Why Firms Moving Fastest are Winning The Content Game

Something happens in your market.

You have 48 hours to have a point of view on it before the internet moves on.

So, how long does it take your firm to publish something?

I studied Defence at university. Not the most obvious path into VC marketing…

But last week I got unexpected intellectual whiplash from a podcast. Marc Andreessen was talking about a16z's media operations and mentioned the “OODA loop”, a military decision-making framework I hadn't thought about in years (Observe, Orient, Decide, Act)

The core idea is simple… if your decision cycle is slower than your opponent's, you lose.

We all feel the half-life of content getting shorter. A news cycle that used to last a week now lasts a day.

Most comms teams haven’t caught up, running approval processes and review cycles that made sense when media moved slowly. There’s a structural opportunity for the firms willing to fix it.

The window is shortening

There is a moment - usually 24 to 48 hours - when a topic, a market event, a portfolio milestone, or a cultural moment creates appetite for a specific firm's point of view.

In that window, the right voice saying the right thing gets real distribution.

Then the window closes. The internet moves on. Whatever you were going to say is now either invisible or, worse, reads as late.

The reason most firms miss it is not that they didn't notice the moment. It's that they get stuck somewhere in the loop. They observe, they orient around it - "we should say something about this." They even decide what they want to say. And then the approval chain kills the act. By the time the draft has cleared two partners and a approval check, the conversation has moved on.

If your publishing cycle is unable to move fast when it matters, you are structurally incapable of participating in the zeitgeist.

Not all speed is equal

I’m not saying default to ‘something happened, go comment on it’. That's actually the weakest form of speed - and the version that feels shallow, because it is.

There are three levels, and they're not equal.

Level 1 — Reactive.

Something happens. You respond.

OpenAI releases a model, every VC posts a thread. This gives short-term visibility but it's commodity commentary. Anyone can do it, very sharp commentators can differentiate, but it fades with the news cycle. This is where most VC new media talk begins and ends.

Level 2 — Framing.

Something happens. You define what it means.

On X recently, Matt Shumer posted Something Big Is Happening. 82M views… Within 12 hours, Will Manidis published Tool Shaped Objects - 4M views, but enormous resonance with a niche venture audience. He later repeated the move responding to a viral Citrini Research post.

Same dynamic - when OpenClaw began generating serious hype, Andreas Klinger moved quick to publish content with its creator Peter while the conversation was still live... For a small channel, the video performed v well - 50K views (~5x subs).

YC moved fast too, within days they brought the creator onto a podcast, which went on to do 1.1 Million views.

This is YC’s advantage - they sit so close to the founder internet, they can capture moments while they are still culturally alive… However… It’s also the risk.

When you move this fast, you sometimes attach yourself to a product or 🦞 that might disappear in weeks. Tempo needs taste and restraint, not just speed. Jury’s still out on the lobster suits…

But speed is still the prerequisite, move fast enough and Framing also enables you to use someone else’s news moment as a platform to advance your own thesis…

When a16z announced their $15B fund, Leslie Feinzaig published her interpretation of what it meant for fund strategy. Major announcements almost always split opinion. By publishing early with a clear stance, she gave one side of that reaction a frame to organise around.

Foundation Capital’s Context Graphs essay did the same thing. It landed in the middle of a live debate about systems of record in AI and quickly became the piece people referenced to explain the shift.

At scale, Sequoia’s Coronavirus: The Black Swan of 2020 memo is one of the clearest examples. Published March 5th 2020 - less than a week after the WHO declaration - it became one of the most shared pieces of content in the modern VC era.

Before other firms acted, Sequoia had already defined how the industry would talk about the crisis.

Level 2 doesn’t have to mean the biggest reach. Maybe your niche or industry is much smaller, but this is about being a reference point for a conversation still unfolding.

Level 3 — Name-setting.

You introduce a frame or a concept that didn't exist in the discourse before you named it, and the market adopts it.

Brian Chesky gives a talk about how he runs Airbnb. Paul Graham writes "Founder Mode" in response. A relatively short essay, published quickly — and suddenly the entire tech ecosystem has new vocabulary for something founders had felt but never had words for. That's Level 3.

Likewise, a16z responded to the growing trend of national sovereignty - they came out hot with “American Dynamism” and have championed that thesis, they ofc weren't the first fund in this sector but they have essentially now named the category… How many American (and now European fwiw) Dynamism thesis funds have we seen since!

I wrote previously about the power of naming and you can read more on that here... 

The speed element at Level 3 is different from Level 2. It's less about reacting in the first few hours, but naming something that others carry - once someone else's content is using your terminology, you've won.

How to build for speed

The impact of the 3 levels shows that the most significant content isn’t just a reaction.

You don’t need to comment on everything…. But when you do, you need to move inside the half-life window.

Most marketing operations inherited their instincts from an older media world - caution, review, approval chains - once rational, now counterproductive for a significant category of content.

So how practically can you get faster…?

• Observe faster - build a content bank.

Speed in the moment is much easier with pre-loaded material. Keep a running bank of angles on recurring topics your firm cares about… Draft angles on recurring topics, half-written takes.

It also helps to 1) maintain a swipe file of formats that work, 2) be collecting reactions to things as a habit - a voice note after a call, Slack threads, bullet points written at an event etc.

• Orient without a committee - assign decision rights explicitly. 

If everything requires alignment, the moment will pass. Map your content by channel and type, and give the people closest to the topic publishing authority. One final approver, two reviewers maximum.

• Decide - remove all friction

Compress the path from opinion to draft. Templates help here: if a partner can send a voice note and get a post back, they will. If the bar is "write something polished," most won't bother. If your firm produces internal decks, runs IC discussions, or does recurring activities that generate real insight, build repeatable processes that turn those into content.

Likewise, if someone on your team is already active on X and things land well there, have a process for pulling that into other formats rather than starting from scratch.

• Act by default - build muscle

New media logic is consistent, multi-surface presence, and much of this comes from habit. Define what can go out without approval, and set rough time windows.

The default VC comms org is optimised for risk minimisation - but breaking free of this is important to build a base of relevancy, over time, let partners run their own loops - if they know what the firm stands for and what it never says, they can move without checking.

[For more on how to work with partners on content, see this piece and this piece]

The low-and-slow caveat

None of this means everything should move fast…

A full scope content strategy will be across two separate streams.

There is a category of content where slow is correct - deep thesis pieces, annual reports, flagship essays or resources e.g. Tidemark’s Vertical SaaS Knowledge Project, Index’s Scaling Through Chaos. These build long-term authority and they are worth the time.

For marquee pieces, run separate processes. Speed would make these things worse.

But for everything else… the moments, the market events, the conversations your founders are having, OODA.

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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