Your Brand Lives in the Feed Now

There’s a consistent thread running through the most successful VC deals. They’ve backed founders who move quickly, experiment early, and aren’t afraid to look different.

Yet, many of those same funds present themselves with the creative ambition of a municipal bond offering. While their portfolio companies leverage the latest AI video, design, and interactive tools, most funds avoid using any of them.

As the bar for attention continues to rise, this disconnect is becoming harder to ignore.

If you want to work with founders who test, iterate, and ship at speed, your fund needs to reflect some of that behaviour too.

This isn’t hypothetical. Just weeks ago, (love them or hate them) Cluely’s founder said it was a16z’s boldness and speed that won them the deal.

The same applies to LPs.

Spacecadet raised $15 million by embracing this dynamic. You might’ve seen their ‘famous’ interactive pitch deck - beat the game, earn a fund allocation. They got 15 LP applications within 24 hours. It was creative, but more importantly, it signalled exactly how they operate.

For any fund playing at the edge of a category - whether that’s frontier tech like Spacecadet, or climate, bio, or fintech - how you show up is now part of the work.

What’s to Learn From Spacecadet?

Spacecadet is "The Marketing VC" run by Daniel Eckler and Wiz Abdulla, who invest in "world-changing moonshots at the frontiers of science and technology" - AI consciousness, biotechnology catalysts, and ventures at the intersection of impossible and inevitable.

Spacecadet offers marketing as a service through "Story Sprints", creative agency access, and free resources helping founders explain impossible-sounding ideas to skeptical audiences. Their standout approach has attracted standout LPs - Marc Andreessen, Chris Dixon, Stewart Butterfield, and execs from Google, Airbnb etc etc. So far they’ve backed 37 companies and 14 already have markups.

They saw a differentiation opportunity in being explicitly bold about what the future looks like if they are backing it. Almost working backwards from “What will the future look like if we’re successful.”

Competing for bleeding-edge deals as a smaller fund can be a challenge, so conventional marketing signals rarely cut through the experimental mindset required to build in these spaces.

So they use their content strategy as proof of concept - experimenting with emerging AI tools, creating viral content, taking calculated creative risks to demonstrate the same appetite for experimentation they seek in founders. This demonstrates technical fluency, and find differentiation opportunities that slower-moving funds miss entirely.

The Case Study List is Nuts

• Using the latest tools immediately - C-3PO Rap video.

Years before AI voice clones went mainstream, Spacecadet created a parody video where C-3PO raps like a 90s gangster. The voice was AI-generated, the concept absurd, and the result was over 3 million views on Twitter. It was one of the earliest examples of real cultural reach in the category.

• Physical Products

Spacecadet turned LPs, founders, and tech icons into fully custom Magic: The Gathering-style cards, complete with stats, lore, and original artwork - printed and mailed physical decks to their network. People naturally shared them because they were personal and well-executed. The cards tagged investors, made them look cool, and gave them something to post without being asked.

They followed this up with Cards Against Reality, a collab with Ramp that satirised dystopian startup futures. The format was funny, familiar, and viral by design. Both projects extended Spacecadet’s reach across networks that most funds struggle to activate.

We’re working with two funds on two different Physical Products coming in the fall, really excited to see how these turn out - both designed to be a deliberate point to be tangible when *everything* now is digital.

• Real-time, weird, memorable content - Sci-Fi Haikus, Animoguls, Apple Body Takeover: that feels native to the internet because it so reactive.

These were fast-turnaround, internet-native pieces that hit because they felt like they belonged in the feed. Sci-Fi Haikus became an ongoing format. Animoguls reimagined tech icons as animals. The Apple Body Takeover spoof dropped the same day as the Vision Pro keynote - a fake product launch imagining a headset that literally took over your body. Each piece hit because it was fast, well-made, and clearly understood the online culture it was playing in. 

They also apply this same boldness in direct interaction with LPs

• Fund I’s Legendary Pitch Deck

They launched their raise with a comic book–style deck that looked nothing like the usual investor PDF. Then they built a browser-based game where anyone who beat it could apply for a fund allocation.

