The Productisation of Venture Capital

Marketing has been on a journey in every industry. It started as a support function - downstream of the real work, responsible for making things look good/ sound right.

Then it became a growth function. Then, it also became a product function - something so embedded in what a company does that separating the two stopped making sense.

Venture Capital is arriving at that third stage. Slowly, and unevenly. But it is arriving.

For a long time, VC marketing had one job. Keep the fund looking active e.g. Press coverage, portfolio announcements, a LinkedIn presence. Marketing was the packaging. The product was capital and judgment.

That framing is shifting, and who is getting hired in VC right now is the clearest evidence of it.

So what does this say about venture, and what should it change about how your firm does marketing?

Venture as a product

I have been thinking about this framing for a while, then this week, Chapter One posted their reason to exist as a firm -

The old ways of describing what a VC offers - capital, judgment, network - fit a hundred firms. They are not differentiated.

Chapter One said this directly… most firms describe venture as a game of access, but they think that is backwards. The best investors win because they have earned the right to work with extraordinary founders earlier, more deeply, and in situations where conventional firms are not yet useful.

And then, simply: "In other words: venture is a product."

Their stated ambition is to be the most product-obsessed venture firm in the world. They ask themselves the same question every day they would ask if they were building a startup: do we have a truly differentiated product? If the answer is no, they have work to do.

It is a simple reframe. But it changes almost everything about how a firm should think about marketing.

This is not just a philosophical position either. It is showing up in who is getting hired.

In the last year, Creandum, Pear, KP, General Catalyst, and Greylock have all hired marketers from product backgrounds with little to no prior VC experience.

We have seen the media-to-VC pipeline for a while - creators moving into venture investing. But this parallel trend that is less discussed - product and growth operators moving into platform and marketing roles at funds. These are people who have thought about positioning, conversion, distribution, and user outcomes. They are bringing that orientation with them.

Previously VC marketing has compromised of PR traditionalists - not that those people are bad, some are exceptional, but many come from a background where everything is checked and polished. It is impossible today to win on polish and the people who know how to market come from places where brand and product were the same conversation.

In fact, platform roles in venture should map almost directly onto GTM and customer success in SaaS.

• Acquisition - get more of the right deals.

• Retention - deepen relationships with existing portfolio companies so they take your next cheque and send their network your way.

Most funds have not hired for those functions explicitly, but product marketer and growth marketer orientations translate so cleanly.

• A product marketer (how do we position this?)

• A growth marketer (how do we distribute this?)

Many VC content strategies cannot answer either question. They exist because someone decided to do content, not because the firm knows what its marketing is supposed to achieve.

Where SaaS marketing maps directly

The fundamentals of VC marketing and SaaS marketing are more similar than most people working in venture acknowledge.

Know your audience deeply. Understand what they care about. Show up where they already are. Tell a clear, differentiated story consistently. Align marketing tightly to what you are actually trying to achieve.

That last point is what prevents random acts of marketing - the LinkedIn post about an industry trend that has nothing to do with the fund's thesis, the newsletter that goes out because it is Thursday, the podcast that makes it to episode twelve before quietly dying. None of these are aligned to anything. They exist because someone decided to do content rather than because the firm knows what its marketing is supposed to achieve.

Being on a small team with access to AI tools accelerates this significantly right now. The gap between a fund with one person who thinks like a product marketer and a fund with nobody who does is larger than it has ever been.

Where VC diverges from SaaS

Two structural differences matter - and understanding them can keep marketing efforts focused.

The inverse supply and demand problem. In SaaS, ten thousand people wanting to buy your software is a great day. In VC, ten thousand founders wanting your capital is a filtering nightmare. VC marketing has to be loud enough to attract the best founders but equally specific enough to discourage the noise.

SaaS marketing almost always wants more volume. VC marketing wants higher signal.

Broad awareness plays that work in SaaS often actively hurt VC firms by attracting the wrong founders at scale.

Money is a commodity. A dollar from Sequoia and a dollar from a first-time fund are the same currency.

This is also why capital is not the product.

But everything around the money. The prestige, the network, the operational support, the signal that the right investor on your cap table sends to every subsequent investor. Because the commodity is identical, VC marketing has to work significantly harder on intangibles. Which is where most firms are leaving the most value on the table - not in the intangibles themselves, but in how specifically and measurably they articulate them.

VC does not have funnel. No founder wakes up, sees your LinkedIn post, and pitches you that week. No LP discovers a fund on Monday and writes a cheque on Friday. The decision happens over months or years of ambient contact - your content, your portfolio stories, your events, your network all circling around them while they make up their minds. The goal is not conversion. It is gravity.

A year ago I posted about this - the idea that VC marketing should not be thought of as a funnel at all, but as building an orbit. Potential founders, co-investors, and LPs circling while they decide. SaaS can optimise for conversion rate. VC has to optimise for presence over time.

That is a fundamentally different objective and it changes what good marketing looks like…

Adjectives versus outcomes

Most platform and support language in venture is still adjective-based. The usual cliches "We have a great network," "We are founder-friendly." "We are hands-on investors." Any and all funds can make these claims.

The shift that productisation forces is from adjective to outcome. From claim to evidence… basically how concrete and how transparent can you be about what someone is getting.

This can before the investment too. E.g. Rule30 promises a decision in 24 hours. That is a product feature. Specific, verifiable, differentiating. A founder knows exactly what they are getting before the first meeting.

Sudarshan, building in public on X, posted this week…

Humble brag or not… This is beyond a brand claim for SF1, it is a product metric. A founder reading it knows something real and specific about what this investor does.

Likewise, SaaS companies show before-and-after metrics. They publish dashboards. They build case studies with specific outcomes. The equivalent in venture exists - 776 has been a consistent example of publishing platform metrics and making the support offering legible - but it is rare…. and provides good evidence that as a firm you SHOULD be tracking these impacts.

Most VC case studies and support claims are vague either because firms genuinely are not very helpful, or because they are bad at articulating how they help. Either way, the result is the same. The most useful change VC firms could make - stop describing support as an adjective vs. a measured outcome. "We have a great network" is a promise. "We do X, that achieves Y, shown by Z" is a product feature. One of those is differentiating.

What this changes

I imagine this hiring trend will continue - and probably accelerate. AI tools are compressing what a single person can execute across brand, content, distribution, and analysis. The gap between a one-person marketing function that thinks like a product marketer and a five-person team that thinks like a PR department is closing fast. Small teams with the right orientation now have leverage that previously required departments.

PR still has its place. For major announcements, fundraises, and reputation management it remains valuable. But as a core day-to-day function, less so.

Many platform professionals are upskilling into product marketing thinking, building with AI agents, and taking on content and distribution work that would previously have required a separate hire. That is worth watching - the productisation of the firm is not only coming through external hires, it is coming through how existing roles are evolving.

But ultimately the hiring shift is downstream of something structural. There are more funds than ever and more capital available than ever. The best founders at the best companies can increasingly choose who they take money from. That changes the competitive dynamic for every firm - including the ones that have historically not needed to compete for the best deals.

Measure stuff, build stuff, and sell stuff.

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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