narrative capital (converting attention to equity)

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I’ve spent my career working every part of the venture ecosystem, and I’ve spent more time than most observing and thinking through the things that are changing the structure we are all used to.

I think narrative capital is the biggest thing going on in venture, and I’m betting my career on it. (More on that another time - email me if you want the details.)

I can’t take credit for the branding (shoutout to Sajith Pai and his piece on the subject).

Narrative capital refers to the growing trend where media is eating venture capital. Attention is the new oil, and media creators - writers, podcasters, and tech influencers - are leveraging their platforms to build investment firms.

And they are winning (over much larger funds).

There is a lot to unpack on how we got here, why this matters, and what to expect from here, but we’ll try to tackle all of that below …

P.S. This piece is long and will get cut off by Gmail. We recommend clicking the button above to read the full piece.

Narrative capital

There are three main themes that explain the rise of narrative capital:

Here’s what each of those mean in more detail.

The days of venture being labeled as a cottage industry are long gone, and tech has been the way to create generational wealth for the past ~three decades.

That explosion of wealth has created more and more people and firms chasing after the next generational companies, and the chart above gives a visual of just how much the asset class has changed over the past 30 years.

NFX wrote a great piece on some of the second-order effects of this, but at a high-level it’s obvious: more competition going towards fewer deals.

When everybody is competing for space on the cap table, that also means:

The definition of “venture” has changed, and now a “venture” firm can manage and deploy billions of dollars. 

The past few years have been painful for everybody in the asset class, and the lack of liquidity means that nobody is getting paid - founders, employees, GPs, and LPs - until something changes.

This has changed fundraising from the top down, and LPs have now shown that they are only comfortable writing into big names that have made them money before.

Nine firms captured 50% of LP dollars in 2024, and the top 30 names took in 75% of all capital flowing into the asset class.

As these megafunds have converted over to become more of asset managers than venture investors, their check sizes have started to mirror their strategy, and they are now forced to deploy $10m+ growth checks into de-risked, later-stage businesses.

That has created a funding gap at the earliest stages, and every time a funding gap emerges, a new crop of managers comes in to fill that gap.

We have written about this in detail in the past.

Kyle Harrison (GP @ Contrary) wrote this piece about the unbundling of venture capital. It explains the concept below in more detail, and we recommend reading it to get up-to-speed on the larger trend playing out.

At a high-level, here is what is playing out:

In 2025, the shift is noticeable.

Monolithic funds are having to adapt or die. Feudalist funds like a16z are taking advantage of the VC musical chairs and grabbing talent left and right. Even with the slowdown of capital going towards emerging funds, more and more investors are positioning themselves to become more than an individual contributor in the coming years.

In other words, the genie is out of the bottle.

All of the trends discussed earlier are not going away. Instead, they will accelerate.

At its core, the root of narrative capital stems from a larger shift that has been playing out for the last two decades and that is proof of work being valued over credentialism.

The IP of humans is what drives an investment firm, but until recently, it was not rewarded to share the thinking that makes up that IP.

Under monolithic firms, that IP was shielded from the public, and the investment team operated in silence. Most of the knowledge, patterns, and information processed by these firms was only visible to those within the firm walls.

As these firms became more feudalist with a small handful of public-facing partners, some of that knowledge started to creep into the public. That knowledge got converted into blogs and other content, and that content became a magnet to attract high-quality founders and act as a source of deal flow.

Now that that playbook is out, it has become an expectation that GPs share their thoughts and opinions somewhere on the internet in order to increase their surface area and act as a content magnet for outliers.

Look at some of the notable GPs who have started funds over the past few years:

If you’re looking for a pattern, the pattern is that all of these GPs got their start writing and sharing their thoughts on the internet long before they became a GP.

Attention was converted into something larger. 

Thoughts turned into content, content converted into an audience, the audience manifested into a core asset, and that has been parlayed into an investment firm.

Media brands are great at all of the things that traditional investment firms are bad at:

Media is great for some things, but it knows nothing about maximizing equity value. On the other hand, private equity knows a ton about maximizing equity value, but it knows very little about audience and distribution and growth. 

Marrying the two ideas and building a private investment firm on top of a media business is how a LOT of wealth will be built over the coming decades, both for the GPs managing the fund and their portfolio companies.

Some people have a tendency to underestimate the value of an audience, but the tweet below shows the impact that one piece of content had for Will Manidis and Science.io:

No other capital partner could have close to this type of impact without having a large dedicated portfolio support team or an equally-powerful media component.

What these new crop of investors have realized that the general public has not picked up on (yet) is that as their media empire compounds, so does their fund. 

Here’s how I’m thinking about it for my own fund:

On the media side of the house:

Media flywheels are over-discussed, and most people on this side of the internet have a good sense of how this works. 

Tying this flywheel in with a fund flywheel is underdiscussed, but this hopefully gives a better framework to visualize how they are intertwined. 

At their core, venture funds have five functions: finding, picking, winning, helping, and exiting. Each of these functions improves as the media flywheel improves. 

Here’s how: 

Every person that starts with content makes content for a specific person on a specific platform.

The formula we have found most successful narrative capitalists use is to capture attention on the platforms (X, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram) and build more trust through a regular newsletter (beehiiv or Substack).

There is a higher weight towards an X following that a TikTok following because one signals clarity of thought where the other signals an ability to attract low-quality attention. 

You will find that the majority of LP capital for these types of funds comes from high net worth individuals, liquid founders, and family offices, but there are a handful of institutions who have also backed many of these funds. We have written about this trend in the past.

Cendana is a notable name. Level, Pattern, Sapphire, February, Truebridge, Crossover, Slipstream, Foundation, Nomads, and StepStone are a few others.

As we expect the number of narrative capitalists to grow, we expect the number of LPs backing these types of managers to grow as well.

As somebody attempting to juggle both a media business and a fund, the most common question / concern I get from LPs is around the amount of time required to pull all of this off.

It’s a valid concern, and I’ll admit: it’s not for most.

Winning attention consistently on the internet has become one of the hardest things to do. Doing it repeatedly is a full time job-and-a-half.

So the time commitment piece scares off a lot of folks.

Another risk is the fact that trust is built over years and eroded over minutes. Independent media companies are predicated on the principle that the person telling the story is worth trusting. When that person starts to become incentivized to tell their story a certain way, some of that trust can get put into question.

It has happened before, and it will happen again, and it’s a tricky road to navigate as somebody balancing both the trust of an existing audience while also trying everything to maximize returns for LPs.

In 2025, media and investing are becoming more and more intertwined. 

All of these trends are accelerating, and it creates more of an opportunity for people with an audience to parlay that audience into an investment vehicle. 

How I’m applying this

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