Are You the Only One Not Posting Memes?

In 1754, Benjamin Franklin had a distribution problem. He needed to convince bickering, siloed colonies they were about to be wiped out by the French.

He could have written a 2,000-word editorial but instead he published a woodcut of a severed rattlesnake with three words: JOIN, OR DIE.

This was kind of the first ever political meme. High-fidelity, high-compression, built on cultural reference. It went viral (before the word existed) - other newspapers reprinted the snake to signal their own conviction.

Franklin understood that when the stakes are high, the person who compresses the most context into the smallest space wins.

You might not know the Franklin story, but if you're in venture, you’re no doubt familiar (inundated) with memes.

Fast forward to 2022: Praying for Exits - an anonymous account with 80K followers - raised a legitimate VC fund. VC Brags did the same. Turner Novak built an entire personal brand on unhinged meme humour. Slow Ventures even led a $3M seed round in Memelord.com.

You could conclude VCs have become deeply unserious people. Or you could see what's happening to the speed of communication.

The context embedded in a meme you can consume in half a second is absurd—maximum context, minimum space, near-instant consumption. And still carry enough weight to move markets or elect presidents.

A GP asked me recently- "Should I be posting memes? Everyone else is."

Memes are now part of the marketing toolkit, and in VC they are almost ubiquitous. So how should you use them... if at all.

Why Serious VC Funds Are Posting Memes

There was understandably a lot of media hubbub around Marc Andreessen quote-tweeting the pope with the Sydney Sweeney interview meme. No comment on the appropriateness, but it wasn't a one-off - Andreessen has been using memes consistently for nearly a decade.

Other VCs, like Slow's Sam Lessin, have gone even further by arguing here that VCs should "invest in memes" because "messages and positioning need to be ready to be transmitted through memes / in short repeatable clips."

They've put their money where their mouth is and invested in Memelord.com, but have also brought in people like Jack Raines as an investor to the fund who largely built his career off provocative posting and memes.

Slow creates great content - we've referenced them before (here and here) - so why do they use memes so heavily?

1. Memes express complex ideas quickly. Pictures speak 1,000 words, memes speak 1 million. "Memes are the most information-dense form of communication" - Elon Musk.

   Complex startup idea? Movement in your industry? Put it in a meme so simple anyone can understand.
   

2. Memes drive engagement. This is why newspapers have included cartoons for over a century. People do read to get to the funny, and through which you can convey something more serious.
   

3. Audiences like memes. Not just teenagers... Often, the smarter you are, the more unhinged your humour. If you think you're too smart for memes, it's probably the opposite. And while memes skew younger toward founders, meme-native generations are aging into LPs too.

People take their work seriously, and many identify with ‘the industry’. So, introducing humour feels dangerous. But really, memes are about truth-seeking. There's been so much in this industry that is a facade - happy hours with people dressing in one-dimensional ways and having myopic conversations.

For marketers in venture and GPs, being counter is something to be leaned into and gives more freedom. Looking back at our GP Content Matrix, take a look at someone like Delian from Founders Fund - creating content with no filter makes his investing conviction more compelling.

Truth Reigns Supreme

Truth is the foundation of effective marketing and content.

We've talked before about how unique perspectives are one of two essential ingredients in top VC content. But unique only works if it's true. And truth is such a key ingredient in venture that even anonymous accounts can build audiences and raise funds.

You see it at both ends of the truth barbell… humour on one end, transparency on the other.

The joking end: Praying for Exits

Praying for Exits launched Exits Capital in 2022, focusing on SaaS, Consumer Internet, Aerospace & Defense. The founder leveraged brand recognition from the meme account to build a network and raise capital. Humour is a bridge to relationship and genuine connection —> LPs/ Founders —> Social media presence became the tool from memes to fund manager.

These jokes making fun of the industry often voice what every investor feels but won't admit. Being one of the first people to use this directly was important, but honesty within the posts is what built the following, and in turn what built the fund.

(FWIW VC Brags did basically the same thing and I think also raised a fund.)

The transparency end: Arfur Rock

Arfur Rock - another anonymous X account, run by an anon GP leaks positive, non-public details about startups and VC deals.

VCs see it as a transparency win in an industry constrained by SEC rules. Anonymity is the point - it allows insiders to share "known secrets" without bias, focusing only on good news, avoiding scandals, layoffs, down rounds. Share truths, free from judgment.

The transparency is the value.

At both ends of the barbell, these accounts say what people are thinking but won't say publicly. They compress industry sentiment into formats that travel. They're transparent about what's actually happening - not the sanitised, PR-approved version.

The application to your content… Ultimately, being more honest will make your content better.

Too many people are preoccupied with always looking correct online. That paranoid anxiety has permeated people's lives to the point that they're unwilling to go to the edges. That’s the inverse of the behaviour that underpinned a16z’s success, which we broke down last week.

Increasing the authenticity you have online will benefit you most, and part of that is being true to you and being okay with putting something out and not being correct (Which we have talked about here).

Memes Aren't Substance

Memes don't replace:

• Memos

• Podcasts

• Writing

• Long-form conviction

They point to them. If there's nothing to point to, you're just posting jokes. Think of them being more effective created in reverse:

Long-form conviction → meme compression → distribution

Come for the meme, stay for the memo.

Turner Novak is a pretty clear example of this.

Posting both memes as a sort of top-of-funnel for his long form.

His thesis is that founders and investors want to work with people they enjoy being around. But behind the joke exterior is serious work. Memes are the entry point.

The Good, The Bad…

The Good: Memes as a Forcing Function for Personality

Your job is to meet and build trust with talented, ambitious founders as early as possible. Often this means showing your personality. Playfully poking fun of things is one way to do that.

This opening up of VC to people who can command attention makes VC accessible, and rewarding genuine and real personality is not particularly common across other industries.

This is net good. For founders too - they can see you're human before they let you on their cap table for 10+ years.

The Bad: Memes Create Short-Term Thinking

But memes, and Twitter, and 240 characters also create short-termism.

When you're creating content, who are you magnetizing and why? Who's the audience you're actually getting vs your intended audience? What's the gap?

Most people fire intermittent BS into the ether. "This is the random thing of the day that I think will get me some engagement." That's a bad way to go about it.

Building a brand and having integrity around what you say is much more important than "this is the room-temperature perspective on the current topic I have today."

Most people are pretty short-term in how they put content out, especially on the VC side.

So opting out of meme culture altogether is an okay position if you want to be consistently on a longer time frame.

… And The Practical

But… the real lesson from memes isn't try to "be funny." It's "be efficient." You can apply compression thinking to your content:

1. Visual > Text for complex ideas When explaining your thesis, market etc - use visuals. Not because they're trendy, but because they compress context. Sometime A+ content uses diagrams, charts, illustrations to explain what would take 1,000 words in text.

2. Repeatable clips over essays Sam Lessin is right: "messages and positioning need to be ready to be transmitted through memes / in short repeatable clips."

This just = post memes. It = can someone quote you? Can they remember your view? If your content isn't quotable/shareable, it won't travel.

3. Cultural reference beats explanation Franklin's snake worked because people already knew the myth (superstition that a snake cut into pieces would come back to life) he didn’t explain it - he just mapped it.

With content what does my audience already know that I can reference and build on? Or what hasn’t been said about what many already know.

Ultimately, memes are a ‘tool’. They are a great test for whether your ideas are sharp enough to compress, and whether they can travel.

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.

If you enjoyed this read more from our top posts:

• Your Fund's Next Hire Should Be a Documentary Filmmaker

• The Future of VC Marketing is Interactive

• What is Full Stack VC Marketing?