LPs Are on TikTok?

Imagine every top-tier founder and LP in tech drank at the exact same bar every single night. VCs would be fighting over themselves to buy a permanent open tab.

That bar exists. It has 2 billion people in it, and almost nobody in venture is standing at the counter.

Earlier this year, I posted on X about working with an emerging VC on their instagram and how it was printing LP intros.

It blew up my DMs. The consensus reaction from GPs was -

"LPs are scrolling TikTok and Reels!?"

Everybody doom scrolls.

Be honest about your own screen time. Short-form vertical video is where all latent human attention drains… it has become the true top of the funnel for modern decision-makers. Platforms are showing us how users really behave, regardless of what we want to believe about ourselves.

To get straight to whats working, we’re skipping the macro debates and taking three things as given:

• Entertainment is the tax attention charges

• 90% of VC content looks the same

• Personality is venture's answer to celebrity capital.

Assuming those are true, the real question is practical… Who in venture is doing short-form video well, what is working, and what does it mean for your firm?

The First Movers

Broadly, I am bucketing the most active accounts into 4 camps. These are defined by the job the video does.

- The news-jackers.

Something happens in tech, they film themselves talking about it.

Drew Glover (FGV Capital) and Atlas Berry (Mission One Capital) take hot tech stories and talk over them - fast to produce, edited platform-native, and both funnel the attention into newsletters (e.g. frontier.m1c.vc), super smart.

The audience does not care how big your fund is. Atlas has built over 300,000 Instagram followers while running a very small solo GP fund…

Elsewhere, Andrew Chan (Atas VC, 13k on TikTok) runs a volume version - "exposing venture secrets," patchy production, sometimes wandering off-topic entirely - and still ranks when you search venture terms on TikTok… Atas VC hasn’t even launched, again, showing how open the field is.

But he is honest about the playbook - 1,112 videos in a year, and at his peak he was posting 6-10 times a day! Which he admits is unsustainable.

Content returns follow the same power law venture does. A handful of outliers carry the portfolio, and volume is how you get more shots on goal.

- The translators.

These accounts answer the questions founders have/ FAQ about VC.

The common thread: accessibility for founders, not category takes. Founders want to know how you think about them, and they can ask direct questions and learn.

Marshall Sandman (Animal Capital) and Erica Wenger (Park Rangers) hammers a daily founder Q&A - simple videos, relentless volume. Kate McAndrew (baukunst) leans visual: pitch deck breakdowns, numbers, day-in-the-life.

Charlie WW (Haatch) brands his content “Gen Z VC” and explains how venture works - data rooms, pitching, process - which fits a UK fund backing less traditional founders.

- The personality plays.

Getting to know the Investor not just education.

Mitch Harounian (Venture Reel / Moxxie) invests in consumer, so he shoots where consumer lives… a Barry's class for the Barry's breakdown, the Yankees game for a power-law bit about hitting ratios, the Whole Foods aisle for a portfolio company's launch. The scenery is the hook, the videos take minutes to shoot, and it is a strong blueprint going for extroverted GPs in visually rich niches - a robotics investor could run this playbook shot for shot.

Nichole Wischoff (Wischoff Ventures) is approaching 100k on TikTok breaking down business models - coffee shops, gyms - mixed with career advice and her own life. Although not always ‘venture’ content, that audience now is a personal moat that travels with her.

Elsewhere, Enrico Mellis (Animal Syndicate) barely posts about venture at all - music industry rabbit holes, structured riffs on whatever he is deep in. He is doing 2 clever things at once: 1) training the content muscle in public, 2) letting his actual interests act as a magnet for founders building at the edges of them.

- Institutions

Publishing as a firm, not as individual.

Harry Stebbings has recently started green-screen yaps alongside the 20VC clip machine. IMO when one of the biggest podcast brands in venture pivots formats, that is the market telling you where attention is going.

A16z is also crushing Instagram - they treat it like a separate, premium media publication, turning founder origin stories and complex business lessons into ruthlessly edited, highly visual narratives. Rather than repackaging LinkedIn or X content, it designs specifically for Instagram - and for the saves and shares that come from builders finding something interesting/useful.

Felix Hartmann's Hartmann Capital re-edits podcast clips specifically for Instagram - faster pacing, different visual grammar, and thesis-driven visuals like robotics. Plenty of funds have podcasts, but few adapt them for IG rather than just TBPN-ing clips across X.

And then ofc, there is Redpoint… Rashad Assir making comedy skits (amongst other formats) for a tier-1 fund is now it is it’s own case study in breaking through the noise. This has worked well, the fund is more accessible, founders know who Redpoint are before the first meeting, and - the underrated part - the firm has built genuine in-house competence at making things people watch, which is a capability it can now offer portfolio companies.

The copies are arriving, Dragonfruit Ventures ("the gen-z vc") has tried versions of the same skit playbook, fronted by GP Matt Shoss, who built a creator audience outside venture first and is now pointing those reps at his own fund - 19k Instagram followers inside a year, and now with new vlog style videos documenting the fund itself.

