We Built New Media for VC/LP
A reflection on how VC media evolved, who it left behind and why we're launching new media infrastructure for emerging fund managers and LPs
Today we’re launching Murph Capital – our MVP version of a new media and community platform built specifically for emerging VCs and LPs.
If you’d rather not read 6,000+ words on how we arrived here, feel free to skip ahead to the “Enter Murph Capital” section or jump straight to the “Conclusion”.
Information as Market Infrastructure
Over the years I've spent working inside the venture and LP ecosystem, one observation has stayed with me more persistently than most: private markets run on differential access to information, and on the reputational signals that people use as proxies when that information is absent.
I think this is the mechanical reality of an asset class where outcomes are opaque, timelines span a decade, and the quality of a decision cannot be assessed until long after it was made. In such an environment, who controls the narrative around a fund, a firm, or a manager is a key question of structural positioning.
So when I entered the venture industry in 2018, this dynamic was already well established – it simply operated through a relatively legible set of channels:
The Forbes Midas List determined which GPs had social proof with a mainstream LP audience.
TechCrunch and The Information shaped deal perception.
A handful of GP blogs represented the practitioner layer:
Fred Wilson had been writing on AVC since 2003.
Paul Graham's essays had become canonical texts for a generation of founders.
Marc Andreessen wrote "Software is Eating the World" in 2011 as what was, in retrospect, a strategic document designed to frame an entire investment thesis as intellectual inevitability.
Looking back, what stands out is how traceable the ecosystem felt. You could map where credibility came from and who effectively acted as its gatekeepers. Distribution ran through a small number of institutional nodes, which created a kind of gravitational center for attention and influence.
Gradually, that center of gravity moved. Legitimacy no longer seemed to originate from the same institutions, nor did it wait for their validation. It began to accumulate in more distributed, practitioner-driven environments, often before traditional outlets had reacted.
The Great Distribution Shift
The shift happened in identifiable phases:
Fred Wilson, Naval Ravikant, Paul Graham – these weren’t running content strategies. They were practitioners with enough conviction in their own frameworks to write them down, repeatedly, over years. The audience that accumulated around them was small by today’s standards but disproportionately composed of exactly the founders, investors, and allocators whose opinions shaped deal terms and fund commitments.
What I’ve come to think of as “the flippening” has now fully occurred:
X discusses
Substack analyzes
TBPN synthesizes
And then the Wall Street Journal files…
For the firms, rounds, and narratives that are actually shaping private market consensus, legacy media is downstream of practitioner-led direct channels.
The TBPN New Media Market Map, published in 2025, documents exactly this: how distributed the source-of-record function has become, and how many of the relevant nodes are individual creators or small editorial operations rather than institutional publications.
6 Forces That Made This Permanent
Understanding why this shift occurred requires looking at the incentive structures underneath it.
Capital Commoditization
In 2007 there were fewer than 1,000 venture firms in the US. By 2023, that figure had climbed to more than 3,400, and the number of funds in existence had more than quadrupled over roughly the same period.
When capital becomes abundant, the marginal dollar stops differentiating. Founders no longer decide primarily on price – they decide on conviction, reputation, and what they already understand about a firm before the first meeting. Increasingly, that understanding is formed through public signal.
Algorithmic Distribution Replaced Editorial Gatekeeping
Publishing is no longer scarce. Access to distribution has largely flattened. What became scarce instead is clarity of thought.
Any GP with a specific, well-articulated perspective can now reach a defined audience directly. Most don’t. Which is precisely why those who do stand out.
Practitioner Trust Over Observer Journalism
Traditional media reports on venture from the outside. Practitioners articulate it from within (aka personality driven media). Over time, what compounds is not coverage but pattern recognition – the accumulated body of public decisions and frameworks that allow others to infer how someone behaves under uncertainty.
That kind of credibility cannot be manufactured quickly – it builds through consistent, visible thinking.
Generational Taste Fragmentation
Shift one generation and the media landscape changes entirely. Younger founders consume most of their signal through video and creator-led platforms like TikTok, referencing operators and investors as intellectual anchors in ways previous cohorts once referenced journalists.
Attention distributes across micro-ecosystems. The Residency is a standout example of how to build brand gravity for the new generation.
Riches in the Niches
The strongest venture content positions emerged from focus, not breadth. Funds that committed to a narrow intellectual territory built durable authority within it.
Concentrated viewpoints resonate more deeply than broadly hedged commentary because they signal conviction rather than optionality.
No Classic Rebundling
Earlier media disruptions eventually consolidated into new dominant platforms. This cycle feels different.
Instead of replacing old institutions, new layers stack on top of them. Independent platforms coexist with legacy outlets, each shaping different parts of the conversation.
The Players That Understood This First
First Round came first. Long before "new media" became a strategic category in venture, they began operating like a publishing house embedded inside a venture firm. The move was not aesthetic but epistemic: they positioned themselves as interpreters of early-stage company building. Over time, that content engine became part of how founders evaluated them – not just as capital, but as institutional memory.
