The VC Marketing Framework You Need for 2026

Happy New Year!

I've spent all of 2025 talking to VC firms about content - how to build reputation, how to communicate what makes them different, how to actually use storytelling.

Then TBPN / a16z came along and slapped a label on it: "New Media."

Suddenly, everyone's asking the same questions. "What's our new media strategy?” “How do we do new media?” “Should we launch a podcast?” “Is this New Media?"

This is an over complication.

New media is just the mechanism - a shift in how information flows. If you want to understand how to actually plan your content in 2026, the concept you need is...

Lore.

Here's what that means, why it matters, and how to build it. (TLDR at the end)

What New Media Changed

All "new media" means is the flippening.

Historically, news was upstream. A small number of outlets decided what mattered, framed it, published it, and everyone else reacted. If you were "unveiling" something, you went to the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Charlie Rose, etc etc. The act of publication created the event. Media declared reality, which gave journalists enormous power as gatekeepers, and it trained execs to treat press appearances as rare, controlled moments.

This has now completely flipped in relevance.

The first draft of reality now happens in public, continuously, on platforms like Twitter, Reddit, podcasts, YouTube, group chats, Substack comments, clips.

Ideas surface there first. Narratives get stress-tested there first. Reactions, counter-arguments, memes, and interpretations pile up before any reporter touches the story.

From the journalist's point of view, this is uncomfortable. Their job used to be discovery and framing. Now it's synthesis - they're reading the internet, watching what's already moved, then writing a piece that packages it into "news."

This Isn't Abstract. It Should Actively Change How You View PR Dollars.

Andrew Song (Make Sunsets founder), recently shared the ROI of their PR/marketing spend. Spreadsheet here.

Look at the numbers.

The top 5 are three Substacks and two personal blogs, averaging $2,900 in net new sales six days after publication. Then come six large national outlets averaging $204.

This doesn't mean you shouldn't spend time on traditional media… it can be useful to reach a mainstream audience + establish creds. But know distribution size does not map to relevance anymore. This is especially true the more niche your audience is.

If you check top news media outlets on SimilarWeb the range is 5-25M readers. But each individual story page is seen by ~10-20K people… i.e. = a large Substack, where there is likely a denser quality of audience.

Also look at how top AI companies are launching…

More are giving access to credible early adopters - people who are respected within their domains and plugged into the groups and weird, creative corners of the internet. Devs, technologists, and builders who have ~100k followers, but whose opinions have sway over how tools are perceived.

A good e.g. is Nick St. Pierre, who became a de facto evangelist for Midjourney early on. Luma recently followed the same playbook, with a small group of AI-native creators.

This shift matters for VCs too…

The biggest funds will increasingly act as connectors to these new gatekeepers - the Discord admins, the subreddit moderators, the niche Substack writers who actually move opinion in their domains.

But the challenge = VCs can't use the same playbook as product companies.

You're not selling a product. You can't create "launch moments" or run conversion campaigns. You can't A/B test your way to trust.

The thing that creates gravity for a VC firm isn't marketing in the traditional sense. It's who you are, what you believe, and whether people trust you to deliver over a decade.

That's where “ LORE “ comes in.

Lore is what lets a founder infer who you are, what you believe, and how you behave under pressure - from just a handful of stories.

A way to think about this is World-Building. Lore creates a world that can be entered - held together by recurring story forms, recognisable characters, familiar trials, and known end states. People entering your ecosystem already know the beats, even if they've never experienced them personally.

This sounds abstract.

But bear with me… I think that is much more foundational than it sounds.

How YC and a16z Built Lore

Take Y Combinator for Example… the ultimate startup/VC canon creator…

YC created a place in the imagination that founders can enter long before they ever apply, and often long after they leave. That ‘world’ is held together by lore.

The stories of YC are so recognisable that we haven't lived them, but we’ve heard them enough times to anticipate them.

Content creates context → PG essays, founder advice, Demo Day stories and the vocabulary

Context creates success stories → Founders apply already believing in YC's approach. The ones who succeed do so following YC's playbook (make something people want, do things that don't scale)

Success stories create credibility → stories get retold founder-to-founder

Credibility creates alumni engagement → Successful founders return as mentors, angels, partners. They reinforce the canon by telling the next cohort the same stories.

Alumni create more content → Returning founders write, give talks, share stories. The content is YC-flavoured, using YC language, citing YC patterns.

More content = more applications → By the time someone applies, they already believe the lore about what YC is and what it will do to them.

The cycle repeats, each time adding another layer of shared memory.

YC didn't set out to do "world-building" in a marketing sense. They behaved consistently enough, for long enough, that a world emerged around it - repeating characters, phrases, stories etc.