From Dad Videos to Dealflow

What this can do for a fund is clearest in Bryce Roberts (Indie VC).

His personal short-form - videos talking to his family about business, and thinking out loud - looked like the junk quadrant of VC content I referenced here, BUT over time, this personality led content began to source deals.

Now, with this audience, he is turning it into a a full dealflow initiative built on that audience, promoted by TBPN, cosigned by the timeline.

This is a mechanism I have written about before most VCs think content works by making them better known. The real advantage is becoming “known well” - founders understanding who you are, what you care about, and whether they want you on their cap table before you have ever spoken.

Short form is a cheap machine for this - personality survives a 40-second vertical video in a way that denser and time consuming formats (e.g. quarterly letters) may not.

All of this is still wide open for VCs.

Run the test yourself - search "venture capital" on TikTok (a billion MAU btw!) and you will recognise almost nobody on the results page! No offence to Atas VC, Hartmann Capital or Golden Gate Ventures… but these are hardly household names, or brands with content budgets or wheelhouse.

The lowest-effort format saturates first

BUT… put every account above on 1 spectrum.

At one end: yapping. Get on the mic, riff, be personable, shoot it in a take.

At the other: structure - edited, visual work.

Yapping is the obvious entry, and it works… But is also the first thing that will saturate, precisely because anyone can start tomorrow.

Rashad (Redpoint), who was kind enough to read a draft of this piece, referenced that on these platform - unlike LI/X - the bar keeps going very quickly - new creators enter, existing creators get better. Ultimately, here you're competing with much better (funnier, hotter, etc) creators on IG/TikTok.

So, the further you move toward structure - editing, visual hooks, formats that take craft - the longer the ground stays open, because the barrier is effort rather than confidence.

Most of the opportunity is still out there

Even more so, the accounts above are using a fraction of what these platforms reward.

Why does the accessible stuff dominate this census?

3 possible answers. 1) Short form is simply a beginner's medium, and first-time founders are the only audience there. 2) Accessible content just wins everywhere, on every platform, always. But my bet is 3)… nobody in venture has seriously tried depth in this format. The deep end of the pool is empty.

But this working is proven adjacent to venture. Two Minute Papers (~2M) spent a decade on YouTube proving that dense research, packaged well, builds an enormous audience. Greg Isenberg (750k) built a huge audience teaching low-code ideation. Oren John (1M) did it for consumer marketing. These audiences are proven by their size, and are full of the exact builders funds claim they want to back… But no fund occupies this content ground.

Which is exactly what the rest of this section maps.

Short form does not need to mean just talking into your phone.

• Slides, not video. a16z's best Instagram content is carousel-format - Ben Horowitz's guide to owning the outcome as 7 designed slides. The format dominates far beyond venture, and almost no other fund touches it.

• The visual explainer. Natalie Fratto draws her arguments - hand-sketched charts, explained aloud. A GP as the explainer rather than the yapper, and a format with essentially no competition in venture.

• Faceless video. The aggregation playbook, ported to motion: founding stories, startup histories, nobody on camera. Theme pages prove the demand daily.

• Filmed-anyway content. Portfolio visits, hackathons, demo days - things the fund does regardless, where the camera is marginal cost. This is “data sawdust” in video form, and whiteboard sessions belong here too.

I also think the biggest unmade play belongs to the biggest firms… A tier-1 fund has backed 50 to 100 household-name companies - and its association with them is aging out with the founder generation. How many Gen Z founders care about eBay? It is one of the greatest venture outcomes ever, and to a 24-year-old it is long gone. Short-form founding stories - how the firm's own legendary companies started - could re-earn that history with an audience that never watched it happen. Reputations decay without redistribution.

5 lessons from doing this

If any of this has moved you… some lessons and caveats. from growing accounts.

1. Not every GP should do this.

Raw, repeatable formats work when the person is naturally quick, opinionated, and comfortable on camera. Forcing a reluctant partner into vertical video produces content that damages the exact thing it was meant to build.

2. Find the intersection

An account we have grown to 30k sits across sport and investing, so the content can lean into the mainstream distribution, which venture content cannot do on its own. You can keep the target audience and borrow a bigger one that contains it. Every niche has a version.

3. Consistency and volume beat polish.

The formal, multi-review production model common at European funds is structurally incapable of timely short form. If every video needs sign-off, you have already lost to the person who shot 3 on their walk to lunch.

4. Short form is discovery.

Clips create the first touch - a newsletter, a YouTube channel, a podcast, a proper website gives the interested somewhere to land. The news-jackers funnelling Instagram into newsletters have this exactly right.

5. Risk is Front Loaded

There are 3 hurdles, justifying the time internally, getting through the initial reps / risk experimenting with formats and finally figuring out how it is worthwhile for the firm. Unfortunately, have to go through the first two to figure the worth.

Go where the founders are

The volume of founder content on these platforms is WILD, and the volume of VC presence is a so so minimal.

I am deep in this rabbit hole again, if your firm is thinking about short form, reply to this email.

Laurie, Refinery Media

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