Your Fund Needs an Enemy

Does anyone hate your venture fund?

What about your GPs?

Maybe they should. Because if you stand against no one, do you really stand for anything?

Venture is famously allergic to this question. It is an iterated game - everyone might co-invest with everyone next year - so falling out is expensive, everyone stays friends, and nobody ever has to lose.

In an industry like that, offending no one becomes the default strategy.

Which is why your fund has a mission statement nobody could possibly disagree with.

That is the problem. All effective positioning is counterpositioning. A real strategy requires a trade-off - choosing 1 path over another - which means deliberately creating conflict with the people who chose differently.

Challenging an opponent mints true believers, and it signals you are doing something revolutionary, because revolutions are, definitionally, against something.

So this piece is about enemies… The funds using them best have gone far beyond naming one in their content. They have built tools around them, hired around them, and in 1 case named the entire firm after a 500-year-old fight.

The disagree test

An enemy is not a rival logo, and it is not "the status quo," which is nobody. An enemy is a specific belief your market holds that you think is wrong.

The test is can a reasonable person take the other side?

"We back ambitious founders" fails - nobody is against ambitious founders. "Founders should not need a cofounder to be taken seriously" passes, because much of the industry believes the opposite.

The cliche example is Facebook's "move fast and break things."

Everyone wants to move fast (agreeable), but break things!? That is a fight picked on the enemy of caution, process and permission.

Counterpositioning can even be an investment strategy itself. Ricochet primarily invests in startups that reached due diligence at leading funds and got passed. A fund whose entire thesis is other funds' mistakes.

Climate proves the failure case

Climate investing is one of the clearest demonstration of what happens without an enemy, because the category has suffered, often choosing nobility over conflict.

Compare 2 positionings:

Breakthrough Energy - "When I see a tough problem, my first thought is always 'how can innovation help solve this?'" Admirable, agreeable, and structurally enemy-less - nobody on earth disagrees with it, so it slides off the brain.

Lowercarbon Capital - backing "kickass companies that make real money slashing CO2 emissions, sucking carbon out of the sky, and buying us time to unf**k the planet."

There are enemies everywhere in that - CO2, the clock, and implicitly every climate investor not making real money. You remember 1 of these 2 (and it is not the noble one).

You could even argue the category's flagship positive framing backfired at policy level - Europe's climate programme was framed as pure virtue, and the bureaucracy it generated became a clearer enemy to the public than the emissions ever were.

As if to prove the point, yesterday the EU Council announced its new packaging rules - bring your own container for takeaways by 2027!? - 2 million+ views of pure hostility…

After all…. if you position against nothing, something will position against you.

The macro version is everywhere - progressive politics dominated the culture long enough to manufacture the anti-woke backlash, which coincidentally even has its own venture fund - New Founding VC - positioned entirely against “Wokeism”.

Level 1: Say it

The entry level is the enemy named in your narrative, and it works at many levels.

Founders Fund runs it at the level of technology. "We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters" - the enemy is incrementalism.

Sometimes the enemy is “venture capital” - Greysheep VC's entire pitch is "If you hate VCs, we're your VC." Likewise, The Craftory Fund says it exists "to take down the conventional model of venture capital." Both are CPG funds, which tells us how CPG founders feel about the asset class.

Families Fund runs it at the level of society - framing Crisis as Opportunity. The enemy is the doom narrative around education and family, the strikethrough is for the optimist.

And a16z runs it at the most conceptual altitude of all.

The Techno-Optimist Manifesto contains an entire section literally titled "The Enemy," and the enemies named are pure ideas - stagnation, pessimism, the precautionary principle. Not a person or firm in sight, which is worth holding onto for later. Even the biggest firm in venture knows an argument without an opponent is a press release.

Even the thumbnail frames it as a binary choice - an argument without an opponent is mid. Notably, a16z's enemies are ideas - stagnation, pessimism, the precautionary principle - not people (Hold that thought).

Level 2: Make it work

The next level up, the enemy becomes something you build.

