Why Top VCs Ignore 80% of Their Audience

Yesterday I saw this brilliant post from Charlie O'Donnell about “The Tech Community Reality Pyramid” - a framework for how community organisers should think about their audiences. If you’re in events, I recommend you check it out here.

It's one of those posts that immediately made me realise… this is exactly what's broken in many VC’s content strategy.

Replace "tech community attendees" with "people consuming your VC content" and the pyramid holds perfectly.

I have spoken to three funds this week, one small, one large and one massive. In all 3 cases, their content is optimised for the wrong 80% of the pyramid.

Yours might be too…

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The VC Content Audience Pyramid

As above, let’s map this out:

APEX (Top 5%)

• Who: Top GPs at leading funds, serial successful founders, respected LPs

• What they do for you: Their engagement = instant credibility signal

• Accessibility: Extremely low - they ARE the content others want to consume

• Reality: They don't need your content. They're likely already shifting narratives in tech, e.g. Andreessen and American Dynamism, Harry Stebbings 996 etc etc.

FUTURE STARS (Next 15%)

• Who: Series A/B founders who've seen scale, rising GPs at emerging funds, experienced operators

• What they do for you: Their shares/engagement validate your expertise to others

• Accessibility: Low - they only engage with your top 10% of content

• Reality: This is who you're actually trying to reach when you say "sophisticated audience"

SMART, REAL PROFESSIONALS (Next 30%)

• Who: Pre-seed/seed founders actively raising, junior partners, operators considering VC

• What they do for you: Network effects, potential future portfolio companies or colleagues

• Accessibility: High - they're actively consuming to learn

• Reality: Your core audience for regular content

ASPIRATIONAL MAJORITY (Bottom 50%)

• Who: Idea-stage founders, students, aspiring VCs, dreamers, people figuring it out

• What they do for you: Engagement metrics, newsletter opens, likes

• Accessibility: Very high - they'll consume everything

• Reality: Optimising for them = optimising for vanity metrics… More on that in this blog

Btw… obviously people are fluid… This is because you can cut the audience again by sector, or by specific topics… for example, I would consider myself in different sections in different topics for example my knowledge of 3D tech or Defence Tech is much higher than the majority, but I know relatively little about Web3.

The Optimisation Trap

I won’t go into detail here, we’ve covered this here and here but mostly, generic content advice, engagement hacks, "10 tips for startups" content - this is all designed to capture the Aspirational Majority.

High engagement. Low signal. Likely the wrong audience.

This content is easier to make, the bottom 50% is accessible, they engage and they comment. This might even make your metrics look good.

But they're not the LPs deciding whether to allocate to your fund or the critical founders choosing their next investor, or who will might refer quality dealflow.

The strategic question is "am I designing content to target the bottom 80% or the top 5%?"

And here's where it gets uncomfortable… the content that resonates the top 5% might alienate or confuse the bottom 50%.

Portfolio learnings with specific data points? The Aspirational Majority finds it too niche.

Technical deep dives on your thesis? Goes over the majority of founder heads.

This is why the Trust/Signal Matrix from my previous piece matters so much. You're not just optimising for high trust and high signal in abstract terms - you're optimising for trust and signal with a specific tier of the pyramid…

and by the way, sometimes, this might be the aspirational majority. First Round Review’s content, or Hustle Fund’s content are the obvious examples here:

Who Do You Need to Speak To Today?

Your audience is not everybody in the tech community. Your audience is not everybody in VC.

The audience you're targeting should be fluid based on fund lifecycle:

Pre-fundraise / Fundraising mode:

• Apex: Established LPs, fund-of-funds decision makers.

• Future Stars: Emerging allocators, HNWI.

• Content focus: Fund performance, portfolio insights, unique data…

• Basically how can you optimise for credibility signals that reach allocators

Post-close / Deployment mode:

• Apex: Breakout founders in your sector

• Future Stars: Series A/B founders who might want you in their next round

• Content focus: Your learnings from founders, tactical frameworks, sector-specific insights

• You're optimising for dealflow and founder mindshare, how can your content get shared in founder circles.

Portfolio support phase:

• Apex: Experienced operators who could join portfolio companies

• Future Stars: Domain experts who could advise or connect

• Content focus: Portco challenges, hiring needs, specific domain problems

• You're optimising for talent pipeline and expertise access, and this might mean engaging a your broader network or venture partners.

Most VCs don't think about this fluidity. They create one content strategy and run it forever, wondering why it's not moving the needles they care about at that moment.

