Why Venture Capitalists Don’t Do Marketing Like the Rest of Us

And what all of us can learn from them

Janessa Lantz
Published in
6 min readMar 21, 2017

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Marketing would be a whole lot easier if you were giving away money.

Right?!

Suddenly getting (and keeping) peoples’ attention would get pretty damn simple.

So you might be inclined to look at venture capital marketing and write off the whole marketing strategy. It wouldn’t work for me, you might think, I’m not giving away money.

Of course…neither are VCs. And while I’m not going to attempt to convince you that the widget you’re selling is more exciting than funding — it’s probably not — I will attempt to convince you that any B2B company has a lot to learn from how VCs do marketing.

The best VC marketing places both firm and partner in a position of strength, and they gain this position of strength, not just because of what they do (funding), but by how they do it. This strategy has implications for any B2B company.

If you boiled the VC marketing strategy down to one sentence it would be this: Know more about your space than anyone else — and prove it constantly.

The history of VC marketing

Early 2000's

History never gives us a neat line marking the beginning or end of a thing, but if you had to choose, if you had to identify the line of demarcation between “before VC firms did marketing” and “after VC firms did marketing” you would place it in 2001, the year that Mary Meeker published her first Internet Trends report.

Mary Meeker’s Internet Trends report is arguably the longest running piece of content marketing as well as the most influential. In 2012, Wired named Mary Meeker the queen of the internet. Digital nerds, myself included, plan our day around the release of this report:

And Wall Street also pays close attention:

Mary Meeker’s report changed the game for how venture capital firms did marketing. 2001 was the tail end of the dot com bubble bust, a time when fear was high and trust was low. The Internet Trends Report was never created to be a lead-gen tool. It was created to show that Mary Meeker knew more about the world of internet companies than anyone else, and they proved it with data and research.

This model has become a defining characteristic of how venture capital firms do marketing. It’s not about generating leads or press or even necessarily about providing helpful content and resources. Venture capital marketing is 100% about proving that you, personally, are the smartest in your business.

Twitter and the emergence of the thought leader

2004–2010

But while the Mary Meeker report set the gold standard for how VCs do marketing, it was nearly a decade before her strategy of creating content that proves expertise reached popular adoption. In 2004, Brad Feld published his first post on Feld Thoughts. In 2007, Jason M. Lemkin joined Twitter. In 2008, David Skok started his blog, For Entrepreneurs. In 2010, Ben Horowitz started Ben’s Blog.

Across all of these tactics, you see a similar trend emerge — the focus is always on showing that you know more about your space than anyone else, and proving this by regularly writing thoughtful posts about what’s happening in that space.

Very few of these early adopters of VC marketing followed the same research-heavy, data-rich approach used by Meeker, but they held on tightly to the idea of delivering a unique perspective that shows their personal expertise.

Tapping new channels

2010–2014

As competition in the area of VC thought leadership started heating up, the level of professionalism and the pursuit of new channels followed.

In 2010, Brad Feld published the first of his seven books on startups. In 2013, Jason Lemkin answered the first of his 2,000+ Quora questions. In 2014, Marc Andreessen introduced the world to the power of the tweetstorm. Each of these individuals carved out a niche for themselves by being the first to a platform or applying a new approach to an established platform.

Marc Andreessen Tweetstorm about disruption

The content itself hit an evolutionary inflection point. There were now fewer quippy thoughts and more talk of sales models, CAC, ARR. The focus was still on demonstrating personal expertise, but doing that took going a layer deeper.

Building communities

2014-present

Today, you will be hard pressed to find a venture capital firm where at least one partner isn’t actively producing content in an effort to position themselves as the smartest VC out there. But more and more, VCs are also bringing in help. Rather than individual partners demonstrating expertise, the craft is evolving to demonstrate the expertise of the firm itself.

In 2014, Andreessen Horowitz became the first VC firm to break into podcasting. Bringing on Sonal Chokshi, senior editor from Wired, to build a podcast that, today, is listened to by an average of 20,000 people per episode.

In 2015, First Round brought on Camille Ricketts to grow their new publication, First Round Review. Rickets approach to content marketing was less partner focused and instead provided extreme value to entrepreneurs by connecting them to the thinking and ideas of operators.

In 2015, Jason Lemkin launched SaaStr Annual. By 2017, the event was bringing in over 10,000 attendees and heralded as the single best place to meet and mingle with like minded entrepreneurs.

What people are saying about SaaStr Annual.

This updated approach positions, not just a partner, but an entire firm as being experts on a space; relying heavily on the community around them to help make this point. Podcasts, in-person events, publications — all of these tactics show off the deep connections a firm has in given space.

Learning from VCs

For the past 14 years, the way that VCs do marketing has placed them in a position of strength. They know more about the space they occupy than anyone else, and you trust them because they are constantly proving it to you. But they are not the only companies (or people) for whom this works:

  • SaaS: Danielle Morrill built an incredibly strong SaaS brand for her company, Mattermark, by publishing research reports on the funding landscape. Some of it is gated, but a lot of the good stuff is just given away completely free.
  • Non-profit: Kimberly Bryant is the founder of Black Girls Code, and boasts a Twitter following of over 20k. Like VCs, she regularly tweets about the space she works in — diversity in tech and leadership.
  • Consulting: Kevin Hillstrom has never gated a single piece of content, but year after year he’s published blog posts that demonstrate his incredibly deep expertise in ecommerce and catalogue businesses. He’s built a consulting business with over 200 global clients.

High numbers of pageviews, big email lists, and marketing funnels feel good because they scale. But Ben Horowitz and Mary Meeker don’t need a giant email list because they’re never going to put you a 5-email drip. And they’re not going to put you on a 5-email drip because they have something so much more valuable — they’ve earned our trust.

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For new VCs interested in building this type of reputation, don’t miss Benjamin Joffe’s excellent response to this article.

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