VC Marketing in 2035: What Changes When AI Does the Work

This is going to be a longer piece - I've been thinking about VC marketing in the age of AI, and this one needs more room than our usual 4-minute read.

This isn't going to be another "everything's changing" thread. What I'm really curious about is how the marketing role itself might shift over the next decade. Also, this won't be an analysis of current tools or workflows as it is largely inevitable that software will compound so rapidly by 2035 that today's marketing stacks will quickly be outdated.

When we think about VC marketing in 2035, of course AI will be solving a lot of problems in the ‘HOW’ as AI generation will certainly help us get more done. But this still leaves unanswered the WHO, WHAT and WHY that will define the role.

Bear with me on this one - I think there's something here that's worth the extra few minutes.

If you’d rather get your 4 minute fix, check out some older writings here.

If you're raising a fund today with a 10 year lifecycle, you need to think about what venture capital looks like in 2035.

The disruption on the investment side of Venture is well documented, if not already happening.

Dan Gray (@Credistick) outlined in a great article how algorithmic LP allocations, AI and defi could reshape Venture in the future. While Alex Macdonald - founding partner @Sequel - is vocal about the growing role of AI in their fund, Data Driven VC has 45K+ subscribers, and we’ve worked with a big European fund on communicating how they’re using AI in decision making today.

But much less talked about is the massive implications this has for everything else - platform functions, back offices, and especially how funds build their brands.

AI and algorithmic capital will swallow most private equity opportunities. In response, VCs will be compressed into the earliest stages - chasing alpha where algorithms can't follow. As such, successful VCs will be judged by their ability to find deals before they generate enough data to be machine-readable.

Today, VC marketing exists largely to fill in the blanks. Most of the time, founders and LPs can’t see a fund’s actual performance. Track records are private, attribution is murky and founder experience is passed along anecdotally, not systematically.

So marketing becomes a kind of proxy, something that stands in for the things people wish they could know but can’t verify i.e. a polished website suggests legitimacy, PR features imply momentum.

But what happens when those information gaps close?

When AI makes performance transparent, when founders can reverse-diligence you as easily as you diligence them, when every deal gets parsed and every return gets benchmarked - marketing doesn't disappear. But it does change.

In 2035, marketing won't convince people you're good in the absence of proof. As data becomes more available, marketing will help LPs, founders and other VCs understand how you're good, and why it's repeatable. Marketing - previously a substitute for clarity - becomes an amplifier of clarity.

This makes brand building and partner recognition all the more important.

If this shift is inevitable…. The question is what does it mean for how you build your fund - and your brand - today.

I think there will be six lenses through which VC marketing must be redesigned:

Industry, Audience, Proof, Partner, Firm, Platform.

1. Industry Lens (Transparency and Proof)

As Dan Gray outlined in his piece on algorithmic LP allocations, we're moving toward a world where performance becomes legible through data rather than narrative. In this environment:

• You don’t need to spin stories around why a deal was smart - just show the ledger.

• But you do need to give context, judgment, and insight to demonstrate why your edge is repeatable.

There are three parallel examples where this is true - industries where performance became visible and marketing had to evolve - and likely explains where Venture marketing is heading.

Lessons From Public Equities

In public markets, fund managers cannot hide behind vague performance claims. Their benchmarks are public and their fees are more transparent.

This transparency completely changes how asset managers market themselves. They can't just say "we're good at picking stocks" - the data already shows whether that's true. Instead, their marketing focuses on why their approach works and when it works best. The role of marketing becomes one of narrative and interpretation: Why did we underperform this quarter? what’s our long-term thesis? why are we overweight in a sector others are underweight in?

This is why firms like ARK Invest publish detailed research and weekly insights - all of the data the reference is publicly available, it’s just their audience needs help interpreting it in context. Especially when they underperform, funds have to double down and explain how temporary setbacks don’t discredit their thesis - wouldn’t this be hyper refreshing to see in VC…

In this scenario, marketing becomes a form of ongoing education. It builds belief in the manager’s worldview, not just their historical numbers. That’s the shift VC is heading toward - when performance is visible, marketing becomes a way to explain the WHY behind the WHAT.

Implications for VC: 

Lessons From E-commerce & DTC

In the early days of direct-to-consumer brands, companies like Casper could build massive businesses largely on brand storytelling. Beautiful websites, compelling origin stories, and sleek packaging were enough to convince customers to try an unknown mattress or buy glasses online.