The majority of people consuming your content will not be people you want to attract.

Not because they're bad or unworthy. It's just math. Most people aren't at the stage where they can help your specific business goals right now.

Some of them will become Future Stars eventually. But you can't let them drive your content strategy today.

When you start designing for correct content attribution… a lot can change:

Your content becomes more specific:

• Generic startup advice could come from anyone - it's been said a thousand times before vs. specific insights with real numbers can only come from you

• "will everyone understand this?" It's "will this get put in Slack channels?"

Your engagement drops but signal increases:

• Likes from people who won't remember your fund's name tomorrow? Down, vs. shares from founders, and LPs whose networks you want access to? Up.

• The comments shift from "great post!" to substantive disagreements or additions from people who know the space

Stop chasing trends, start setting conversations:

• Not aggregating generic news or reacting to every AI hot take everyone else is also commenting on

• Instead: What specific conversation can our fund lead in the zeitgeist? What pattern are we seeing that contradicts consensus?

• You're not trying to be part of every conversation - you're trying to own a specific conversation

Become comfortable with smaller, higher-quality audiences:

• Optimising for 500 people in your specific niche means you can go deep, use industry shorthand, reference obscure context

• The goal isn't maximum reach - it's maximum signal to the people whose attention actually compounds into fund outcomes

This is uncomfortable. Especially when you see other profiles getting 10x your engagement with generic content.

But… Engagement from the Aspirational Majority doesn't close funds or create dealflow. Recognition from the top tiers does.

"Elite" Doesn't = "Complicated"

The other trap I see VCs fall into when they start thinking about their content is they think sophisticated content needs to be dense, jargon-heavy, or deliberately inaccessible.

The image of the VC descending from the clouds, handing down some incomprehensible report to the lowly founders below.

That's not what this is about.

Elite insight doesn't mean complicated delivery. It means unique perspective delivered clearly.

Some of the best VC content is deceptively simple… (“make something people want”)

• A single chart showing portfolio data no one else has

• A three-sentence observation about a pattern others missed

• A framework explaining something everyone experiences but no one articulated

I have written more about this idea in this post:

The difference isn't complexity but specificity and ownership.

The test is - "Could this content ONLY have our fund's name on it?"

If you removed your fund's name and logo, could this have been written by anyone?

If this could only come from your specific experience/thesis - then you've created something valuable for the top tiers.

Examples:

Generic (even if well-written): "Hiring is the most important thing for early-stage startups. Here's how to think about it." → Anyone could write this. No fund-specific insight.

Elite but clear: "We've backed 12 vertical SaaS companies. The ones that made their first sales hire before $500K ARR failed 80% of the time. Here's why." → Only your fund could write this. Specific data. Clear takeaway. Accessible language.

The Practical Tension

When I create this specific newsletter, I am thinking about 1-2 specific people.

People who've been in my orbit from the beginning. People whose opinion I genuinely respect. People at the top tiers of the pyramid for the specific goal that this content is serving. If it would make them think "huh, interesting perspective" or "I should share this with my network" - I publish it.

Tbh, this is discipline. Because it means sometimes publishing content that gets 1/10th the engagement of the generic stuff. I am confident I could grow a much larger newsletter if I covered significantly more generic content, or aggregated all the top “VC news” of the last month… This is the same for funds I work with, we could get more engagement with another AI market map… but should we…

Decide the Tension you want - Who are you creating for, and When?

You will have a unique ratio that works: 70% of content for top two tiers (Apex + Future Stars), 30% for accessibility (Smart Real Professionals + Aspirational Majority).

This will help you find ownership within your niche… but also get eyeballs beyond your immediate circle.

The Gap in the Market

Here's what doesn't exist enough in VC content - content that fills a specific gap for a specific tier, with this you can start competing to be the most insightful voice for your specific top-tier audience.

Look across the VC content landscape.

• What conversation isn't happening that should be?

  • Is there a stage or geography underrepresented in content? A specific founder challenge everyone faces but no one's written about?

• What unique data does your firm have?

  • patterns no one else can see because they don't have your portfolio.

• What format doesn't exist yet for your space?

  • Is all the content in your sector long-form written, but your audience wants video? Is there a podcast covering your sector from the founder side but not the investor side?

• What explanation is missing?

  • Regulatory or technical nuances affecting every company in your sector but documented nowhere. The "why now?" for your thesis.

The more your content fills a gap that didn't exist before, the more people in your niche will reference it constantly.

Find the gap. Fill it. Own it.

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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