The Marketing Department Paradox

I had coffee with a founder last week who said something that's been rattling around in my head: "You know what's weird? Every VC I meet is essentially a salesperson, but they all act like they're investment bankers."

He's right, and he's wrong. They're not salespeople—they're marketers. And the difference matters.

The Three-Sided Marketing Machine

Venture capital is perhaps the only industry where your entire business model is marketing to three completely different audiences simultaneously:

Marketing to Founders: You're selling a commodity (money) in a market where the best customers (top founders) have infinite choice. Your "product" is identical to everyone else's—capital is capital. The only differentiation is narrative: your brand, your network, your "platform." This is pure positioning.

Marketing to LPs: You're selling a dream wrapped in a spreadsheet. Future returns that won't materialize for a decade, based on your ability to pick winners in markets that don't exist yet. This requires crafting a narrative so compelling that institutional investors will lock up capital for 10+ years based on vibes and track record theater.

Marketing to Other VCs: The dirty secret is that venture is a social game. Deal flow, syndicate access, board seats—they all flow from your position in the pecking order. You're constantly marketing your wins, your thesis, your intelligence. Twitter isn't a distraction for VCs; it's core infrastructure.

Yet walk into any venture firm and ask about their marketing department. You'll get blank stares or finger-pointing at the one junior person managing the blog that no one reads.

The Resource Starvation Game

Here's what I find genuinely bizarre: VCs will spend millions on office space in San Francisco, hire armies of analysts to create decks no founder will read, build "platform teams" that are essentially expensive concierge services—but suggest hiring a serious VP of Marketing and watch them physically recoil.

The typical VC marketing "stack" looks like:

• One overworked associate managing social media between deal memos

• A PR agency on retainer that sends the same press release template to TechCrunch

• A podcast that releases three episodes then dies

• A Medium blog with the last post from 2019 titled "Why We Invested in [Company That's Now Dead]"

Meanwhile, the partners are spending 80% of their time on marketing activities—they just don't call it that. Every coffee chat, every conference keynote, every thoughtful Twitter thread is marketing. But because it's the partners doing it, it's "relationship building" or "thought leadership."

The Anti-Marketing Mythology

The resistance is ideological. VCs have constructed an elaborate mythology about why marketing is beneath them:

"Our returns speak for themselves." Except they don't. Returns are private, lagging by a decade, and largely fictional until liquidity. By the time your returns "speak," you've already won or lost the next three funds' worth of deals.

"The best founders find us." This is survivorship bias as strategy. The best founders find you because other great founders talk about you—which is literally word-of-mouth marketing that you're not managing.

"We're investors, not marketers." You're picking companies based on narrative potential. Every investment memo is about story—TAM stories, founder stories, market timing stories. You're already in the narrative business; you're just bad at your own.

The Compound Cost

The underinvestment in marketing creates compound negative effects:

1. Deal flow suffers. The best founders are being bombarded with personalized, high-touch outreach from Tiger, Sequoia, and a16z. Your generic "saw your Series A announcement" email isn't competing.

2. Portfolio support atrophies. Without marketing muscle, your portfolio companies can't leverage your brand. You become dead money on the cap table—exactly what founders are taught to avoid.

3. LP relationships commoditize. When every firm's pitch deck looks identical (same TAM slides, same "why now" format), LPs default to betting on track record and pedigree. New firms can't break in; established firms coast on reputation.

The Marketing-Native Future

The smartest VCs are quietly building marketing machines—they just call them something else.

Look at what's actually working:

• Packy McCormick built Not Boring into a venture firm by newsletter audience capture

• Harry Stebbings turned a podcast into 20VC, now managing $400M

• Turner Novak memed his way to legitimate deal flow through TikTok

These aren't VCs who do marketing. They're marketers who do VC.

The next generation of venture firms won't have marketing departments—marketing will be the department that has everything else. The org chart will look like:

• Chief Narrative Officer (what you call CMO)

• Deal Flow Marketing (what you call sourcing)

• Portfolio Marketing (what you call platform)

• LP Marketing (what you call investor relations)

The Uncomfortable Truth

Here's what VCs don't want to admit: In a world of infinite capital and finite great founders, venture capital is becoming a luxury brand business. And luxury brands are built entirely on marketing.

The firms that win the next decade won't be the ones with the best returns—those are increasingly random and regression-bound. They'll be the ones with the best narrative machines. The ones who understand that every touchpoint is marketing, every interaction is brand-building, every piece of content is deal flow.

The irony is perfect: VCs spend all day evaluating companies on their go-to-market strategy, growth loops, and customer acquisition costs. Then they go back to firms with no marketing strategy, no growth loops, and infinite customer acquisition costs.

Your portfolio companies have marketing departments. Your competitors are building marketing machines. LPs are starting to evaluate firms based on "platform" and "brand"—which are just other words for marketing.

The question isn't whether you need marketing. It's whether you'll admit it before it's too late.

P.S. - The best response to this essay would be to forward it to your partners and say "interesting perspective." That's marketing too.