That world is gone. Now, every product has hundreds of Amazon reviews. Reddit has dedicated communities dissecting whether brands are legtimately good or just good at marketing. Browser extensions show you price histories and competitor comparisons. Influencer partnerships are disclosed and Facebook's ad library lets you see exactly how much brands are spending to acquire customers.

Today, the A+ DTC brands know they can’t just tell you their product is amazing. Instead, they show real-world usage, highlight customer testimonials, and give you access to the data that supports their claims (return rates, ingredients, sourcing, price breakdowns).

In this environment, the role of marketing shifts from “persuasive narrative” to “visible integrity.”

I don’t think stories will disappear - but they will be forced to line up with reality. In fact, the closer the brand brings you to the truth, the more trust it earns.

Implications for VC:

Lessons From Saas and Dev Tools

In software - especially developer tools - the game has changed completely. You can’t bluff your way through with fancy branding. The product is out there, on GitHub, or Hacker News, or Product Hunt. It has a free tier, or people can trial it to see exactly how it works, how it performs, what the documentation is like, how fast bugs get fixed, and how active the community is.

Easy to forget that software wasn’t always like this. In the pre-internet and early enterprise era, software was sold like hardware. CIOs and IT managers signed seven-figure contracts off brochures and Gartner reports. Pricing was opaque, onboarding was slow, and marketing was all about looking enterprise-grade. Even early SaaS still relied on long sales cycles and marketing theatre.

Now, great dev tool marketing doesn’t tell you it’s great - it shows you how to get started in 60 seconds, provides a clear demo repo, and shares the thinking behind the architecture. Marketing becomes less about sizzle and more about scaffolding: helping people understand how to use what’s already visible.

Stripe is the obvious flag bearer here. Instead of telling developers their payments infrastructure was "enterprise-grade" or "best-in-class," they showed you. Their original homepage featured actual code snippets.

In terms of their documentation, Stripe was also so good it became a meme. Their status page was brutally honest about outages. When something broke, they published detailed post-mortems explaining exactly what went wrong and how they fixed it.

Implications for VC:

The Transparency Assumption

These three industries all moved toward greater transparency, and marketing evolved accordingly. But there's a critical assumption embedded in applying this pattern to venture capital - that performance data will actually become standardised and accessible.

A more positive future for the asset class depends on this transparency revolution happening. Without it, AI could entrench existing problems rather than solve them. If LPs use LLMs to discover funds, the most search-optimised players (a16z, etc.) get amplified while genuinely better performers with smaller footprints get buried. The 'best' funds become whoever optimises for algorithmic visibility, not actual performance.

Consider the attribution problem - even today, VCs add logos like SpaceX or Anthropic to their decks without clarifying whether they invested in the seed round or through a layered SPV six months ago. Without standardised transaction ledgers, AI systems can't distinguish between genuine early conviction and opportunistic association.

This creates a feedback loop. The more LPs rely on AI discovery, the more funds optimise for AI discovery rather than performance.

The bear case = the structural problems of VC get worse, not better.

The marketing evolution described in this piece assumes the transparency path wins, and authentic content can support that future. But that's not guaranteed.

Whether it creates transparency or amplifies noise depends on your choices, i.e. what will industry participants do today.

2. Audience Lens (Who You Market To)

The Brand Split

By 2035, VCs will need to maintain two distinct but complementary brands:

1. Brand that appeals to algorithmic capital allocation systems

2. Brand that connects with human founders.

Dan Gray posits that LP capital will increasingly flow through algorithmic treasury DAOs that evaluate GP performance through data rather than relationships. Whether or not this capital is pooled in decentralised structures is probably up for debate, but the fact that you will be stress tested by AI systems is definitely not.

Algorithm Facing Brand

Needs to prove three things:

Performance consistency: Your returns, measured across standardised metrics, benchmarked against peers in your stage and sector (clean data that algorithms can process and compare, not storytelling).

Process reliability: Evidence that your decision-making follows repeatable frameworks rather than gut instinct. LPs - because of the tools at their disposal - will favour GPs who can articulate their selection criteria in ways that can be codified and tracked.

Risk calibration: Proof that you understand the risk-return profile of your investments and can communicate why certain bets make sense within a portfolio context.

This brand lives in structured data. Your investment ledger, your decision frameworks published as algorithms, your track record broken down by sector, stage, and market conditions. It's designed to be consumed by machines first, humans second.

