The Audience Problem In Venture Capital

We are well aware of the startup launch theatre.

The big launch video, the thread, the founder waiting for the likes to roll in.

Often the company doing this sells, say, AI tooling to dental practices. The customer is a 52-year-old practice manager in the midwest who has never opened X in her life.

The irony is the launch isn't for her. It's for other founders and the timeline.

Every week a tech-adjacent video editor is reaching into the folder marked HYPE for the spaceship blasting off, Jordan dunking, Bill gates jumping over the chair - to cut a sixty-second hype reel for an audience that will never buy the product.

Imagine taking the $100,000 that went into impressing your peers, and spending it on customers instead. You'd probably be a better company.

Everyone nods at this when it's aimed at startups - marketing to your peers instead of your market.

But let’s turn it around on the people funding those startups.

In venture it’s arguably worse, a huge % of VC content is just funds performing for other funds, and worse still, most of them don't even know they're doing it.

The third audience

We talk about VC content as if there are two audiences: founders and LPs.

But the third audience is other VCs. You post a take on the state of AI, a dozen investors like it, and everyone agrees it was good.

There's a legitimate version of this. The problem is that most funds do it by accident, with no idea why, and call it a strategy.

Plenty of great content is read mostly by other VCs. But you need to be able to explain how impressing other VCs makes you money.

Sudarshan at sf1.vc is a good e.g. - a pre-seed investor whose edge runs on selling deals upward, getting his companies in front of the T1 funds for the next round. So he makes content to be interesting to those funds. So reaching those partners is the funnel working. This is a good way to target other VCs, maybe this is you too.

The superb Dan Gray (@credistick) is the other version - he has spent years making A* content for investors, and Odin (British SPV platform), brought him to do it for them. Odin's customers are investors = purpose of this content is to impress other VCs.

But so many funds are copying this content about VC content.

I think the market map started this way - a way to show LPs and co-investors where a fund plays. Now every fund makes one, and most have stopped asking why. Other investors do still scan them, mapping each against their own thesis. But the funds claiming to market to founders never stop to check whether founders care.

In the words of DJ Quik “If it don’t make dollars, it don’t make sense.”

Nobody's on the hook

The obvious culprit is the investment announcement. Enormous, sustained energy goes into keeping the announcement machine running. Yes, these matter at the margins - a courtesy to the founder, a small market signal.

But the effort, set against how much founders (most funds ‘stated’ audience) really care, is wildly out of proportion.

No founder lays awake over which fund co-invested in a round they're not in. It's on autopilot. Nobody decided to make it, funds just do this because they always have.

Why this keeps running, what nobody in the industry says - most people in VC marketing roles aren't on the hook.

In a startup, marketing is wired more or less directly to revenue. If the content doesn't work you can see it in the numbers, and someone's job is on the line - that tension is what forces people to get good, to ask what a customer wants and work backwards.

Especially at many big funds that tension doesn't exist. Fundraising and status aren't tied platform team output; LP commitments are sticky, so you get safe seats. People keep things ticking, run their improvement cycles, add process, and nothing about the fund's success depends on any of it. Which means nobody is ever forced to ask….

Does anybody actually want this?

It's not laziness. It's incentives. If your work isn't connected to dollars, the work drifts.

Effort is not the problem

It's not only the funds coasting…. Even when a fund clearly does care - spends real money, hires real talent, builds something with production value - the question still goes unasked.

Lightspeed just launched Lightwork, a weekly show with Claire Zau and Josh Machiz. Episode one: a historic IPO, Siri's makeover, Anthropic's new model.

Dare I say, who is asking for this? We are not short of commentary on the state of AI - we are drowning in it. A weekly show explaining what this week's AI news means is about the least scarce thing on the internet right now. Whatever problem that solves, it isn't one founders have.

Now the nuance matters. For Lightspeed this is defensible as a content strategy.

When you manage $40+ Billion across offices on several continents, broad ambient brand presence is a legitimate goal (similar for a16z etc). Generalist, accessible content scales, builds a big top-of-funnel audience, they can comfortably afford it, and will probably get famous guests.

Hiring Claire - a real existing audience plus genuine new-media instincts - makes it more defensible; bringing her audience into LSVP is a strategy, and they said it themselves - "influencer" / "investor" as the job description.

But look at who shows up in the YouTube comments…. the audience is VC-curious outsiders and people who like Claire. It is not the technical founders Lightspeed exists to back. That's fine - as long as they're honest that this is reach-and-brand content for a broad outside-in audience, and don't tell themselves it's something founders need.

This is not a problem for Lightspeed. It's close to fatal for the smaller funds copying some version of what Josh & Claire are doing.

Do Founders Care?

So what would those funds make instead?

Start with the most glaring gap, which is technical. Every fund on earth says it wants to back technical founders. Almost none make a single thing devs care about.

The closest anyone comes is Alana Goyal at Basecase, whose whole positioning is "too early to talk to an investor? talk to a developer." She backs it up - she commits code every day, and publishes her git log on the site.

Devs find that interesting - her content about building her site using her portfolio companies' products got ~1M views.

This content is personality-first, not fund-strategy-first - which is why the space still reads as wide open rather than solved.

Heavybit (dev content) and Headline's CTO Conrad Chu (shipping products) are circling it. Nobody's fully claimed it.

But this isn't really about being a dev.

The same gap exists everywhere founders pay attention and funds don't show up. Greg Eisenberg has built a huge audience among builders doing low-code ideation - how to spot an idea, how to start, how to market it - the stuff early founders search for.

Oren John does it for consumer marketing. These formats work; the audiences are proven by their size. There's just no fund occupying that ground, despite every fund claiming those operators are the people they want to back.

Find what the people you want to back would choose to watch or read, and make that. A few that work for almost any fund -

Whiteboard-native thinking.

Whiteboarding is the native language of startups - huge blue ocean for funds I mentioned before here.

Benchmarking from your own portfolio.

An underused asset in venture, and nothing to do with being technical. You sit on a portfolio generating real operational data. Aggregate it, anonymise it, give nothing away about any one company, and you've got something founders would actively seek out. Years ago a16z published what AI tools gaming companies were really using - as a founder at a 3D-tech startup at the time, it was eye-opening to see what peers ran and how. Every fund has a version of this.

Bounties.

Still a half-formed idea, but something here. Telegram famously hires through bounties - post a problem, attach a prize, someone solves it in public, you pay them. It signals the people you want around you, solves real problems, and travels, because people share what they build. The venture version could be "here are real problems our portfolio companies are stuck on - solve one and we'll fund you." A fund that ran that well would generate more genuine founder interest than a year of announcements.

I’ve written on this before, getting funds to think about whether their content is outside-in or inside-out. i.e. whether or not you are reaching new founders, or servicing existing ones.

Who this is for

• If you're an emerging manager.

The incentive problem that lets big funds coast doesn't apply to you - your marketing is wired straight to dollars, to LP capital and the founders you win, the way a startup's is.

Good work pays off faster and more directly for you + if you've got a real technical edge with founders, you have both the reason and ability to make what nobody is making.

• If you're a big fund

The lane is empty. You've got the budget and the portfolio to do the deep, specific, interesting work, with almost no competition doing it. YC built a near-insurmountable advantage with Startup School just by being relentlessly useful to the earliest founders. The playbook is sitting there, untouched.

Before you make anything, be honest about who it's for.

The bar is low because nobody's been forced to clear it. There is a huge opening.

As ever with differentiation in VC… if bottled water can do it, so can you.

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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