Purple Entrepreneurs First sign hanging on brick building exterior in startup district, San Francisco, California, December 4, 2025. (Photo by Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images)
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Most venture funds spend their careers telling founders to find product-market fit yet few apply that discipline to their own brand. A new analysis from Murph Capital argues that for emerging managers, failing to build a distinctive public identity is a deal flow problem, and ultimately a returns problem.
The piece, co-authored by VC marketing strategist Laurie Owen and Murph Capital founder Pavel Prata, lays out a 6,500-word framework for how first- and second-time fund managers can out-maneuver established platforms not by outspending them, but by doing the one thing large funds structurally cannot: being specific, transparent, and close to the work.
Owen cites Bryan Johnson’s $60 million Blueprint raise, a round that included Alex Hormozi, Logan Paul, and Steven Bartlett, but not institutional VCs who had actively tried to participate. The cap table was curated for audience and cultural reach, not check size or track record.
The same dynamic is accelerating at the other end of the market. Sequoia partner Julien Bek’s “Services: The New Software” generated over 4 million impressions when published last month, not because the thesis was new (the AI-enabled services bundle argument had circulated for years), but because Sequoia’s institutional frame did the heavy lifting. Strip the logo, Owen argues, and the same piece might reach 4,000 people. The brand is doing all the work, instead of the content itself.
For emerging managers without that brand inheritance, this creates a specific and urgent problem. They are producing content that mimics established funds without the frame those funds spent decades building. The output is so similar; interview formats, LinkedIn takes, investment announcements, and the result isn’t spectacular.
The Murph Capital framework centers on what Owen calls the “specificity advantage”; the structural benefit of being a small fund with a narrow thesis in a market where large funds are forced to stay broad. Andreessen Horowitz spent the past several years building separate podcasts, newsletters, and editorial voices across crypto, biotech, fintech, and defense, each mimicking the depth that a focused emerging manager gets by default.
The practical illustration is Convective Capital, a fund that invests exclusively in wildfire technology. By any standard reach metric, you could say its content underperforms. By the only metric that compounds into actual deal flow: presence in the specific LP and founder communities that matter to the thesis, it reportedly overperforms. The fund’s Red Sky Summit is now the premier event in fire tech, a category that did not have a premier event until Convective created one.
The same logic applies to message discipline. Essence VC used the word “infrastructure” so consistently across its website, podcast, and announcements that when a16z general partner Martin Casado wanted LP exposure to infrastructure investing, Essence was the obvious answer. The fund closed a $41 million fourth vehicle without requiring a traditional fundraising campaign.
The second structural advantage Owen identifies is transparency, and here the asymmetry with established funds is even more pronounced. Large funds carry legal, compliance, and LP communication overhead that makes process disclosure difficult. Emerging managers carry almost none of that overhead in early vintages.
Nichole Wischoff has published her actual deal flow funnel publicly; screens, first meetings, term sheets, creating a real-time record of how she operates that both founders and LPs can evaluate before a first conversation. Stefano Bernardi at Unruly Capital went further, making the fund’s entire internal dashboard public: closing dates, check sizes, valuations, co-investors, and write-offs. His reasoning: sophisticated counterparties already know most of this.
Owen frames this as the “building in public” advantage, an approach well-documented in the startup world but systematically underutilized in fund management. The argument is that the existing playbook for first-time managers, cold LP outreach, conference networking, is brutal and inefficient by comparison. A documented public record of judgment, deals seen, and theses tested is both a fundraising asset and a founder acquisition channel.
The media-to-fund path now has enough data points to be a pattern rather than an anomaly. Rex Woodbury built Digital Native into a platform audience before spinning out of Index Ventures to launch Daybreak. Packy McCormack built Not Boring before launching Not Boring Capital. Turner Novak built a following on memes and market takes before raising Banana Capital. In each case, the content preceded the fund, not the other way around.
The more interesting direction, Owen argues, is the inverse: fund-to-media-asset. Lobster Capital’s Gabriel Jarrosson has built a community of YC alumni and batchmates around his YC-focused investment thesis. That community improved his deal sourcing. The improved sourcing led to a new product: a YC application feedback network called The YC Roaster, that could only exist because the community had already formed around a specific enough thesis.
For LPs evaluating emerging managers in 2026, the Murph Capital framework suggests a useful filter: public content as a timestamped record of foresight. A manager who has been articulating a thesis in public for two years before outcomes validate it is demonstrable evidence of the “see” function that LP evaluation frameworks prioritize.
The investors most likely to be useful are the ones specific enough to have something to say about your exact market. Generic platform funds may offer brand and capital. The EM willing to publish their deal flow funnel, explain why they passed on your competitor, and document their thesis in public has already signaled the kind of intellectual proximity that produces useful board conversations.
As funds scale, LP obligations accumulate, co-investors watch, and portfolio companies own portions of the story. The freedom to be specific, transparent, and close to the work narrows with every dollar raised. The managers who use that window now are building frames that established funds will spend the next decade trying to replicate, from the outside, looking in.
This article was originally published on Forbes.com
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