The Founder-Facing Brand

By 2035, founders will diligence investors as rigorously as investors diligence them - and AI will make this instant, comprehensive, and unavoidable. Every call, memo, and public post will be parsed for signal.

This raises the bar for what a founder-facing brand needs to be. As above it must be legible to machines. But founders aren’t just querying databases, they are still fundamentally human. They're looking for investors who, understand their specific problems, are associated with helping them make sales or hires (intros), and offer 1:1 accessibility.

This all underpinned by the question, are you someone they want to spend years working with?

This brand is inherently social and cultural. It lives in your content, your network, your reputation within founder communities, and your ability to create moments of connection and insight.

Because of this marketing becomes “anti-marketing”.

It’s anti-marketing because it rejects the traditional idea that marketing is about image management or persuasion. Instead it’s about radical transparency + authenticity - giving people direct access to what you actually do.

This might look like publishing raw footage of you actually helping founders solve problems. 776 is one of few funds ahead on this trend - but with AI, this can also become much more personalised.

Your “website” won’t be static (cc tryarchitect.com). When founders search for investors, AI will generate a personalised version based on their stage, sector, and challenges. A B2B SaaS founder might see case studies from your SaaS portfolio, advice matched to their ARR, and intros to peers solving similar problems. A biotech founder would see something completely different - regulatory insights, specific pharma connections, and technical content on drug development.

Firms like a16z are already ahead, building deep content assets for each vertical stack they care about. But even that model will evolve. Today, verticalisation is about producing distinct hubs of content for different markets. In the AI-driven future, those hubs will stop being separate libraries and start functioning as adaptive systems. A founder won’t browse a “biotech hub” - they’ll query an agent, and the agent will pull the most relevant pieces of your knowledge base, dynamically assembling a picture of who you are and why you matter to them on a personal founder-to-investor level.

In summary…

• Algorithm-facing brand = Prove performance, consistency, diligence

• Founder-facing brand = Be accessible, helpful, signal status

This duality shifts content strategy:

• Algorithm-facing content = publish your thinking, share your hit rate, show your diligence engine.

• Founder-facing content = proof of empathy and alignment, funds scale personalities, 1:1 content turned into 1:many content.

3. Proof Lens (Content as Alpha Evidence)

When anyone can surface deals and algorithms can process structured data, content becomes how you prove judgment before the data exists.

This is especially critical at the earliest stages where algorithms struggle:

• Algorithms need structured data.

• Humans win with intuition, networks, and foresight.

• Content becomes pre-performance evidence.

If the future VC's job is to "see the deal before the deal," content becomes your time-stamped prediction engine. Every framework you publish, every contrarian take you defend, every early-stage thesis you articulate becomes proof that you can identify opportunities before they generate enough data to be machine-readable.

Once companies start leaving any structured data trail (ARR, headcount, patents, LinkedIn job changes), every fund with an AI engine sees them. The window where a human fund “discovers” a breakout because they noticed early traction disappears - that opportunity space is competed away instantly.

The only way to have differentiated access is to build relationships before structured signals exist. Content is the most logical way to scale 1:1 relationships, and I think this will become more and more essential as data eats up any day 1 alpha.

Content is how you intercept founders in that pre-signal zone e.g are you top of mind with founders before they leave their FAANG roles?

For raising new funds, content will also become a public predictor of future success - it becomes a machine-readable archive of your judgment. By 2035, LPs (and their AI copilots) will literally back-test your published theses against actual outcomes. They’ll know which GPs consistently spotted the invisible. Content becomes not marketing but timestamped proof of foresight, not publishing content will mean that you have less data points in their orbit.

4. Partner Lens (The Defensible Unit)

AI will inevitably automate the plumbing of venture - financial ops, compliance, reporting - meaning there’s no strictly necessary role for firms as entities. If the fund as a unit of trust weakens. What remains are the people.

Reputation, network-embeddedness, and day-zero access become the scarce resources. Founders will increasingly choose individuals who already sit inside their networks, whose judgment they trust, and whose presence in a round confers legitimacy. LPs, too, will slice attribution at the partner level - tracking who actually sourced, championed outliers, not just which logo sat on the cap table.

That’s why many firms may persist less as operational necessities and more as brand containers - ways to pool visibility, aggregate reputation, and stabilise returns across a set of individuals. In this sense, the “whole” only exists to amplify the “parts.” Informal partnerships become formal firms, but attribution still flows back to the individual.

Firms that thrive will be those that make this shift explicit - treating the aggregate brand as scaffolding that lets individual reputations compound faster.

