When Partner Brands Eclipse the Firm (And What To Do About It)

I find myself in the same two conversations constantly.

• On one side, GPs are urgent to do more: Should I be posting? Should I start a podcast? How do I do this without it taking all my time?

• On the other, platform teams are losing control: Our partners don’t care to about content, OR they do their own thing we can’t influence or integrate.

Both tensions stem from the same reality -

Personal brands are now the most efficient trust and distribution vehicles in the market.

Yet, a firm still requires an institutional brand that can survive partner mobility, retirement, and spin-outs.

The paradox is that most firms either underutilise their partners’ brands, or over-concentrate them.

Good VC content shouldn’t suppress individual voices; but be a system where personal brands compound into firm equity rather than remaining fully portable. A firm achieves true balance when a partner’s brand acts as a funnel rather than a silo - generating dealflow through the individual, but routing that attention through firm-owned surfaces and increasing belief in the broader bench.

You can be partner-led but still institutional - if the partner is clearly "a star in a system," not "the system."

But getting there means understanding why this balance is so hard to achieve, and why the market is increasingly pulling toward individual brands over institutional ones.

👋 We’ve had a bunch of new subscribers join since last week’s The State of European VC Marketing piece - welcome. If you missed it, you can catch up here.

Why Personal Brands Are Winning

The rise of solo GPs tells the story. In recent emerging fund analyses, solo GPs represented around 50-60% of new fund formations. And emerging managers are launching smaller funds - 67% target under <$10M - favouring personality-led brands where the GP's personal brand often is the distribution engine.

This is evidence that the market has learned something: trust routes through people, not logos.

The famous NBER report dataset tracking individual VC partners across time concluded that the partner’s human capital is estimated to be 2-5x to more important than the VC firm’s organisational capital in explaining performance

Marketing formats have reinforced this - Algorithms, podcasts, social feeds, public memos are inherently person-centred.

For firms, this creates serious risk… When trust routes through a person instead of the firm, it warps the brand, creates vulnerabilities, and leaves a lot of hard work to undo later - if the partner stays or leaves.

• Reid Hoffman and Greylock is the classic example. Joining in 2009 his presence effectively overshadowed 50 years of the Greylock brand - many assume he is the founding partner!? He had his own podcast (Masters of Scale), multiple books, political presence. Greylock at one point leaned into this, using his "Blitzscaling" framework as part of their core identity. But the shadow effect was real and still is… Hoffman transitioned away from being a GP in 2023, but I assume you still heavily associate the two.
  

• Elsewhere at Greylock, Sarah Guo spent a decade building a public profile. But in 2022, she left to start Conviction - and proved that a partner could port their entire brand/ deal-flow to a new firm.
  She's doubled down on again... Conviction (imo) has a weak brand outside of Sarah. She launched No Priors with Elad Gil (a deliberately solo GP), with no attribution to the firm. The contrast between her personal site and Conviction's minimal site is case in point: the brand is her, not the firm.

• Kleiner Perkins faced the same dynamic. Mary Meeker was arguably the most famous person there for years due to her legendary annual "Internet Trends" report. In 2018, she and her growth team spun out to form Bond Capital. Kleiner Perkins - once the undisputed king of VC - had to completely reinvent its brand after its most recognisable partner (and her entire growth stage unit) left. They're still doing that work now. Meeker proved her "Trends" brand was portable; LPs and founders followed her to the new firm.

These aren't edge cases and it's not just narrative risk... LP docs already encode "key person" reality. 88% of funds automatically suspend the investment period when a key person event occurs.

For multi-partner firms… Don't accidentally become a personality fund without admitting it.

The Three Common Failure Modes

So how do firms actually fail at this? There are three patterns I see constantly, and most firms are experiencing at least one:

1) The Bureaucracy trap is where firms add too much friction. Heavy review processes, slow approvals/content calendars and over-sanitised tone.

• Partners either stop contributing entirely or go rogue and build on their own channels because it's faster and more authentic. The firm loses relevance, and the personal brands grow outside the system.

2) The Retroactive trap is where partners disappear, do their own thing, then suddenly drop a pile of work on the team. "I want to turn this into a post, a deck, a video, and a campaign by Friday."

• The team becomes a service desk, not creative partner. Leading to resentment, chaos, and no coherent firm-level narrative. You're reacting to partner output instead of shaping it.

3) The Star Eclipses trap is where the partner brand becomes the primary container for the firm's identity and distribution.

• You can diagnose it quickly: Founders say "I want [NAME]", press and ecosystem references attribute wins to the person. The partner owns the audience primitives - newsletter list, podcast, YouTube channel - and the firm doesn't.