• Fund II’s Physical Call to Arms

For their second fund, Spacecadet leaned fully into the sci-fi. They mailed out a personalised, AI-generated physical video book that played like a mission briefing. It was bold, strange, and perfect for the kind of nerdy futurists they were targeting. The packaging made it impossible not to share. In the week it dropped, I saw dozens of posts across Twitter. A rough tally puts total reach well into the millions - and that’s without counting anything from LinkedIn.

They use tools like VEO, ElevenLabs, and GenAI platforms not just to tinker - but to ship.

Spacecadet has built a habit of experimentation, and experimentation is a muscle. While for many funds these would be off brand, the equivalent for your fund might not be a million miles away from these principles. This is what it looks like when a fund treats creativity the same way founders treat product.

If your fund is betting on founders to push boundaries, why are you so risk-averse in your own expression?

The bar for attention has shifted dramatically. You're not competing with other VC newsletters. You're competing with everything else a founder could consume - TikTok, YouTube, actual entertainment. Generic thought doesn't stand a chance.

Marketing vis a vis Signalling.

Your content strategy can communicate more than your investment thesis and reveal your relationship with risk, innovation, and execution.

Conservative marketing often signals conservative thinking. If you won't experiment with a LinkedIn post, would in demand founders trust you to back their moonshot idea?

Spacecadet's approach signals -

• We understand emerging technology because we use it

• We move fast when opportunities arise

• We can help portfolio companies with creative marketing because we do it ourselves

• We're comfortable being different when it serves a purpose

The Five Forces Driving This

The capabilities are democratised. AI video, advanced design, interactive experiences - creating professional content has never been more accessible. Most funds just don't use what's available.

The attention bar is higher. You're competing with memes, games, and actual entertainment for founder mindshare. Professional but boring loses every time.

Asymmetric leverage exists. A single viral campaign can drive qualified inbound, improve deal quality, and build brand recognition without adding headcount. The ROI on creative risk is massive.

Founders want partners who understand their world. Being visible and distinctive makes you top-of-mind before deals heat up.

Your actual edge might be invisible. If you don't package expertise with creativity and clarity, it won't matter how smart your investment thesis is.

Finding Your Edge

We’ve written before about how VC funds should be building tools as a form of marketing [read that here]. This time, we’re focusing on content - and how funds can use it to actually show their edge.

Not every firm should make AI videos or physical drops. Just like not every fund should be on TikTok. But every fund should be using content to make their real strengths visible.

• If you invest in enterprise software, publish teardown demos showing how buyer behaviour is shifting in response to AI adoption or budget constraints.

• If you focus on healthcare, create reactive visual explainers unpacking policy shifts, FDA approvals, or payer changes - fast content made from a founder-investor lens that shows you’re tracking what actually matters for go-to-market.

• If you back climate tech, build shareable content that surfaces the hidden logic of the space - like visual frameworks for where climate capital actually goes, or before/after snapshots of supply chain decarbonisation. Or Turn boring PDFs into scrollable formats founders and policymakers can actually learn from. The storytelling layer has never been more accessible

It might be helpful to think what can go “niche viral”.

I work with an incredibly niche (geographically) first time fund, and we use this as the frame for everything.

The format matters less than the intent. Use sharp, modern content to surface your insight. Don’t default to vague positioning. Show the work.

Each campaign builds muscle memory - sharper instincts, faster execution, better judgment. Working with external partners like us can help you pressure-test ideas, build the right creative frameworks, and ship consistently without losing your edge. This will also give you the infrastructure to help portfolio companies navigate their own marketing challenges as your experiments become case studies.

Most importantly, align creative risk with investment thesis.

If you back companies pushing technical boundaries, your marketing should push creative boundaries. If you invest in practical solutions to real problems, your content should be practically useful.

What does creative risk taking look like for you?

Laurie, Refinery Media

If you made it all the way through, thanks so much for reading! A few 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.