On the other hand, partners won’t need to “join a brand” to build one. A solo GP with a machine-readable track record and a trained AI twin can compete directly with established firms. Their digital presence is a living media engine.

This trend is somewhat beginning already, with solo GPs on the rise (account for 53.4% of all emerging VC funds launched in 2024³ ) and many more personality funds cropping up - examples include Robin Haak, Gloria Bäuerlein, and Maria Rotilu in Europe, or Elad Gil raising a billion-dollar solo fund in the US. Partners build individual reputations that compound with their personal brands. They become the kind of people founders specifically request because they represent expertise and support that can't be replicated elsewhere ¹ .

Think of what Rex Woodbury has built with his Substack (analysis that feeds into his fund, Daybreak, and powers his Discord). Now imagine that system fully AI-driven: sector analysis published daily, LP updates auto-generated from portfolio data, and founder communities moderated and personalised by your AI. The same insight engine, but infinitely scalable and customised for every audience member.

Investors in 2035 will be mobile and carry their deal attribution across funds via judgment records, unique data sources, and personally trained AI agents that can’t be easily replicated.

2035’s environment will favours people who:

• Build in public. Sharing your progress/journey along with sector insights, and founder interactions creates a trust that exists independently of firm.

• Train their AI effectively. Feeding it frameworks, decision trees, and sector insights so it can scale your thinking systematically.

• Build verifiable expertise. Being known as "the" investor for a particular space becomes more valuable than being a generalist at a prestigious firm. AI agents will back-test your theses against outcomes. Edge comes from being right.

• Design scalable relationship systems. Hundreds of founder / LP relationships maintained meaningfully through AI orchestration. Delphi and, for example, Martin Tobias’ AI agent, is an early example of this.

• Create proprietary data moats. Owning information streams or frameworks that AI can’t scrape or replicate. This most likely comes from private chats - AI agents connected your whatsapp/imessage can be queried and assessed for trends.

5. Firm Lens (Behaviour and Incentives)

Once attribution flows back to the partner, the firm’s marketing strategy has to change. Instead of polishing a single corporate story, firms invest in scaffolding that makes each partner legible and discoverable.

That means building systems that amplify individual judgment - each memo published, every thesis defended, every call recorded as visible proof. The firm becomes less a logo and more a publishing house - a platform that helps its partners’ ideas travel further and compound faster.

Budgets follow this shift. In 2035, marketing teams spend less time running the firm’s LinkedIn page and more time acting as embedded media operators for each partner - ghost-writing their content, producing their video content, managing their speaking circuits, and building their personal SEO so that when founders search for 'best fintech investor' or 'AI infrastructure expert,' specific partners appear. The same is true on the LP side.

It is likely this also changes incentives inside the firm.

Partners who build durable personal audiences effectively de-risk the firm itself. Their following becomes both a deal-sourcing engine and an LP magnet. Crucially, that following travels with them if they leave. Firms can either try to contain it - locking down brand under a central logo - or embrace the reality that their job is to accelerate it. The best firms will choose the latter, re-tooling their “platform” function as an internal amplification engine i.e. helping partners scale distribution, manage their data trail, and sharpen their reputational edge.

This also changes compensation. Carry alone feels blunt in a world where partner visibility drives firm value. Expect more fluid, performance-linked models - where personal distribution, deal attribution, and network effects are directly monetised. The closest analogy today is NCAA’s NIL market - athletes monetise reputation, reach, and access independent of the team they play for.

By 2035, partners could do the same - earning upside not just from fund performance, but from the monetisation of their personal platform: paid communities, AI-powered advisory, licensing proprietary frameworks. The firm’s role shifts from splitting carry to enabling and capturing some of this value without stifling it.

In practice, a 2035 venture firm looks less like a monolithic brand and more like a constellation of individual brands.

The job of the central entity is to keep those stars aligned long enough to compound together.

That means the head of marketing isn’t just a storyteller for the firm - they’re blurring two roles at once: an editor-in-chief for outputs (packaging, distributing, and archiving the intellectual and creative output of each partner) and an infrastructure architect for inputs (building the AI systems, distribution rails, and third-party connections that let partners project their expertise at scale).

There are some early versions of this logic, for one The Midas List does show attribution flowing to individuals rather than firms. But it’s blunt, backward-looking, and built on public exits. By 2035, attribution will be continuous, more granular, and machine-verified.

But this creates a structural risk.

If the partner is the unit of value, what happens when they leave? Why would an LP or founder stay with the firm if the edge was clearly tied to one individual?

