Why Does Anyone Care About Venture Capital?

Venture capital should be boring.

It is tiny compared with the rest of finance. Private equity, public markets, credit all dwarf it. The largest banks hold more on their balance sheets than the entire venture asset class manages.

But venture has a cultural footprint no other part of finance can touch.

People know Sequoia, a16z, Founders Fund, YC. They have opinions about partners they will never meet, rounds they will never join, and firms they will never pitch. Nobody talks like this about a mid-market buyout shops.

So why does anyone care about venture capital? And once you understand the answer, what should it change about how a firm communicates?

Why VC has cultural leverage

Ultimately, venture outcomes do not just make money. They change how people live, venture is the part of finance that embodies the lovable underdog, and heroic story from idea to outcome.

That is the source of the cultural pull. When a venture-backed company really works, it becomes a normal part of life, and venture is interesting because it was involved before any of that was obvious.

That is why the origin stories travel. No financial product gets to stand that close to the first cheque, weird founder, or the tiny market. The asset class is small but the winners are culturally enormous.

That gap is more than a curiosity - this is marketing leverage that the asset class hands every firm for free.

Many industries spend enormous sums trying to manufacture the kind of inherent narrative interest that VC gets by default. The firms that understand they are sitting on that asset have a huge advantage in their content and marketing.

You can see that leverage being used right now. I’m sure you saw Founders Fund dropped a series of portfolio founders and friends, Altman, Luckey, a who's who, playing Mafia. Zero mention of investing.

What makes it work is that Founders Fund has a deep relationships with those people. The Anduril story is a Founders Fund story. So are the others around the table.

No other financial asset class could make content like this, because no other asset class sits that close to the individuals who define an era.

While the strangeness, the contrarian framing, absence of PR polish, is itself an extension of the mythology Founders Fund has built for years. The relationships make the content possible and the FF brand makes it land. That is Founder’s Fund spending their cultural leverage.

The VC Marketing Survey is live. It covers how funds are approaching content, brand, distribution, and where budgets are going in 2026. The more funds that fill it in, the more useful the data - and everyone who submits gets full access to the results.

Why that leverage matters commercially

Most firms waste it.

They describe their category - Stage, sector, geography, cheque size, track record, network, hands-on support etc etc. All of it relevant, but none of it explains why anyone should care. They describe the category, but not the consequence.

This is the financial services instinct, and it is the wrong one for VC. A bank describing its lending criteria is being appropriately boring, because a bank sits downstream of economic reality that already exists. It finances things that already work, whereas venture sits upstream of possibility. It can point at a strange founder, a tiny company, or a movement nobody has noticed yet, and say, this is going to matter. That is a completely different posture, and it deserves completely different communication.

The current gap is that most firms market an upstream business in downstream language.

So what? Well, the best founders have options, and they do not choose a fund on $$$ alone. They choose the future they want to be part of.

Firms that only describe its category are left competing on the two things almost nobody can win on: (1) bigger cheques and (2) inherited prestige.

The same is true for LPs who are backing your ability to see what others cannot, especially before the outcomes exist to prove it. Marketing in downstream language forfeits the intrinsic advantage the asset class gives you for nothing.

How to find it and express it

Every firm has an upstream thesis - all investors make claims about the future, albeit sometimes buried inside the portfolio.

For firms not sure how to “do marketing” this is worthwhile starting point as it is likely the most interesting part of your strategy.

• Cyber fund —> is making a claim about trust, risk, enterprise paranoia, and the future of security national infrastructure.

• Fintech fund —> is making a claim about who should access capital, what infrastructure the banks failed to build, and how identity should work.

• Consumer fund —> is making a claim about how society is organised, and habits that make up daily life.

• Deep tech fund —> making a claim about the impossible, and which research is commercially viable.

• B2B SaaS fund —> making a claim that fewer people should lose the will to live inside Salesforce.

Firms default to stage and sector, which can be clearer about the mechanics. But a sharp claim about the future you see is usually a clearer picture of ‘the firm’.

How firms can uncover and express it

Fifty Years does this at the level of ambition.

They invest in deep tech for the world's biggest problems, and their recent short film is a public argument about what kind of future we should be building vs the startup-obsessed world.

It opens by parodying the slick, AI-generated, A24-style startup announcement video, the ones everyone uses to make trivial companies feel important, and the journey of the character in the film is actually a solid example of the clarifying exercise in the above section.

For Fifty Years this movie is making their investment thesis (breakthrough scientific research into commercial ventures) visible.

But the point is not that every VC firm should become civilizational, anti-corporate, maximalist, anti-safe, hacker-house adjacent, or founder-messianic. That would be awful. Most firms would look ridiculous doing that.

It is that the content matches the conviction underneath it. (FF earned the right to be strange, Fifty Years earned the right to be grand). The belief sets the volume, and every firm's belief sits at a different volume.

Cultural gravity is relative. It does not have to be the Fifty Years version. It only has to match the thing you believe enough to invest in, even if that thing is as quiet as design or as narrow as one technical niche.

• Baukunst - is making a bet that the future belongs to creative technologists - people who fuse art and engineering - at a moment when the market sorts founders into "technical" or "design" buckets. The conference, the McLuhan reading room, the artwork are claim that there’s a whole category of builder the market underrates is the one that matters next.

• Betaworks does it through named Camps (incubators) are dated, public bets on where the frontier moves next. Each camp is a timestamped claim about a future. e.g. Huggingface came from BotCamp, Twin from AgentCamp etc etc.

• Collaborative Fund - For fifteen years they have backed companies at the intersection of values and economics - Sweetgreen, Kickstarter, Beyond Meat - when the market dismissed that intersection as low-margin and unscalable. They wrote, relentlessly, to prove the future they saw was real, that consumer behaviour was permanently shifting toward brands people believe in.

April’s recent announcement of Collab Holdings fund (and essay) does it again, arguing that extraordinary consumer brands are being starved of the right capital while everything chases AI, and using a 1972 Warren Buffett letter to See's Candy to make a brand-new capital strategy feel obvious and inevitable.

What this means for your content

Most VC marketing starts with outputs. What should the newsletter look like, should we start a podcast, what do we post this week etc etc. The output is the last thing that should happen, not the first.

Start instead by ignoring your sector labels. They feel safer because they are legible, but a label is a crowded room, and the more your identity depends on it the more you end up sounding like everyone else. The thesis you want is in what your portfolio has in common that is not obvious from the category, or the kind of founder you understand better than others.

A borrowed thesis has tells. It reaches for the same words everyone else uses, founder-friendly, AI-native, thesis-driven, because the firm never built its own proprietary vocabulary. When that happens, founders cannot say what you are “the firm for X. You are not the people for Y.”

The firms above know their lane and are confident in it, and that confidence is exactly why they are not tempted to copy anyone. It is also what gets partners animated, which is the thing no format can fake.

The real work, for a marketer or a platform lead, is to go and find that. Not to invent it, or to import it from whichever fund's content is working this quarter. It is already there, in how the partners think about the asset class, the companies, and the future. Get that out first.

The job is not to produce more content. It is to find the claim your portfolio is already making, and put it at the centre of everything else.

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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