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What We've Seen Work Across VC Funds This Year
Emergency post for a week off
Laurie Owen
November 04, 2025
I wrote this roundup a few weeks ago but never sent it.
You're receiving it now because I've just had a baby (now in the ‘3 before 30’ club - send help!) and writing anything new this week isn’t happening…
But honestly, you're getting something better than fresh analysis.
We've helped funds reach millions of eyeballs this year, been part of multiple fund closes, and supported countless investment announcements across 15+ funds.
Here’s a breakdown on what’s worked - what we've seen move the needle across platforms, formats, and fund sizes.
(This will be a little different format-wise, but hopefully still useful.)
👋 We’ve had a bunch of new subscribers join since last week’s a16z playbook piece - welcome. If you missed it, you can catch up here.
Funds see the most success when they buy in, lean into their unique angles and data, and just compound away month over month.
This has also had the biggest impact on the fundraises we've been part of. Consistency negates luck.
As ever, full rebrands have been some of the most interesting work - helping funds figure out what they actually stand for, then building the system to say it consistently.
As a result of going direct, more visibility, and sharing more of what makes each fund unique, we've had some big features for our clients in mainstream media. We've also had posts and articles referenced or quoted by mainstream outlets.
What's been especially exciting is that this has included clients who don't employ any PR support - internal or external. They just rely on our work on the content and brand side.
This is part of the growing evidence that 'going direct' is the best strategy to start with.
LinkedIn:
r/linkedinlunatics aside, LinkedIn is still the most efficient platform to grow, build and engage your audience. It has the broadest section of founders, other investors, industry experts and LPs.
The competition for content here is also shallower - the LinkedIn content marketplace has an imbalance. Only 1% of all users actually post.
We have produced tonnes of LinkedIn posts across partners and funds - and while partner posts definitely perform better, there is still a lot of value in fund level posts as a lighthouse for prospects - especially for SEO and around big announcements like funds or investments.
Partner-led content outperforms fund accounts 3-5x on engagement, but both serve different purposes
Consistency beats virality - funds posting 2-3x per week build steady audience growth that compounds
Content that sparks conversation (not just likes) performs better. Ask questions, share contrarian takes backed by data, or tell specific stories rather than generic platitudes.
Twitter / X:
Twitter is a harder but valuable place to gain traction.
It is hard because your content on the feed has to compete with a number of other things not native to a platform like Linkedin e.g. NBA highlights, viral videos, music etc.
It is also hard because it is much more time sensitive - in this way, more generic or non-news related content does not perform as effectively, and crossposting LinkedIn → Twitter is therefore less effective, than Twitter → LinkedIn.
The flip side is that it is a place of high signal and high value considering the type of founder and investor that concentrates their time here.
Partner profiles on X that we manage have typically performed well if they are starting with a modest and above avg amount of followers, but does require much more active monitoring and replying than LinkedIn - which either makes it unappealing to GPs, or a more timely/costly endeavour for an external provider.
Technical depth plays better here than LinkedIn - you can go nicher and find your audience
Partner profiles outperform fund accounts even more dramatically than on LinkedIn
Real-time reactions to news, investments, or industry events get traction
Why we didn't include Twitter impressions in the stats: The platform is more volatile - millions of impressions are easier to generate but often translate to less meaningful engagement. Caveating that have not worked with Web3 funds, and some funds have only a European focus.
Long Form Content / Blogs:
Many believe that long form content died a death a while ago, but our experience is the opposite.
High signal/unique long form content carries significant weight for highly specialised managers, and can foster a lot of highly specific engagement.
Where this comes into its own is when paired with an effective distribution method. Just writing the blog and posting about it once is not especially effective. But using these as part of outreach campaigns to LPs, or using them to build interest around an event, a thesis, or an investment can be very effective. Newsletters also prove a very effective method for distributing this content.
The 'Substackification' of VC was written about in Sifted, and while Substack has a lot of faults the on-platform engagement reach can distribute content natively, which also makes it a beneficial place to write. The downside is this locks you in that ecosystem and it is difficult to embed/integrate with a VC site natively.
News / Reactive Blogs:
One of the first hurdles we overcome when working with a fund is helping them own their own narrative around investments.
Rather than always sending traffic to external PR, building short and timely posts on the why/what of each investment pays significant dividends - anecdotally we have had a number of journalists say about a large fund that we work with that it “seems like they are everywhere” because of this timely and specific content strategy, paired with effective graphics.
The timeliness of it makes it easy for the fund’s opinions to caught up in the PR buzz of investments.
Additionally, this content serves really well as a running record of ‘thesis in action’ and is especially useful for LPs to see how/what/why a fund has invested in linearly.
As ever. This is the holy grail of VC content. Sorry to say it.