What they built:
First Round Review – a long‑form knowledge platform with nine “digital magazines” (Management, Product, PR, fundraising, and more), featuring deep operator interviews turned into reusable playbooks.
In‑depth founder interviews that read as applied research, such as “What It’s Like to Raise a B‑round” and “Rebuilding Culture After a Scandal,” giving founders ready‑to‑use frameworks.
The State of Startups report, built on 500+ founder surveys, repackaged as public charts, posts, and social snippets that founders actively reference.
Curated founder communities and peer forums (“Founder Circles”) that mirror the Review’s intellectual layer offline and reinforce long‑term, transparent norms.
In‑house editorial and semi‑in‑house PR infrastructure, treating content as part of the value‑prop, not an afterthought.
First Round demonstrated early that media could function as compounding institutional IP. They built a durable archive that founders repeatedly return to.
a16z studied that playbook and scaled it into something else entirely. From their founding in 2009, media was a core function, not a side project. Margit Wennmachers built their communications operation from nearly the beginning, and the firm had more marketers than investors before it had a track record. That was deliberate.
The real escalation came between 2023 and 2025. The rebrand (Art Deco visual language, a “techno-optimist” philosophical identity) went far beyond aesthetics. A legible worldview: a cultural container that everything the firm publishes, funds, and says fits inside.
What they built:
A multi-vertical publishing cadence across Substack and a16z’s owned media (roughly 5 newsletters per week covering AI, crypto, and infrastructure) alongside annual “Big Ideas” reports positioned as coordinated media events.
a16z Speedrun, structured as a YC-style entry point with checks up to ~$1M and access to an estimated $5M in associated benefits, supported by operational playbooks that explicitly address launch and distribution strategy.
A dedicated in-house New Media team of writers, producers, and strategists embedded into portfolio launches (a16z remains the only venture firm listed as an institutional presence on TBPN’s New Media Market Map mentioned above).
An 8-week New Media Fellowship that drew 2,000+ applications and selected roughly 60–70 fellows from OpenAI, Google, Apple, and the broader creator ecosystem, creating a pipeline of media-native talent aligned with the firm.
Coordinated launch support for portfolio companies including essays, video production, social distribution, and podcast placements – concentrating narrative visibility around key announcements rather than relying solely on traditional press.
The a16z Build newsletter and related in-person dinners designed to integrate founders and operators into a tighter intellectual and offline network.
Consistent partner-level media presence, with Ben Horowitz, Marc Andreessen, and others hosting long-form conversations and appearing regularly on high-signal podcasts, keeping the firm’s perspective in steady circulation.
Y Combinator never branded itself as a media company, yet it may be one of the most structurally influential narrative engines in venture history. Its distribution strategy was not about aesthetic rebranding but about turning institutional philosophy into scalable doctrine. Essays, lectures, demo days, and later podcasts became extensions of a coherent worldview about startups, speed, and iteration.
What they built:
Paul Graham’s essays – canonical texts like “How to Start a Startup” and “Do Things that Don’t Scale,” often cited in founder interviews and pitch decks as baseline thinking.
Startup School – a free, open online curriculum that replicates key YC lectures, letting founders internalize YC’s framework without joining a batch.
Demo Day as a broadcast capital‑coordination event, streamed to hundreds of investors and turned into a concentrated media‑week for selected narratives.
The YC Podcast – a weekly show of long‑form conversations where founders and operators walk through PMF, growth, and iteration, reinforcing YC’s playbook in real‑time.
A public alumni graph visible through YC’s site and founder‑to‑founder references, creating a strong sense of track record and network density.
YC’s advantage lies in repetition and scale. By articulating and distributing a consistent startup framework over decades, it embedded its intellectual DNA into multiple founder generations. Distribution here is less about media aesthetics and more about doctrinal persistence.
I could go on with more examples, but it's better to check out this newsletter by my friend Laurie Owen. He put together a fantastic, detailed breakdown of how the brands mentioned above built their media engines.
He also developed the graph below, which illustrates the current state of the VC media landscape. Even a quick glance shows just how varied these strategic approaches have become.
Reversing the Order of Legitimacy
The examples above are easy to attribute to institutional scale. It is straightforward to argue that firms with billions under management can afford to build media infrastructure around themselves.
The more structurally interesting category, however, consists of practitioners who reversed the sequence – building audience and intellectual surface area first, and only later formalizing a fund on top of it.
Harry Stebbings is perhaps the clearest example of this inversion. He began recording The Twenty Minute VC podcast at 17–19, initially from his bedroom with a $40 microphone, long before managing institutional capital.
Over time, the podcast’s audience and network became an informal distribution layer, which later evolved into the foundation for 20VC as a micro-VC fund launched in 2020. That fund has since scaled into a firm managing over $600 million, but its initial asset was attention and access accumulated through years of consistent publishing.
Mario Gabriele followed a similarly inverted path, though through written analysis rather than audio. He launched “The Generalist” around 2019 as a deeply researched Substack newsletter focused on company strategy and emerging technology trends. As it grew into one of the most widely read strategy publications in tech, it established both intellectual authority and network density.
