There is No Data About the Future

Remember VC market maps.

You've seen fewer of them even if you haven't clocked it - the genre that was everywhere a few years ago has been thinning out of the feed.

An old Insight Partners map had resurfaced in my feed - their December 2024 map of the AI agents ecosystem. If you’re wondering why nobody makes these anymore, I gave Claude the same brief and in 29 minutes and $2 (if this was API-called) later, I had mostly the same list, albeit no logos.

That's not a dunk on Insight - mine now only exists because content like theirs trained the machine.

I've been thinking about data and content a lot recently. A few weeks ago I wrote about aggregation, and the 2 ways it still differentiates:

• run it as a consistent machine (consistency the product)

• aggregate data only you have (your sawdust)

Every scrap of the past is either ~free, or for increasingly scarce and up for sale like Spirit airline’s sawdust last week.

The past, in other words, is becoming a solved market. Which matters for Venture, as an asset class whose entire product is the future.

After all, there is no data about the future.

So why does so much of the business that sells the future markets itself with the past? And what does it look like to market the future instead?

1. Witness it early

There's no data about the future, but the future starts somewhere - in labs, in papers, in the small number of people operating a year ahead.

But often, the true frontier has a marketing problem. Academic research is famously badly packaged and most corporate R&D is closed. The most future-dense material in the economy has no community layer, no distribution, no brand.

YC noticed, and Paper Club is the result. Every couple of weeks this year - a small group of researchers, engineers and founders in Mountain View.

One of their most recent ones below, and each events pages gets a unique look too.

5 new research papers, 10 minutes each, then dinner. The talks go online but dinners are off the record.

What YC is doing is applying fund marketing skill to the frontier itself - rolling up the badly-packaged edge into community, content and access in a single format. Sit at the edge with the other people at the edge. Discuss it, and the discussion is the content. Connect with the best builders in the room, and I think even demo/test some of the research.

2. Underwrite it in public

The natural vehicle for this already exists… the Request for Startups. YC has been publishing them since 2009 - but as the industry turns toward future-facing content, more funds are adopting the format every quarter. Expect a wave.

But if every fund starts an RFS, what makes yours mean anything? The risk is sameness - 10 lists, the same 10 ideas, ironically that could have been llm produced.

Specificity.

Conviction's recent RFS from Sarah Guo - thread on American robotics manufacturing doesn't say "we're excited about reindustrialisation" - it names the missing capability (the yield ramp from making parts to making them at cost and quality), locates the people who hold it (a few thousand manufacturing engineers near Shenzhen or retired in Japan and Germany), cites the regulation that creates the window, and proposes a specific company - then ends with a direct ask to whoever's building the hard exception.

Accountability.

I like the idea of going back and marking your own homework - publicly scoring previous requests against what happened. An RFS is a set of predictions, and predictions without grading are easy.

Alex MacDonald at Sequel has been doing this with his year end predictions, but funds should do this on their RFS…. fwiw, YC’s first ever Request for Startup was “The Future of Journalism”.

Messenger.

Pear VC are running an RFS authored by portfolio icons - an operator at the frontier asking for a company to exist especially a C-Suite from a huge scaleup carries a lot of weight, and perhaps a better bat signal for builders.

Productisation.

Every just showed the format's ceiling. Thesis Statements, launched this week: 100 builders and thinkers, each making a specific prediction about what great human work looks like after automation, published as a public record - with revisiting and grading happening at an upcoming event.

Interesting continuation of the content into an event to test which ideas held up.

So finally,

The audit for your content calendar is 1 question per piece - is this built from the past, or is it a position on the future?

Built from the public past, it's competing with $2.47. Built from your private past, that's the machine from a few weeks ago - run it, but know its ceiling. Above the ceiling is the the future.

Venture is the industry that's supposed to own the future. Publish like it.

Laurie, Refinery Media

If you made it all the way through, thanks so much for reading! A thousand 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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