🧠 Strategy ≠ Spreadsheets: What This New VC ‘Blueprint’ Still Needs

A new report making the rounds—Rethinking Venture Capital: A Strategic Lens—aims to reframe the entire venture capital ecosystem, from LP allocations to fund structures to liquidity design. It’s 130 pages of sharp, systems-level thinking from Rohit Yadav, and it’s already becoming required reading in more than a few GP inboxes.

The core premise is powerful:

Venture is in what Yadav calls a “dissonance phase.”

• ⚙️ Tech cycles move in quarters, not decades

• 💸 Fund structures are still built for the 10+2 model

• 🌪 Exits are increasingly hostage to macro and geopolitical forces

There’s a wealth of smart detail here—on secondaries, on institutional design, even on reframing venture as national infrastructure. It’s a real contribution to the conversation. But as I read it, I kept circling back to one quiet omission:

For a report about how to rebuild venture, there’s almost nothing about how firms actually communicate, differentiate, or earn attention in this new era.

🚧 What’s Missing: Narrative Infrastructure

There’s a subtle assumption in the report: that if we fix the model, everything else follows.

But we’re not operating in a neutral market.

Capital is abundant. Reputation is scarce.

And how you tell your story increasingly defines whether people believe in what you’re building.

You can’t fix the pipes of venture and ignore the signals.

You can’t redesign the engine and forget the dashboard.

📣 Why This Matters Now

If we’re truly entering what the report calls Venture 3.0—a phase of institutionalization, liquidity innovation, and broader access—then the role of marketing and narrative doesn’t shrink. It expands.

Here’s what didn’t get covered in the report, but urgently needs to be part of the conversation:

🔑 Three Missing (But Critical) Strategic Levers

1. Narrative as Diligence Infrastructure

   LPs are no longer relying solely on numbers. They’re evaluating the clarity and consistency of a firm’s point of view. If your investment thesis doesn’t show up across your website, your memos, your social presence, and your partner conversations—it’s just vapor.
   

2. Content as a Force Multiplier

   The best firms already know this. When you define a category before anyone else, you don’t just get allocation—you attract alignment. A16Z, Altimeter, and Craft didn’t wait for others to explain the market to LPs and founders. They told the story first. Content isn’t marketing—it’s ideological scaffolding.
   

3. Marketing as Operating System

   Let’s drop the idea that marketing is cosmetic. In a crowded capital environment, style is strategy. Distribution is capital. The firm with the clearest, most consistent articulation of what it backs—and why—wins meetings before the deck is even opened. That’s not fluff. That’s structural advantage.

🛠 Where the Report Excels

To be clear: Rethinking Venture Capital does a lot right.

• It threads together LP strategy, macro headwinds, and fund mechanics better than almost anything else I’ve read this year.

• Hiive CEO Sim Desai’s section on secondaries is especially strong—arguing that liquidity should be treated not as a favor, but as infrastructure. (Hiive’s own research backs this up with real behavioral data.)

• The “Venture Spread” model is a useful reframing tool, especially for LPs rethinking risk across geography, stage, and structure.

So this isn’t a dismissal of the work. It’s a prompt for what’s next.

If we’re serious about rebuilding the venture capital operating system, we can’t stop at capital formation and exit design.

We also have to rethink signal design.

Because the system isn’t just pipes. It’s perception.

✏️ Final Thought

Venture is a belief-driven industry operating inside a rationalist wrapper. That’s the paradox, and the opportunity.

This report gives us a blueprint for how the plumbing might evolve. But the next layer of work is just as important:

How do we explain what we’re building, and why anyone should care?

The firms that figure that out—how to pair structural innovation with narrative clarity—won’t just adapt to Venture 3.0.

They’ll define it.

📘 Read the full report: bigbook.vc

🪤 Or better yet: audit your own firm narrative. Start by asking: does our content reflect what we claim to believe? Let me know what you find.