Of all fundraising sprints we have been part of with GPs, email is such a vital weapon.
It is mind-blowing that some funds have a CRM of 500, 1000, 10,000 opted-in contacts but fail to send them consistent fund updates or meaningful content.
Mark Suster's famous essay "invest in lines not dots," is as true for investors as it is founders, and the entire industry runs out of people’s email inboxes. This is a lay-up.
Beyond the "own your audience" truism, newsletters imo are still the linchpin of all fund content, as they serve as a multiplier and distribution outlet of all the other content referenced here.
We were featured in Beehiiv's blog talking about the effectiveness of fund newsletters, the how and why, so I won't go into that in depth here.
Please read it.
Start sending newsletters.
Contact me if you need advice/support in this.
FWIW, I built my own newsletter about 3D tech with a friend to ~4000 subscribers and it quite literally changed my life.
Podcasts:
If you have a partner in your fund willing to do this - especially if you can outsource production - this is a no brainer.
The reason is not with the aim to grow a big following or become the next 20VC, but because this content is so efficient in its place in the distribution flywheel.
Firstly, podcasts can become blogs which can become newsletters, which can become short form posts, which can also become clips… and so on.
Secondly, podcasts serve as a really interesting and simple way to engage founders, LPs, and industry members through inviting them on.
I would like to see funds be more innovative in this format. YC's Lightcone does a good job, and The Pitch show format is epic and unique - but there is some middle ground here, maybe a podcast centred around whiteboarding, testing an investment thesis, livestreaming, or even reverse pitching founders could be interesting.
Podcasts are grown most quickly from
(1) high quality guests
(2) high quality conversations.
Outside of that, patience and/or mass clipping (time and budget) are effective.
Re: The State of Podcasting - My only word of advice here is avoiding this as a starting point. There's definitely something cliche about the current state of podcasting in venture - it often feels like everyone has one, but few add genuine value.
I think that's because the risk with podcast-first approaches is building surface-level credibility that may not translate to actual investment performance. Podcasting can create the perception of authority without the underlying substance - interviewing hundreds of guests doesn't necessarily mean you know them, have deep market knowledge or even investment acumen.
Written content, on the other hand, typically requires you to develop and articulate genuine insights. If someone raises a fund as a result of their writing, I believe that represents more tangible intellectual property and demonstrable expertise.
So for EMs, make sure your podcast is highly niche. It's better to showcase genuine expertise or develop track record first, then use podcasting to amplify and distribute that knowledge to a broader audience.
Alternatively, see our post on ‘The Backwards VC Podcast Strategy’.
Video:
This year has been awesome to get more into the nitty gritty with a couple of funds around video content.
Video, like podcasts is also highly efficient (blogs —> clips —> posts) but also provides a little bit more of a blank canvas to show uniqueness.
Not listing funds we have worked with - but I can share two managers I especially think are doing great work:
Andreas Klinger - Prototype: these vlogs are exceptional, interesting and showcase great Deep Tech. I think they are quite straightforward to produce, allow him to visit great companies, and provide a flywheel of distribution as they are obviously also shared by the companies featured.
Yusufa Sey - Emerging Search Fund Manager is vlogging the process from founding the fund, to $100M AUM. This is highly transparent, highly authentic and (I assume) serves as a really good magnet for other EMs, deal flow sharing and perhaps even LPs. FWIW, Johannes Gemmingen is doing something similar in VC, and is starting to pick up a little bit of traction.
Rebrands / Visual Identity:
Avoiding the cliches around "your website is your business card" - there is without a doubt a level of confidence projected by both your fund website and its brand identity.
I was interested to learn from Sequel's 1700+ dataset of Pre-Seed to Series A startups that design quality of the deck was (confirmed by the data) a huge factor in whether funds raised capital or not.
So we can assume and apply the same logic to funds.
There is also a well documented benefit to having well designed meta images for blogs, and thumbnails for podcasts and video. This is a simple and easy fix for most funds to execute right.
Beyond that, a consistent brand identity across thumbnails, content, press releases, website, decks etc, is great for visual recognition. People should be able to recognise that content as being yours.
It has been a v enjoyable year working with funds on their brand identity, as it is a unique experience to dive into what sets apart a fund, what they really want to stand for, and how that leans into positioning, language, and what a fund/manager are / are not.
At an early stage, this has been most effectively done leaning into uniqueness and clarity, and at a later stage addressing the balance between legacy and relevance.
Consistency
Once again, *none* of the above matters without consistency, and I think this is where we do a really effective jobs for funds by taking that pressure of the ‘content’ treadmill away from them internally.
That’s it!
I'll be back in the game from next week onwards.
If you want to chat about what content looks like for you at year close, or ahead in 2026 - then reply to this email.
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.
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