Julian Weisser's solo founders thesis at On Deck is positioned against 1 specific orthodoxy - default cofounder dogma, the belief that founders need a cofounder because investors expect one.

His argument is that the belief causes real damage… people either do not start, or they start with the wrong cofounder and hurt the company.

His solo founder thesis is: founders should have more independence and not contort themselves around investor expectations. But he did not stop at resisting VCs expectations of founding teams.

Frustrated that some firms hand-wave or sneak through side-letter terms, Julian built the Side Letter Explorer - a tool that runs locally in a founder's browser, analyses whether terms are founder-friendly, and explains what investors are asking for. The enemy produced a product.

Shining a light on your enemy, can highlight your own “negative space” disempowering them and, declaring in public, who you are not for.

Anduril ran an entire "Don't Work at Anduril" campaign, the City of Oslo ran a viral anti-tourism ad asking “whether Olso is even a city”, and Lulu Meservey published who should not come work at Substack.

Creating the negative reaction clarifies what you do stand for, and can act as a beacon for exactly the people who should join you… Believe in something.

Level 3: Become it

At the top of the ladder, the enemy is in the name.

Unpopular Ventures is the self-aware version. While their LP update this week opens by admitting "non-consensus is a bit of a joke in our industry," that every fund claims it and all of them are non-consensus in exactly the same ways. What redeems it is they define precisely what today's consensus is - the update is titled "Embrace the Established, Neglect the New" - and take the opposite side, in writing, dated, with the portfolio to match. Being anti-consensus is a cliche. Being anti a specific, named consensus, where you can be checked later, is a position.

Then there is 1517 Fund -

The fund is named after the year Martin Luther nailed the 95 Theses to the church door protesting the sale of indulgences - expensive pieces of paper the establishment church sold as the only path to salvation.

1517's argument: universities are today's cathedrals, degrees are today's indulgence, - paper sold at great cost as the only way to be taken seriously.

Lo and behold, they back dropouts/college resisters… describing themselves as an anti-establishment educational institution that happens to be a venture fund, backing the uncredentialed and the renegade scientists that sclerotic institutions refuse to recognise. They call it a New Reformation.

Every dropout they back is an argument in a 500-year-old fight. You cannot separate the fund from the position, which means it cannot be copied, discounted, or dropped when fashion in VC changes. The enemy is beyond marketing, becomes identity.

When it fails

2 failure modes...

1) Giving the enemy a face.

Founder rivalries can work - Brex and Ramp have sharpened each other for years, and perhaps Venture's recent dignified version is the accelerator competition. It might be cooler if they went at each other more, but instead Neo's design is a resistance against YC's scale. Neo doesn’t ever have to say it. The rivalry lives in the shape of the product.

General Catalyst showed what happens when you say it instead. Their Mac-vs-PC parody - a dishevelled VC, read universally as a16z, pitching an absurd AI dog and then kicking it, while the GC character moralised about responsibility - did millions of views, and the discourse settled on them as smug.

Andreessen spoofed back, baited to exchange. But the moment your enemy has a face, your content is about them, and usually about your own self-image. Keep the enemy a belief or an institution, and your content stays about the world.

2) costume.

You have to mean it, because an enemy should be consistent in your decisions. Perhaps a good counter is Anti Fund - named itself against the entire industry, and beyond a celebrity GP operates more or less the same playbook, same principles, same structures, same deals. Naming yourself after the fight while running the incumbent model is somewhat flat.

The Rejection Exercise

More practically. Complete these 4 sentences:

• We believe ___, and most of our market believes the opposite.

• We are not for ___.

• We would pass on ___, even if the metrics were great.

• The industry norm we refuse to participate in is ___.

If every blank fills easily, you have a position, and probably always did - if the blanks fight you, perhaps your fund currently stands for everything (i.e. nothing).

What does your fund believe that the rest of the industry thinks is wrong?

This is positioning vs. participation.

Laurie, Refinery Media

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

If you enjoyed this, read more from our top posts:

• Why is Sequioa’s Brand SO Strong?

• The VC Marketing Market Map

• The Future of VC Marketing is Interactive