How VCs Compete With Celebrity Capital

I have never met Slow Ventures partner Sam Lessin. I will probably never meet him, and tbh I am not especially bothered if I do.

But I know he loves skiing, I know he drives a cherry red Miata, makes a history podcast for his kids, and that he is dyslexic.

I have absolutely no right to know any of this. But I do.

imo, it changes things. It changes how I read his weekly email reviewing the going-ons in venture. It makes me follow Slow Ventures through their fundraises, their creator fund, think about the people they hire, and it makes me curious about his thesis that the AI application layer is not worth investing in, rather than scrolling past it like every other take that week.

Hold that thought.

The celebrity wave

Phoebe Gates’ Phia raised $35 million recently. You likely saw the cap table is more a roster assembled for cultural reach than investors.

This is everywhere now. Kyle Kuzma was on TBPN talking venture investing. Serena Williams running a Super Bowl as for a Serena Ventures portfolio company. Jay-Z, The Chainsmokers, the Sidemen etc etc. have joined longstanders like Bono and Ashton Kutcher. Celebrity capital has gone from novelty to category.

If you run a normal fund, the natural reaction is kinda a quiet despair... You will never have 15 million followers or a Super Bowl slot. So how are you supposed to compete?

The good news is that you are misreading the game.

Fame is not the asset

The obvious read on celebrity capital is distribution. The celebrity brings reach, the startup borrows it, equity changes hands for eyeballs - allocation for attention.

That read is mostly wrong, and I know it is wrong because I have watched it up close.

I have spent a lot of time working with footballers (soccer 🙄) in the UK on their investing.

Footballers are about as well known as a person can be in the UK. But the deal flow that lands on most of their desks is generic sports tech, wellness, wearables.

The category the market assumes a footballer must care about, pattern-matched straight from the fame. It is also, mostly, not a great place to invest.

The players I see who do well are the ones with a specific, legible personality and a set of public interests beyond the sport. They see better deals because the network knows them for something particular, not just for being famous.

The variable is not how well known they are. It is how well they are known.

Data supports this too Sifted’s study on celebrity investments that make a difference are when there is clear audience overlap or where the person has real credibility.

Which means the thing a normal fund cannot have, mass fame, turns out not to be the thing that works anyway.

So what?

Known well, not well known

Well known is reach. How many people have heard of you. It is the celebrity's home turf and you lose on it every time.

Known well is depth. Whether the specific people who matter to your thesis think of you first, trust your taste, and want to be associated with you.

Which brings us back to Sam Lessin and skiing… I am one person he has never met, and yet his content has built enough texture that I read his professional output differently, and consider his contrarian theses more seriously. Multiply that by everyone on his list. None of it required him to be “famous”. It required him to be specific, consistent, and himself.

Creator Science is the same mechanism at firm-adjacent scale. A small, niche presence in the creator economy, nowhere near celebrity reach, but real influence inside one specific world, and it has pulled them into relevant deals like Maven and intros.ai that breadth would never have produced.

The creator economy knows Jay Clouse disproportionately well relative to his reach.

Gabriel Jarrosson at Lobster Capital does the same in the YC ecosystem. Maybe nobody outside it could name him, BUT the founders at YC all know him extremely well.

These are doing, at niche scale, exactly what celebrity deal access does at mass scale. Transferring identity. Making the right people want the association.

So should you post about your personal life?

Believe it or not, people do want to get to know you as a person. My fund managers tell me a lot of things about their real lives. I tell them things about my life. The managers I have worked with day in and day out are the best clients. They helped me transition from essentially a writer into a full-stack consulting and services firm with community at its centre. I do not think this could have happened unless I shared my life with them, and vice versa.

The honest answer is that it is happening whether you author it or not. Your personality is being read by founders and LPs in every interaction, every email, every event.

The only choice is whether you shape it.

It doesn’t mean treating LinkedIn like your personal Instagram. There is a spectrum here, and funds are operating at every point on it.

Level 1 - Texture.

At the lightest end, texture. Dale Chang at Scale Venture Partners posts a lot about smoking meats. Does it move the needle for Scale directly? Probably not. Does it make him more approachable, more memorable, easier to talk to at a conference? Almost certainly. Texture is cheap, low-risk, and probably underrated.

Level 2 - Woven.

Deeper in, the woven approach. Visionaries GP Judith Dada (Dadalogue) weaves her thinking about family + parenting into her investing lens. Her “best-performing” post was about raising unfuckwithable kids, and it hardly refs her role as an investor. All of it compounds back to her anyway. Personal content is a professional asset… Her building this personal reach then makes a material difference when she publishes something more Visionaries/VC specific (as she has just done with Europe 2031).

Level 3 - Personality as bat signal.

Aka VIBES - there is personality at firm scale, where who the partners should dictate what the fund does. Founders Inc running track days with supercars, Slow Ventures hosting an etiquette summit, The Founders Fund Mafia series. You can read the personality of these funds directly in the format of their events and content. It works as a bat signal, in both directions, telling founders and LPs the world they would be joining.

Level 4 - Personality as fund structure.

And at the deepest end, personality shaping the vehicle itself. Enrico Mellis runs Animal Syndicate rather than a blanket fund partly because his entire no-nonsense view of value-add says the traditional fund structure promises things it does not deliver. The structure is the personality, expressed as fund design.

Likewise, Cocoa from Carmen Alfonso - markets as an angel fund that acts as the founder's in-house VC. They even deliberately avoided raising from VC funds as LPs so they could credibly tell founders they don't compete with other investors. The whole vehicle is her angel persona, institutionalised.

If sharing comes naturally to you, lean in, because it is the cheapest trust-building mechanism available and most of your peers will not do it. If it does not come naturally, do not fake it. Manufactured quirkiness reads instantly.

But a real question for those firms is quieter… how do the partners actually come across in the vibe of everything the fund puts out, and is that doing the work you think it is?

Being known well, by the people who actually matter to what you do, is not a celebrity privilege. It is available to anyone willing to be specific, consistent, and genuinely themselves in public for long enough.

The irony is that most funds spend their marketing budget trying to become well known and not enough time becoming known well.

Laurie, Refinery Media

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