because no other firm has the dossiers.

Move 2: Make the flywheel a public record

When Cursor acquired Graphite, Ali wrote a Substack post about watching those founding teams meet at Neo Startup Camp in 2020. It is the best piece of Neo content that exists. It went nowhere because it was framed as personal reflection rather than as evidence of a model.

Every time this pattern repeats - a Neo Scholar joins a Neo portfolio company, two Neo-backed founders collaborate, a Neo company acquires another - it needs to be documented in a specific format: not "X joined Y" but "X and Y first met at Oregon in 2023. Here's what each was doing at the time. Here's what happened after."

This is Neo's equivalent of YC's accumulated founder lore. Stripe, Airbnb, Dropbox. The stories that follow companies back to their YC roots. YC has decades of these. Neo has 8 years of off site-style moments that have never been turned into brand assets.

Done consistently, this becomes a public record of the room producing outcomes. The Cursor/Graphite post is already written. It needs to be a format, not a one-off. The editorial brief is showing the network working from the inside over time.

Move 3: Talent as content

Two formats. Both about making the Scholar network visible. Neither requires building anything.

1. Scholar spotlight as Neo owned content.

Before joining Lulu Meservy’s Rostra - Gabby Goldberg ran a newsletter that did one thing - surfaced people she found interesting online, with no agenda. Just an introduction to someone worth paying attention to. The value was curatorial: someone with taste and access doing the discovery work for you.

Ben Lang's Next Play does something similar for job/startup opportunities. David Booth productised this connective tissue function at ODF before taking it to a16z, which is now the a16z Build programme.

Neo sort of does this with “Neo & noteworthy” but it is only on substack, and is just external links. It doesn’t explain their connection to Neo, and if Neo packaged the content themselves they would benefit from their founders sharing it, and as their page outgrows everyone else’s, founders would benefit from Neo directly distributing it. Then previous spotlight becomes proof that Neo saw them first + the archive compounds.

2. The transfer announcement.

TBPN + ETN do a version of this as a joking format - the dramatic graphic, the SportsCentre energy applied to tech hiring news.

Neo's version plays it completely straight, which is simultaneously more credible and more interesting. Clean graphic. "Neo Scholar joins OpenAI as founding engineer."

The reason this works for Neo specifically is the incentive alignment. Most VC firms have no reason to celebrate their network going to work at other companies. Neo's model inverts that entirely. A Scholar going to OpenAI is a win because that relationship becomes the recruiting pipeline that helps Neo portfolio companies hire, which deepens those companies' connection to Neo, which creates late-stage investment access. Every transfer announcement is brand marketing, Scholar programme proof, and recruiting platform demonstration simultaneously. The format makes the incentive structure legible without having to explain it.

Run both formats consistently and they compound together. The spotlight surfaces the person. The transfer announcement tracks where they go. The flywheel post in Move 2 shows what they built. Follows all three to watch the Neo model work in real time.

Move 4: Own the technical content territory

There is a specific piece of the content landscape that is largely unclaimed, and Neo is uniquely positioned to own it.

The lower-right quadrant - practitioner-level, technically rigorous content aimed at pre-company or early founders - is interestingly largely empty, despite this being an area most VCs are looking for alpha.

• VCs' content is either broad-audience / brand-building (Sequoia, a16z, 20VC) or more technical but for career operators (Lenny's, Stratechery-adjacent).

• There is no meaningful cohort of VC-backed content aimed at "a 20-something CS student or grad who might start a company in 4 years," especially at the intersection of rigorously technical and new-media young founder energy.

• If you had to pick the closest VC-adjacent entity in the bottom-right, it would be Buildspace (rip) or Founders Inc. - but they lean narrative rather than tactical.

• Neo Scholars is the only institution that both accesses that exact audience and has the credibility to serve it, yet currently produces almost no public content for that cohort.

The opportunity = own the content conversation for serious technical builders at the pre-company stage. Not "how to start a startup." Not "how to fundraise." The specific intellectual territory where deeply technical, high-agency people think about what they're going to build and why, before they build it. That territory is Neo's by right.

1. Builder interview series.

The press interviews CEOs. Almost nobody (consistently) interviews the people who built the thing. There is no meaningful media outlet doing long, substantive, technically serious conversations with principal engineers at the most important companies being built right now. Neo has direct access to them, because many of them are Scholars.

In 5 years, when that person is running something significant, it becomes primary source history. The archive compounds in the same way the Scholar spotlight archive does.

