The Art of the Case Study

If I had a dollar for every time a venture firm described their value add to me, I could charge a 2% management fee and run a sizeable fund.

But yes, sure your fund is different. You do, really, move the needle for the founders you invest in.

And honestly - maybe you do. That is not the crazy part. The crazy part is that firms believe this, say it everywhere, and then offer no proof.

Imagine choosing between 2 cars and the options were "goes a really long way" and "drives far distances."

That is as far as many firms get in documenting their value add. Let alone providing any evidence - or, god forbid, some data.

Even the term is "value-add" is so loose it means nothing, which is why every firm can claim it and no founder believes it.

So here is my position, the great value-add disconnect is mostly a MARKETING problem.

The fix is boringly simple - say what you will do, show how you do it, and prove you have done it before.

This is important, after all, if you are genuinely good, everyone should know. Here is how the best firms make it known.

Value-add is a story VCs tell LPs

This topic has been memed to oblivion.

99.9% of the time, a VC succeeds or fails on selection, not support. There are vanishingly few stories of startups turned around by their investor.

Effectively, this is because if you actually have evidence of good outcomes, you don't need the abstraction of value add.

It is also a lukewarm take that no amount of value-add makes a good investment great - and as the excellent Cory Bolotsky has written, VCs often spend 80% of their support time on the bottom 20% of the portfolio - which, in the religion of power law, means heavy portfolio support is a negative signal about portfolio health.

Some firms have made the rejection explicit.

Slow Ventures published a manifesto - "We Don't Believe in VC Value Add or Platform Teams" - arguing it selects for worse founders, overpromises and underdelivers, and misaligns you.

Their actual help: "WE GIVE YOU MONEY. Duh."

Worth noting, too, that many of the most "helpful" stories in venture lore - Benchmark (eBay), Sutter Hill (Snowflake), Greenoaks (Rippling) - come from teams with no platform at all.

Even the evidence FOR platform shows how thin the ground is. The best study anyone can cite (850 firms) has firms with significant platform functions showed an 1,160 basis point improvement in Net IRR and 0.9x better TVPI over the decade versus firms with none. Encouraging - except it is the ONLY major study, and its data stops in 2022.

I do think some platform teams are excellent, but the dirty secret of venture is that deep down no one is sure - yet because VCs market their differentiation through 'platform services' they can't/won't admit it.

But really, the accusation is not that firms fail to help, it is that they market help they cannot prove. That is a marketing problem, and it has a marketing fix…

Claiming < proving.

The most expensive capital in venture is proof it works

Can real value-add, communicated properly, actually move the market?

imo, Y Combinator settles this.

YC's real superpower is advertising its value-add - so credibly, for so long, that companies hand over 7% at a $500K post-money cap, with an MFN attached. Some of the most expensive capital in venture, with some of the most sought-after builders on earth clamouring to give it up.

Nobody pays that premium for "goes a really long way." They pay it because YC's value is believed - and it is believed because it is demonstrated, relentlessly, in public.

So if value-add is mostly a story, a vague claim files you with the 90%. The only separator is proof. Proof, published properly, is what we will call a case study - and a real 1 has 4 parts.

• A problem

• An action (specifically)

• A change (measured)

• And a witness (the founder or an artefact from the time).

Most firms publish none of these in favour of adjectives. But there are some example where firms nail a different part.

Document the Support

Craft Ventures runs an Operator-in-Residence model - their people embed inside portfolio companies as interim executives, not board-level advisers.

Aaron Cort joined Replit as interim Marketing & Growth exec in September 2024 - and then Craft published his experience in the team, what he helped with - persona segmentation, onboarding rework, lifecycle programmes, creator strategy, SEO, each with What / Why / Impact sections a founder review. He relates a lot of this to his time pre venture (at Clickup).

During the OIR, Replit grew from $2.8M to $150M+ ARR in that window - but I also think its good that Craft does not overclaim here. The number Craft can claim is narrower - G2 reviews went from 17 to 116 under Cort's efforts. Honest attribution is not a weakness here and because Craft does not claim the company's growth, you believe the parts it does claim.

