The average Web3 VC pitch looks like ours three years ago. “We have deep relationships across the ecosystem.” “We add value beyond capital.” “Our network is our advantage.” It’s not that any of these statements are lies; it’s that everyone says them, which effectively makes them meaningless.
Liquidity providers (LPs) have heard this speech so many times that the words have lost all form. And yet, somehow, the industry continues to photocopy the same deck of cards. Awesome logo slide. Vague thesis. Three bullet points on “added value”. A track record which, for most emerging managers, does not yet exist. Repeat until it is funded or not.
My colleagues and I at TBV spent a lot of time wondering what we actually had that no one else had. The answer, ultimately, was humiliating: not much. So we built something different.
Here’s what the data is trying to tell the industry that the industry continues to ignore: Emerging managers are actually outperforming. Studies consistently show that they achieve top quartile performance more often than established funds and on average generate significantly higher returns. The advantage is real. The problem is entirely structural: emerging managers cannot communicate a clear reason to customers to support them over others, so capital flows to brands rather than potential.
When we created TBV, we decided that the pitch should be a product and not a promise. The question we keep coming back to is: what does a fund actually own? Not who he knows. The connections are not defensible. What has it built, what data has it generated, and what platform value is it creating for founders? It’s defensible.
The answer we came across was that of events. We weren’t just looking for a networking game or a branding exercise. We wanted to develop a people-centric transaction engine. Web3 works on conferences. Everyone already knows it. Founders travel thousands of miles to shake hands at side events. Venture capital firms pay huge sponsorship fees to gain access to people they likely could have reached via email. Calculating ROI has always been unclear at best. What we wanted to do was reverse the model: instead of paying for access, let’s build the environment. Own the data. Create relationships at scale and feed them right back into sourcing, diligence and value for everyone involved.
In 2025, our event series has attracted more than 43,000 participants and more than 100 partners. This didn’t happen by chance and it wasn’t just a marketing stunt. It was deliberate infrastructure. Every interaction, every connection, every emerging trend spotted in these rooms powers TBX, our AI-driven transaction engine. The events and the fund are the same steering wheel.
“We’re not the only ones rethinking this. What’s interesting is how different the approaches are and how few of them resemble a traditional fund.”
Another venture capital firm, Outlier Ventures, understood the situation from a different perspective. They leaned into the accelerator model – creating a real platform of support around early-stage founders rather than just writing checks and showing up to board meetings. The result is a fund with over 300 portfolio companies and a real reason for founders to choose them over others with slightly more assets under management. Paradigm went in a completely different direction: they went technical. They don’t just invest in protocols; they contribute to it. That kind of depth is really hard to replicate, and LPs can see that.
What these models share, and what the next generation of interesting managers will share, is that the fund itself is a product whose utility goes beyond capital. The question is not “how do we tell a better story?” It’s “how can we build something that makes the story obvious?”
The good news is that there isn’t just one answer. The event model works for us. The accelerator model works for Outlier. In-depth technical input works for Paradigm. What doesn’t work, what never really worked, and what LPs are increasingly unwilling to pretend works, is a narrative built entirely on relationships you can’t show and value you can’t measure.
Web3 is evolving fast enough that the managers building the real infrastructure today will be very difficult to supplant later. Those who are still writing articles on their networks in three years will find that the room has quietly emptied around them. I’m really curious to see what other models emerge. Competition in this field, when it is truly focused on something different, is the best thing that can happen to it.