This isn't always wrong. Sometimes personal brands outside the firm container still drive real benefits back….

Judith Dada from Visionaries Club posts very frequently on LinkedIn and Substack - high-quality content positioning her as a thought leader in AI, society, and Europe. She's appearing on podcasts, which mentions the firm. This is definitely increasing Visionaries' visibility. But the asset is her subscriber list, her LinkedIn following - they aren't owned by the firm. If she leaves, that audience goes with her.

Similarly, Earlybird's Dr. Andre Retterath runs Data Driven VC we mentioned this last week as probably a top 5 influential asset in venture, so it has raised Earlybird’s awareness. But, again, it's not very clear how much of that attribution is helpful for Earlybird in the long run.

Are you okay with partners building portable assets as long as they create visibility now? Or do you want to own the infrastructure?

Both can be valid. But you have to choose deliberately.

Firms That Solve This Build "Containers"

i.e. firm-owned infrastructure that partner brands flow through.

(fyi we have already covered content for linkedin, and the questions of what content partners should be making…)

They built firm-owned media and formats that can host multiple personalities. 

• a16z runs their media dept as an in-house container, with all hands on deck available for all formats and partners. That framing makes distribution feel like a firm asset. This shows up as a network of shows, multiple hosts, multiple substack authors, rotating formats. This uses the upside of personal brands while reducing single-point dependency. They also lean into this for collective pieces (YC do this with RFS too)

They created "firm objects" that become the cited thing, not the partner. -

• Bessemer's Cloud 100 and State of the Cloud are firm-owned objects that (a) recur, (b) get referenced by third parties, and (c) give the firm durable association with a category. Individual partners benefit, but the equity accrues to the franchise. This is a very under-used play. Most VC content is ephemeral. Objects are institutional.

Freedom Within the Firm. They want to be part of it because it amplifies their work.

• Scale VP does this well. Many partners own their individual stream - whether it's operating, marketing, or a specific investment thesis - and make content specifically about those lanes. Ada Ventures in the UK is another good example of allowing individual roles within the firm to become content. Check Warner talks about events she's going to and how they relate to particular theses. Michael, who had a product background, makes content about products he's building or evaluating. It seems very free-flow - partners creating from their actual expertise and interests, but clearly within the Ada framework.
  

• Alice Bentinck from Entrepreneur First shows what this looks like with her blog Starting Off From Scratch. It aligns with the EF thesis and leans into her specialism - helping UK entrepreneurs get to San Francisco. But you can see through the imagery and content that it rides in with what Entrepreneur First is doing. There are examples where she's meeting with EF alumni, and she talks about it from her perspective but layers in content that EF has been doing anyway.

The Practical Playbook (How to Do This)

For the Bureaucracy problem: 

• Ideas originate from partners: Make it a loop, not a handoff. in a lightweight, structured way. A standing monthly or biweekly "idea pull" where the team extracts what the partner is seeing, saying, or doing. The marketing/content team then does the heavy lifting - they draft, shape, package, and propose formats that fit into firm-owned series or channels. The partner reviews and adds edge, not does the whole job. They stay in author mode, not production manager mode.

For the Retroactive Support problem:

• Harvest from what they're already doing: Board meetings. Founder calls. IC debates. Guest lectures. Conference talks. Internal memos…. Build systems that turn those activities into artefacts. This is still partner-led content, but the partner doesn't have to become a creator. They just have to keep doing their job.

For the Star Eclipses Firm problem:

• Separate "voice" from "surface." Partners can still post on their own accounts. But make the firm own the surfaces that matter: created assets, firm newsletter(s), firm podcast network, firm YouTube, firm event series, firm tool library, firm email capture etc etc.

• Create firm-owned "objects" that you ship every year. If you're not big enough for a mega-report, do a smaller object that is still recurring and citeable. Objects institutionalise, and star power can reference back to these in their own content. Jared Heyman’s blogs are good at this, everything is framed as Rebel Fund’s output etc.

• Run partner brands like a network. Every partner channel links back to one firm-owned hub. Every partner has at least one recurring format that lives on firm channels. I wrote more about that here!

Build Containers, Not Cages

Personal brands are the most efficient trust vehicle in modern venture. Trying to suppress them is both impossible and counterproductive.

But firms still need institutional equity that survives partner turnover.

The answer isn't less partner brand but better infrastructure and process.

A lot of the work we do with firms is build containers - firm-owned surfaces, recurring objects, house rules, attribution design - and then support on the execution to let partner brands grow while ensuring the firm captures the equity.

We help partners be famous. But also make sure fame routes through the right systems.

Laurie, Refinery Media

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