For smaller firms, this is possible. You don't need institutional scale to create recursive lore. Clear patterns in who you back, willingness to let those founders tell their stories in their own words + the discipline to connect those stories into an arc over time.

Ironically, the example I think is even more accessible for firms is a16z…

a16z: Expansive Lore (Ideas → Institutions)

Like YC, a16z's lore is ultimately about a16z itself as an institution, not just the companies it backs. The firm is the protagonist.

But unlike YC, whose world is built outcomes, a16z’s universe is built around ideas. ‘Software eats the world’, ‘Crypto re-architects trust’, ‘American Dynamism’ etc. making its internal worldview public.

The firm organised around domains - each vertical a claim about how the world would evolve.

Within each vertical, they put forward partners with visible authority. Over time, those partners became inseparable from the ideas they represented i.e. a specific sub-world within the broader system. Chris Dixon, crypto. Katherine Boyle, Dynamism. Martin Casado, infrastructure. etc. etc.

Content about how they operate (not just what they invest in) built community. Builders, operators, policy people, and technologists now follow a16z not for deal announcements - but to understand how certain people think about the future.

Community → reach. Reach attracted founders who already believed in the worldview. Those founders → investments. The successful ones later talked about a16z → content, or returned as partners (Martin Casado is the cleanest example of that arc).

The loop compounds.

More recently, content like the Ben & Marc show makes this explicit. Their stories are about the firm not just about technology or markets.

For smaller firms… While this example requires resources most don't have - a media operation, sector-specific partners, institutional reach into policy. The principle still applies… Even if your "world" is narrow - European B2B SaaS, climate hardware etc.

You can still create a recognisable universe with its own ideas, characters, and story patterns.

The flippening means these fragments now form in public first - on Twitter, in Discord, on podcasts - before any firm can shape them.

But if you're always making the conversation, always pushing the narrative, you're fighting the current.

Real lore comes from doing things worth talking about, then curating what emerges.

In 2026, that means three things:

1. Build an Upstream Detection Layer

If discourse now starts in group chats, niche accounts, founder circles, and tiny Substacks before it reaches traditional media, you need to see it early.

Do this:

• Maintain a living list of niche voices that matter for your thesis areas

• Track recurring memes, anxiety themes, and emerging vocabulary (not just headlines)

• Treat a single viral moment as an early signal, then watch for repetition and remixing

Output you want:

• A weekly/monthly internal brief that says what is bubbling, who is driving it, and what frames are forming

You can't curate fragments if you don't see them forming.

2. Pick Your Characters

Without character, nothing travels.

Marketing has shifted toward marketing a person. Tesla = Elon. Palantir = Alex Karp. You might be accomplished but if you’re boring, you won’t reach.

People with the best "external signal" can outperform people with the best operational substance in the attention economy - at least in the short term.

For emerging firms, this is even starker: Early-stage lore is founder-adjacent, not firm-centric. People care less about your brand and more about you - your background, your scars, your perspective.

In practice: Choose 2-3 primary characters who can carry ideas in public without sounding like PR. Not everyone needs to be a character. The firm needs enough characters that the story travels.

The firm brand becomes an aggregate of distinct characters tethered to distinct ideas.

(First, diagnose which content styles actually fit each GP using the GP Content Matrix)

3. Think in Presence, Not Campaigns

Stop planning "big splash" moments (the velocity of ‘current things’ is too fast). Start building steady, compounding output.

Be willing to be legible. Many firms hedge, keep optionality, avoid being pinned down. That preserves short-term flexibility but destroys long-term pattern formation. If no one can say what you consistently believe or how you tend to act, there's nothing to pattern-match against - no matter how many decisions you've made.

Assume the first read of your firm happens through secondhand fragments, not your website. Those fragments need to point in the same direction, not contradict each other.

TLDR: What Lore Means for Your 2026 Content

• Shift PR dollars: Stop prioritising traditional outlets. Build relationships with niche voices (Discord admins, subreddit mods, domain-specific Substacks) who actually move opinion in your sectors.

• Let founders tell their stories: Don't script success narratives. Let portfolio companies speak in their own words, then connect those fragments into recognisable patterns over time.

• Surface partner expertise consistently: Pick 2-3 partners as primary voices. Give them clear theses to own publicly. Let them be characters, not just capital allocators.

• Track what's bubbling: Build a weekly brief of recurring themes, anxiety points, and emerging vocabulary in founder circles - before they hit traditional media.

• Do interesting things, then curate: You can't manufacture lore. Make bold decisions, back contrarian bets, publish unpopular opinions - then amplify what emerges organically.

• Think presence, not campaigns: Replace "big splash" planning with steady output. Assume people learn about you through secondhand fragments, not your website.

Before you get wrapped up in "new media," figure out what you're willing to consistently do that's worth talking about.

Build your lore.

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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