Here’s how firms can use marketing to de-risk that dynamic:

1. Build durable “containers.”

Firms will function more like publishing imprints or research labs. The firm brand provides continuity, process, and shared infrastructure - not just digital systems (AI distribution rails, content archives, CRM) but also the in-person scaffolding (meetups, offsites, gatherings) where networks densify and reputations compound. Marketing becomes as much about orchestrating those environments as it is about publishing online.

2. Share ownership of audiences.

Instead of fighting the portability of partner brands, firms co-own distribution channels. A partner’s newsletter or podcast might live inside the firm’s publishing infrastructure, even if their voice dominates. If they leave, the firm retains the subscriber base but the partner retains the right to export their content. Think of it like Substack vs. The New Yorker: both writer and masthead benefit, and audiences often follow both.

3. Design partnership agreements around portability.

Just like law firms or consultancies, venture firms may move toward explicit contracts about attribution portability: what belongs to the partner, what stays with the firm, and how to share credit for deals after a departure. LPs will want this clarity too - so they can underwrite whether they’re backing a “fund brand” or a “partner brand.”

4. Make the “whole greater than the sum.”

The strongest defence is synergy. If a founder comes to Firm X not just for Partner Y, but because Partner Y plus Partner Z plus the firm’s AI diligence engine together create something no individual could replicate, then the firm has stability. You might lose a star, but the network effect of the collective remains.

5. Accept churn, optimise for magnetism.

Some firms will just lean into the churn. The bet is that attracting a steady stream of talent outweighs the risk of departures. The firm brand becomes a proving ground that continually refreshes its roster of visible, differentiated people. This again is where VC firms market themselves more like Football teams.

So - the midasification of venture doesn’t necessarily kill firms, but it forces them to pick a model: are you an aggregator of individual stars, a container that standardises attribution, or a magnet platform that trains and exports talent?

6. Platform Lens (Infrastructure for Networks)

If the firm lens is about who gets credit and how incentives are structured, the platform lens is about how that structure actually delivers value to founders and LPs in practice.

In other words: marketing strategy at the firm level only works if it’s backed by the right infrastructure. This is where “platform” evolves - from event planning and newsletters into real-time network orchestration.

Traditional platform becomes hyper-personalised relationship building. Instead of generic "talent introductions," you maintain real-time maps of which founders need which specific roles, and you proactively surface opportunities across your network. This likely makes VC Platform - an always-on service that founders can tap into for everything from technical architecture advice to customer introductions.

Platform teams shift from event planning to relationship orchestration. They track which founders are struggling with similar problems and create spontaneous peer groups. They identify when a portfolio company's breakthrough could help another portfolio company's challenge and facilitate those connections immediately.

TLDR Conclusion

By 2035, the hierarchy of brand in venture will have flipped.

Logos and visual identity still matter - but only as containers. They provide continuity, coherence, and a place where reputations can compound. They’re the football jersey, not the player.

The baseline for credibility is data. Performance, attribution, founder reviews, and network utility will all be machine-readable and instantly benchmarked. That transparency makes aesthetic polish alone a weak differentiator. A beautiful website without data to back it up will feel like theatre.

The differentiator becomes judgment and distribution. What you publish - your frameworks, contrarian takes, and early calls - is timestamped proof of foresight. Who follows you, and why they trust you, becomes the real moat. Social channels stop being awareness hacks and start functioning as training sets: auditable trails of how you think that can be back-tested against outcomes.

So if you’re a GP today, your edge in the 2035 environment isn’t your logo or your deck. It’s:

• What you say (and how early) — timestamped predictions, not generic claims.

• What you believe (and how clear) — frameworks that can be codified, tested, and scaled.

• Who trusts you (and why you) — durable networks that travel with you, regardless of firm.

Everyone will have the same tools. Everyone will publish clean performance data. The difference will be how interpretable, trusted, and memorable your thinking is.

In that sense, marketing in 2035 will be indistinguishable from the best investing.

PHEW… That was a long one… If you liked this, please reply and let me know. If not… back to normal next week.

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.

1  Interestingly, this might actual lead to more deal-by-deal investors, which would support both Dan Gray’s view on capital allocation and Patrick Ryan from Odin’s excellent read on the rise of Solo deal by deal makers (caveat that Odin is an SPV platform).

2  Alts-Enthused Asset Owners Seek Operational Efficiency

3  EWVC March Newsletter: The solo GP game