Why Most VC Marketing Doesn't Compound

Here is a fund I meet a lot.

They have a PR agency on retainer. A ghostwriter runs the managing partner's LinkedIn. In Q4 they did a founder video shoot - talking heads + b-roll, nice.

By year end they have spent $150-200k and generated... stuff. Posts went out, maybe a press hit landed and the videos exist.

Yet, they have gained no competitive advantage whatsoever. Ask a founder in their sector what the firm stands for and you get a shrug.

This is my aversion to “more stuff” as ‘marketing’.

Often, more effort, or even more quality ins’t actually the solution to a firm’s perceived problems.

It is that the 3 things they bought - brand, content, distribution - were designed in isolation, so none of them fed the others.

Money in —> activity out ≠ compounding.

This piece is to show how the alternative, less work, less effort, but more “thinking” can build your brand.

This sounds abstract, but it won’t be by the end.

Wtf do these words mean?

I have an aversion to corporate jargon, so let’s knock this out ELI5.

• Brand = the sentence people say about you (stored signal).

• Content = the public evidence that the sentence is true (proof of work).

• Distribution = who says that sentence (network leverage).

Defined this way, you can see how they connect (more depth on that here).

Content sharpens a vague reputation into a specific one. And “content” here means more than blogs and podcasts. Deals are content too. They make a claim, attach evidence, and are published. Proof of work in VC is both thinking and doing.

Brand lowers the cost of distribution, because a known firm does not have to buy attention for every piece. And distribution - your founders, network, your audience - deposits back into brand, because every person who carries the sentence strengthens it.

That is the machine of Venture Capital marketing, really.

When it runs, each leg makes the other 2 cheaper and stronger.

When the legs are run by 3 separate vendors or 3 separate briefs, you are paying full price for everything, forever.

This also explains something last week’s piece on Thrive Capital: you can enter the loop from any leg.

This is how brands like them or Greenoaks build these monster brands without content. Their networks are strong enough that the sentence travels without much traditional content. Founders carry it into reference calls, and the deals themselves generate proof of work. The flywheel is already spinning.

Sounds abstract but it’s pretty evidential. It also somewhat explains how T1 spinouts can work so well. Sarah Guo, for example, leaves Greylock, taking all of her brand, uses that do deals - content - creates more content about those deals, and within a couple of years the sentence upgraded - from "ex-Greylock partner" to "Conviction is the AI-native firm.".

But most firms don't being with a Thrive-grade network, or a Conviction-grade reputation.

Content is the one leg you can build from effort alone. It is the way in.

So the default kicks in... start a blog, write tweets.

That isn’t wrong. But in isolation, you have to go very hard for it to matter. It’s easier to ask what is that blog PART of? What does it feed?

Go back to content as proof of work… The closer your content sits to the actual work of the firm, the cheaper and more credible it becomes. At the limit, there is no gap at all -

The work is the content…

Ideally, the work is deals. But your deals might not carry a story on their own yet. So the question becomes... what else do you actually do?

Why Paradigm Builds Things

You may not know much about crypto, but roughly half of all Ethereum/Solidity developers now starts a new project today, the standard first step is 1 terminal command…

curl -L https://foundry.paradigm.xyz | bash

Read the URL again. Paradigm - the venture firm - is baked into the install command of the ecosystem's dominant toolkit. Foundry, which Paradigm built and open-sourced in 2021, is now the primary framework for 57% of respondents in a Solidity Developer Survey.

So why would a fund build free developer tools? Because of who Paradigm needs to reach. Their founders are engineers - and engineers do not read VC thought leadership. They use tools. Paradigm's doing is deep technical work, so Paradigm's content is... the technical work itself. Zero friction.

This is also 1 of DOZENS of open-source tools the firm maintains.

Not all crypto, either - they built PACE, a multiplayer game about AI race dynamics based on game theory papers, with a public leaderboard which doubles as a sourcing - the people winning a frontier-AI strategy game are exactly the people a frontier fund wants to meet. They have also done tools with OpenAi, and even a story competition with Neal Stephenson.

Now trace the loop... The work is the content - tools their audience uses daily, each use re-proving "these people have real technical depth." Paradigm does write blogs, plenty of them - but notice what they are about… the work! Research posts, tool releases, deep dives into what they built. The writing compounds the proof instead of floating free of it. The distribution is not an algorithm - it is the developers themselves, every setup guide and repo that says "install Foundry" marketing the fund to exactly the right audience, and the brand closes the loop, devs now describe Paradigm as the technical firm, a brand earned through use.

I have written before that the future of VC marketing is interactive, and that VCs do not make enough technical content.

Paradigm is blowing both out of the water - and I suspect the reason few are talking about it is the crypto spine, which sits outside the current zeitgeist.

The so-what is not "go build developer tools." Just get clear on what you really do, and who for. The work produces the asset as a by-product. Btw.. the YC SAFE was just this, an internal-grade document given away, now plumbing in basically every seed round on earth, insane marketing!

Why Lux Rethinks Events

Events are a given in venture - canapés, a panel, name badges etc. usually run in total isolation from both the content and the brand. The event team books speakers, the content team writes essays, investors invest and none feeds the other.

Lux Capital welded all of it together.

Instead of publishing a blog "WHy wE iNvEsT in DefEncE TEch," Lux built Riskgaming - playable simulations of the exact crises their sectors face. It comes out of their research team - Danny Crichton and Laurence Pevsner.

What they’ve created is a series of games played in person, with character sheets, rules and unfolding scenarios. In one, you might run an AI company, there is a drug-discovery game for a room of 50, and a 100-person game about colonising the Moon.

Lux hosts sessions, but also makes the kits free to download so others can run them. The research becomes a game, the game gives people a reason to gather, and the questions and decisions that emerge feed the newsletter and podcast.

By Lux's own account, it feeds the fund directly. Their LP letter says the games hand Lux "up-close takes on talent and a trove of new investable ideas not yet appreciated by others" - talent evaluation and thesis generation from the same 3 hours. The room itself is an asset too, forcing "stakeholders who may never share a cap table into a shared concert of consequence." Plus 6 months later, when 1 of those players hits a breakthrough, they know who to call. i.e. the games stress-test investment theses, surface hidden adjacencies, and build the network.

The rest of the loop follows. The Riskgaming Substack - thousands of subs - writes about the games and the questions in them, the game kits are free to download, so a Stanford club or a government team hosts the next session with Lux's name - distribution - and the brand is Lux understands how this world works. One player wrote he could still recall his GM in China game in detail a year later. Nobody remembers last year's panel.

A simpler version of the same pattern could be Tidemark's Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project.

This is more typical - frameworks, benchmarks and then events + peer sessions, but organised around 1 operating agenda, where the benchmark survey trades data for a consultation and relationships compound from there.

Tidemark publishes ‘case studies’ and - again, by the firm's own account - Adaptive's founder joined the programming early, built a shared language with the team - and Tidemark later led the company's $30m Series B.

This is that compounding loop all the way to a cheque.

The so-what… events for firms are often very isolated from content, and vice versa, but events could be the cheapest place to start compounding, because you already run them. Swap 1 panel for a format where people DO something, and make what happens in the room live beyond it, through content or otherwise.

The audit

Are you running brand, content and distribution in isolation? You might be putting in more effort, doing more, and getting less results… so ask yourself 3 questions -

1. Does your content create dealflow, or does your dealflow create content?

2. Is your content an advertisement or an asset?

3. Who carries your distribution - the algorithm, or your network?

The next time you commission anything - a piece, an event, a video - ask what it deposits into the other 2. If the answer is nothing, you are not marketing, just producing.

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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