Do venture firms now need PR and a public brand, or can relationships and favors alone win deals?

Will Quist · Sep 12, 2022

The outperforming venture firms are all excellent at branding and have made deliberate, intentional branding choices

Scope: specifically the newer successful firms and outperformers

41:49 20VC: Why 95% of Venture Capital is Not Really "Venture Capital" | The Five Core Levers Needed To Assess Risk and Price a Startup | The Future of Venture; Who Wins, Who Loses, What Happens to the Crossover Funds with Will Quist, Partner @ Slow Ventures

Harry Stebbings · Nov 27, 2024

Venture has become a marketing business above all else, with investors acting as content creators who tweet, write, podcast and make videos to sell themselves

Investors now tweet, write, do podcasts and video series — all have become content creators

10:54 20VC: Why Price Sensitivity is BS | Why "Portfolios" are Merely a Construct to Make LPs Happy | Why the Best Investment Never Happen in "Fundraising Rounds" | What Europe Needs to do to Become a Superpower Again | Klaus Hommels, Lakestar

Max Altman · Nov 21, 2025

Not doing PR and brand-building for his fund was a mistake, and today VCs have to do PR and build a brand rather than relying purely on relationships

When he started in 2015-16 you could just hang out with great people, be a mensch for a decade and do favors to get into good deals; there are now too many VC funds and too many companies for that to be enough

Scope: contrast with 2015-2016 era practice

59:54 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster

Max Altman · Nov 21, 2025

You can no longer succeed as a 'text guy' investor who stays under the radar, builds relationships privately and never shows up publicly

Scope: stated as a belief he has changed his mind on

72:00 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster

Harry Stebbings · Nov 21, 2025

Venture would commoditize, so investors fundamentally need to differentiate and present themselves differently as the market gets more crowded

As the space got more and more crowded, sameness stops working

Scope: framed as the insight he formed ten years ago and still holds

72:10 20VC: Max Altman on The New Seed War: Can Anyone Compete with Sequoia and a16z | Leaving $2BN on the Table with Reddit | Lessons from Backing Rippling at $25M Post | Why Climate Tech is a Mirage and Disaster

David Tisch · Feb 5, 2024

Investor content marketing is genuinely valuable because it uses others' distribution to attract the next generation of great founders

Clips and viral content bring generational companies to your door

Scope: said self-deprecatingly about his own appearance on the show

29:17 20VC: The Biggest Misconceptions & Hardest Truths About Seed Investing Today; Why The Best Founders Don't Need You, Why Uncapped SAFEs Are Good, Why Reserves Are Bad, Why Signalling is BS, Why Price Doesn't Matter with David Tisch & Terrence Rohan

Harry Stebbings · Feb 5, 2024

Making content that resonates with thousands of founders is a genuine skill and a strategic sourcing tactic

29:40 20VC: The Biggest Misconceptions & Hardest Truths About Seed Investing Today; Why The Best Founders Don't Need You, Why Uncapped SAFEs Are Good, Why Reserves Are Bad, Why Signalling is BS, Why Price Doesn't Matter with David Tisch & Terrence Rohan

Klaus Hommels · Nov 27, 2024

Public content creation by VCs is legitimate when it serves a mission that requires reaching a broad audience, but self-promotional posturing is a waste of a VC's time

Some aims can only be achieved by being outspoken; performative 'thrilled to be part of the journey' posting displaces far more urgent work

Scope: distinguishes mission-driven communication from self-promotion

11:20 20VC: Why Price Sensitivity is BS | Why "Portfolios" are Merely a Construct to Make LPs Happy | Why the Best Investment Never Happen in "Fundraising Rounds" | What Europe Needs to do to Become a Superpower Again | Klaus Hommels, Lakestar

Kyle Harrison · Oct 21, 2022

The centre of gravity in venture brand has shifted to individual investors and most firms' marketing has failed to keep up

People now want to interact with a person who represents an institution rather than a faceless monolithic brand, and firms find building individual celebrity uncomfortable

Scope: a few firms are trying to push individual celebrity forward

22:38 20VC: Why 75% of Active Investors Will Disappear in the Next Few Years, The Death of "So So" Venture Firms is Coming, The Rise of Blackstone of Venture Firms and What That Does To Venture Returns, How the World of LPs is Broken and more with Kyle Harrison

Taavet Hinrikus · Apr 28, 2025

Venture is a brand game, and for a new fund the brand is simply the personal brand of its GPs

Scope: new funds specifically

11:14 20VC: VCs are Spreadsheet Monkeys and are Commoditised | Why Fees and Carry Misalign GPs and LPs | Why Founders Will Realise Multi-Stage Funds Damage Seed Rounds | Why We Need European Sovereignty More Than Ever with Taavet Hinrikus

Kyle Harrison · Oct 21, 2022

Deeper personal relationships in venture will come from how investors present themselves online, which attracts the right founders by making clear what job they're being hired for

Every investor is trying to articulate the job a founder would hire them for, in the jobs-to-be-done sense

20:03 20VC: Why 75% of Active Investors Will Disappear in the Next Few Years, The Death of "So So" Venture Firms is Coming, The Rise of Blackstone of Venture Firms and What That Does To Venture Returns, How the World of LPs is Broken and more with Kyle Harrison

Jason Lemkin · Nov 30, 2022

He will only invest in founders who come to him through his own funnel and actively pick him; a founder who says they are 'still learning about SaaStr' signals he is being used as a stalking horse or that it's too early in their discovery, and the deal won't work out.