Then they did it again at Supabase - same OIR model, method, with a new portfolio company. 1 case study on its own is anecdotal, but two of the same raises the bar for “hands on”.

Publish the Impact

Primary’s GTM team helped run Teleskope’s early sales motion, and the published case as just numbers - 325 prospect meetings sourced, which became 17 paid trials, which became 8 customers and $500K ARR - all before investing in the Series A.

CAVU runs this for consumer through UNCOMMON, its in-house brand and growth platform. For Vital Proteins, the Feed Your Beauty campaign - messaging, influencers, out-of-home, a pop-up - is shown in full, with a measured result: a 13-point lift in national brand awareness. The founder can see the work AND the outcome it produced.

Insight Partners made value-add a department and publish its output. Onsite, their operating team, is 130 people (!!) - bigger than most entire funds - and the 2024 report claims Insight placed 349 executives, engaged 350+ portfolio companies, delivered AI workshops to 200+ of them, and made 2,200+ connections to enterprise executives through their IGNITE network of 2,700 senior tech buyers.

But aggregates only prove activity.

They go further and publish dozens of case studies e.g. SonarSource - at entry, Sonar had 7M developers using the product and no quota-carrying sales reps - Onsite helped recruit the VP of Sales and a US inside-sales team, ran procurement workshops, trained pipeline forecasting - and by 2022 the resulting enterprise team was generating high tens of millions in annual bookings i.e. Problem → action → change.

Let the founder tell it.

The strongest witness statements do not live on the firm's website at all.

During the SVB crisis, Parker Conrad called Neil Mehta at Greenoaks at 9:30 on a Friday morning. A term sheet was signed 12 hours later ($500M). You know this story because Rippling tells it - the founder, on the company site. No professionally produced testimonial comes close, because here the stakes were real and Rippling have little to gain in telling it.

Of course, this is also the whole Thrive playbook from 2 weeks ago, that the most credible stories are the ones your founders tell.

Sequoia's Crucible Moments is a subtle version of the same, and one VC firms can copy.

In the Airbnb episode, the company carries the plot - the trust crisis, the Wimdu fight - while Alfred Lin's customer-experience work and Greg McAdoo's trip to Berlin are told visibly inside it. Nobody says "value add" once - but you finish the episode knowing what it is like to have Sequoia in your corner. The whole series is case studies in pod form.

Come with receipts.

Shrug Capital barely formats theirs at all. Their case index is raw Notion pages - Eight Sleep, Varda, Feastables - with the documents and images from the work.

Neo’s Cursor retrospective plays the same card with archival artifacts - coding tests, early assessments, Ali Partovi’s own lowball offer. My Neo teardown called for exactly this - then Ali published it for 650k views.

776 turned it into a system.

Alexis Ohanian describes 776 as "a technology company that deploys venture capital," run on in-house software called Cerebro - and the case-study output is "exhaust from our engine." Portfolio founders get a monthly accountability review; the public gets a rolling scoreboard of the firm's actual work - founder meetings held, warm introductions made, response times, hires supported - across the trailing year.

Interestingly, Talent is probably the most-claimed value-add in venture - and even the firms with real evidence only publish fragments.

Insight reports 349 executive placements in 2024. Oak HC/FT shows 45 placements and 400+ introductions right on its team page. Norwest names the CEO hires - John Herr, Avetta, 2015, sourced from a prior portfolio relationship.

BUT nobody in venture publishes the whole chain - this person, into this role, in this many weeks, and here is what changed after they joined.

For the amount of talent teams in VC there is a lot of ground to win here for firms to avoid vague “value add” and “help with hiring”.

So what?

If firms truly add value, “case studies” are how anyone finds out - building 1 is simple:

1. What was stuck before you got involved?

2. Who did what, specifically - and when?

3. What did you produce - a hire, a campaign, a model, an introduction, code?

4. What changed, against what baseline?

5. Will the founder say it in their own words?

None of the firms above are claiming they made the company. They show 1 thing, clearly, with evidence - and let the reader add it up.

Do that a few times and you stop having to say “value-add” at all. Founders say it for you - and unlike you, they get believed.

That is the art.

Laurie, Refinery Media

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