2. Live idea testing / Workshopping.

The tone across both formats is what makes or breaks this. The risk with technical content is that it becomes dry or credentialist. Neo's version has to have the same energy as the Scholar programme itself - and the content should sound like the community sounds. It needs to be idea-first - similar to AI Engineer skewed with a more entertaining vibe similar to maybe Greg Isenberg’s content.

I referenced this before when I said VC content is mostly unoriginal I referenced the whiteboard idea - crazy that no firm is owning this idea at scale, when so much of VC / Startup world is stress testing ideas and demoing.

Move 5: The annual record

One thing key with accelerators in is the cohort based operation, gives way to annual moments where people are ‘watching the firm’ this is why YC does RFS, and media around Demo Day.

Neo has an obvious publication opportunities that don't exist yet.

The annual talent report.

Only Neo can write this. Ali has been working on the question of what predicts an exceptional technical founder at 19, 22, or 26 for 8 years with real evidence — and earlier still through Code.org, the nonprofit he co-founded with his brother Hadi to bring computer science to millions of students, which gave him a decade of thinking about how technical ability develops before anyone is paying attention to it professionally.

Neo does 3,000 reference checks, 1,000 coding tests, and 350 hours of live interviews per year. The patterns in that dataset are not publicly available anywhere. The coding test philosophy alone - handwritten, conversational - is a distinctive intellectual position nobody else in VC is articulating. Most hiring in tech is still optimised for pattern matching. Neo's evaluation model is explicitly designed to break it. That tension is important, and Ali is the only person in venture with the conviction / data to write about it.

An annual essay built around this research would be primary source on a question the entire industry is trying to answer and nobody has good data on. It also reinforces the dossier from Move 1 - the essay explains the theory, the dossier shows the practice.

Why does this matter beyond Neo?

• Every serious AI lab, every technical startup trying to hire before the market prices people correctly - want to understand where the best engineers are going and why.

• The VCs investing in those companies want to understand what technical bets the smartest pre-company people are making.

• University CS departments want to understand what their best graduates are doing.

Neo sits at the intersection of all of those information flows and currently publishes none of it.

The annual publication creates a PR moment and a top-of-funnel for Scholar applications, plus a reference document for later-stage investors who want to understand why Neo deal flow is different. Every year's record becomes more valuable as the people in it go on to build things that matter.

Move 6: The Front Door

Everything above compounds to nothing if the website is flat.

Neo's homepage has a barbell problem.

• One end: lead with the offer, invite comparison. The reader starts thinking about YC's $500k and 7%. About a16z Speedrun's $1m and 10%.
  

• The other: run the pantheon play like YC e.g. Airbnb came from here, Stripe came from here - which can be somewhat disingenuous as many YC companies don’t succeed.

The third position is the one no accelerator has taken. Not the offer, not the trophy cabinet - the relationship. Who Neo found early, what they tried, what worked and what didn't, and that Neo was there for all of it. Including failures.

This is only possible for Neo because their commitment is structural. Every fund says they back founders through failure. Neo's model means it - the relationship outlasts the result.

The language needs to match. "Apply today" is currently on the homepage. Neo should not say apply. The experience of becoming a Neo Scholar should shift from an application experience to a selection. Ali meets you, gives you a handwritten test, spends years in a relationship with you before he writes a check.

The design needs to match the ambition too. Neo's current site feel like a feature list. Neo's site should feel closer to something aspirational. The front door to the most coveted pre-company institution in tech - which is what Neo is trying to become.

The homepage is where all the moves land. Without a front door that matches the ambition of what's behind it, the rest is rooms in a building with no entrance.

What other VCs should take from this

Neo's problem is a version of a problem almost every fund has.

1. Differentiation at the product level doesn't produce differentiation at the brand level automatically.

Neo has a different model and it is largely invisible because the marketing describes what it does rather than showing how it works. If your fund operates differently - in how you source, how you support, how long you stay - the marketing job is to make that visible. Not to list the outputs in the same language everyone else uses.

2. Make Content that Compounds

Most VC content is either reactive to the news cycle or a one-off attention grab. The moves above work because they compound - each piece makes the next one more credible and easier to produce. That only happens when content comes out of the work itself rather than a separate content strategy. Think sequentially about what your firm does repeatedly and consistently - unique data, repeated processes, ongoing relationships - and the content starts to produce itself over time.

3. Lead with what only you can produce.

Every fund has its version of the Costanoa moment. The intro that became a Series A three years later. The note a partner wrote before anyone else believed in a founder. The intro made in a room that never got documented. These moments exist in every firm - make sure you publish them in a format you control, or they end up in someone else's article, or worse, unknown. Lead with what only you can produce.

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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