He ran the experiment again this year after nine years of investing and the deal with the founder who didn't know SaaStr didn't work out.

Scope: accepts this means he will invest somewhat poorly / miss deals

11:42 20VC: Jason Lemkin on Why Founders Do Not Care About Their VCs Anymore, Why Zoom Made Us All Worse Investors, Why 80-90% IRR Should Have Been Warning Signs and the Algolia Journey From Seed to $2.25BN Valuation

Harry Stebbings · Aug 29, 2022

It is idealistic to pursue both a partner-led star brand and a unified firm-level brand at once; firms must choose one model

The successful examples split cleanly into partner-led star firms (Mark Suster at Upfront, Alexis Ohanian at 776) and all-in-unison firm brands (Sequoia, Benchmark)

Scope: offered as a deliberate pushback rather than agreement

21:18 20VC: Is Now Really the Best Time to Be Investing? WTF is Happening at Growth Stage Investing? Why VCs Have Gotten Lazy Over the Last 2 Years? Investing Lessons from Hitting with Braze and Missing with Snowflake with Logan Bartlett, Managing Director @ Re

Logan Bartlett · Aug 29, 2022

It is idealistic for a venture firm to pursue both individual-partner brand building and unified firm brand at once; inevitably a firm gets pulled toward one orientation or the other

The orientation shows up in small revealed choices — e.g. whether partners' blogs live on their own domain/Substack or on the firm's

Scope: gray areas exist between the two; a few firms have managed to elevate both

21:51 20VC: Is Now Really the Best Time to Be Investing? WTF is Happening at Growth Stage Investing? Why VCs Have Gotten Lazy Over the Last 2 Years? Investing Lessons from Hitting with Braze and Missing with Snowflake with Logan Bartlett, Managing Director @ Re

Ophelia Brown · Mar 17, 2023 · hedged

Venture's hype culture, which has displaced the art of deal making, is a product of the amount of cash in the ecosystem, and whether the industry returns to deal making depends on how this cycle ends

The hype is downstream of capital abundance rather than an independent cultural shift

43:13 Hype culture displacing deal making craft is a product of capital abundance and may reverse with the cycle

Mitchell Green · Mar 28, 2025

Investment firms should distribute their own content rather than letting other funds circulate it, because brand outside Silicon Valley is what gets entrepreneurs in cities like Chicago, Indianapolis and Madison to take your call

Junior team members reported that nobody in those cities knew who Lead Edge was; the firm's own 'hierarchy of bullshit' letter was made famous by partners at other funds passing it around

72:55 Firms must own their content distribution to build brand reach beyond silicon valley

Brad Feld · Sep 30, 2019

Venture is currently at a moment of peak noise, and what's needed is more signal — people relating to each other in real ways rather than in the ways they want to be perceived

The volume of noise in the system has grown enormous and grates on him over time

45:34 Venture currently suffers peak noise and needs more authentic real signal between people

Harry Stebbings · Sep 6, 2024

Most venture firms do lots of deals partly to stay relevant, whereas having media means you can do almost no deals for a year and remain just as relevant — a huge and much cheaper advantage

Deals keep you in the news and in founder flow; content substitutes for that relevance far more cheaply

44:52 Media content substitutes for deal volume as a cheaper way to stay relevant

Jude Gomila · Feb 11, 2020

Writing publicly about the companies you think need to exist — things you'd build or need yourself — is a decent sourcing algorithm for getting into the best deals early

He blogged that he wanted a 'Simple for payroll'; Josh saw the post and reached out, which is how he got into Gusto early

19:52 Publicly writing about companies you wish existed attracts founders building them

Jason Lemkin · Nov 30, 2022

Brands in venture last a long time if nurtured, so the game is to establish a brand and not let it decay rather than worry about month-to-month ebbs and flows

A maintained top brand gets you into one or two good deals a year by hook or by crook, and in venture that is enough; Andreessen and Excel have both rebuilt their brands within his time in venture

51:21 Venture brands persist for about a decade if actively maintained and just one or two good deals a year suffices

Jason Lemkin · May 6, 2022

A large social following alone no longer moves the needle for an investor, but consistently making connections through a strong network still makes you more valuable than 95% of investors on a cap table

Many have copied the early social-following playbook, so it now seems basic; genuine network connections remain scarce

36:32 Large social following no longer differentiates but genuine network connections still do

Larry Aschebrook · Jun 16, 2025

Staying focused on the firm's logo rather than himself individually is what got G Squared to where it is

Building institutional recognition beyond his own sphere came from de-emphasizing the individual

83:26 Firm logo not personal brand built durable recognition

Terrence Rohan · Feb 5, 2024

Much of what is posted on VC Twitter is content marketing designed to make the poster seem smart; privately those same investors would admit they don't know.

Get them two beers deep and they'd say 'shit, I don't know'.

26:57 Vc twitter content is marketing not genuine belief