Only after that foundation was in place did he formalize Generalist Capital, a pre-seed and seed fund that leverages the research brand not merely as marketing, but as a structural access and signaling advantage.
A few days ago he joined Hummingbird as a Partner.
Paige Finn Doherty represents yet another variant of this model. She first built visibility as a Gen Z-focused storyteller and educator, publishing a venture-literacy book and consistently sharing insights across Twitter and Substack.
That public narrative layer preceded the creation of Behind Genius Ventures, an early-stage fund focused on the future of work and play. In this case, media functioned as the initial layer of relationship formation with a generation of founders who encountered the brand through content before encountering it through capital.
Other examples of “media-to-VC” path include Julian Shapiro (Julian Capital), Rex Woodbury (Daybreak), Packy McCormick (Not Boring Capital).
The New Architecture of Venture Media Economics
If the previous sections show that both large venture platforms and individual practitioners are now building serious media operations, a natural question follows: why is this economically viable now, in a way it wasn’t a decade ago?
Cost structures have collapsed, monetization models have diversified, and production workflows have been automated to the point where a small, highly specialized publication can operate profitably without the infrastructure traditional media once required. 3 shifts are worth naming precisely:
Sponsorship as Ecosystem Investing
TBPN illustrates a sponsorship logic that differs meaningfully from conventional advertising. The show’s audience (founders, operators, GPs) is the same population from which sponsors draw their customers and, in some cases, their investors. Sponsoring TBPN is less a media buy than an ecosystem positioning decision.
What makes this model structurally different:
Sponsors like Figma, Plaid, Eight Sleep, and NYSE are not external brands reaching a foreign audience – they are participants in the same ecosystem
The audience makes consequential purchasing and capital allocation decisions, making even a small readership commercially valuable
TBPN reached approximately $5 million in annual sponsorship revenue (or even more) within its first year without a subscription layer
Podcasts such as Sourcery, hosted by Molly O’Shea, illustrate how high-production venture media increasingly attracts direct sponsorship from ecosystem companies. The show, known for its unusually strong visual production for a venture podcast, is sponsored by companies such as Brex, Turing, Public, and Deel.
A similar pattern appears in larger formats. Airwallex, for example, integrates into the sponsorship layer of the All-In Podcast, hosted by Chamath Palihapitiya, Jason Calacanis, David Sacks, and David Friedberg, one of the most widely followed conversations in venture and technology.
At the same time, brands increasingly support creators who are not independent media organizations but practitioners building funds or investment platforms. Harmonic supports Harry Stebbings and the 20VC Podcast, while Hanover Park and Flex back The Peel Show hosted by Turner Novak of Banana Capital.
Subscription Economics and Native Sponsorship on Substack
Substack has become the primary venue where LP and GP professional discourse happens in public form. In 2024, the platform reported $300 million paid out to creators – now including not only reader subscriptions but a growing share of direct sponsorship arrangements.
A few data points worth holding:
70% of Substack’s readership is college-educated and professionally active – structurally attractive for premium brand partnerships
Sponsors like Everlane, Calm, and Tory Burch have moved meaningful budget onto the platform
The platform functions simultaneously as a publishing tool and a social graph – content circulates through professional networks, not just algorithmic feeds
For venture practitioners specifically, a writer with 10,000 highly relevant subscribers can generate meaningful revenue and build direct commercial relationships with their audience – leverage that simply didn’t exist on traditional media platforms.
AI-Driven Production and Workflow Automation
The operational bottleneck in content production has historically been human time. That bottleneck has materially narrowed. The tools now available to any media operation, regardless of size:
Automated transcription. YouTube’s native captions, Otter, Castmagic convert audio to editable text in minutes
LLM-assisted drafting. Headline generation, pull-quote extraction, newsletter drafts, and social posts derived directly from a transcript
Templated distribution workflows. A single recorded input generates a full week of multi-format content across email, social, and long-form channels
AI voice and faceless‑content generation. Services like ElevenLabs can turn long‑form written content into high‑quality AI narration, while platforms such as InVideo AI, Nano Banana, and Kling enable AI‑generated video from text or prompts
The cumulative effect: a media operation no longer scales linearly with headcount. Editorial judgment (the perspective, the framing) remains human. Everything downstream can be systematized.
For a venture firm or emerging manager, the resource argument against building a media presence has weakened considerably. The question is no longer whether you can afford to produce content consistently, it is whether you have something worth saying.
The VC/LP World Remains Largely Untouched
If we look at the founder-VC layer, the shift has already happened. Distribution has become part of strategy, narrative has become a competitive tool, and public presence functions as leverage.
But once we move down to the VC/LP layer (the level where long-term capital is actually allocated) the picture looks different. The allocator layer still operates largely through a logic built around:
Closed reference cycles
Personal introductions
Private memos
Institutional memory that rarely becomes public
Most trust in this part of the market still travels not through public intellectual footprint, but through signals such as:
Who knows you
Who is willing to vouch for you
Who you have already worked with
Which LP networks already support you
In that sense, the VC/LP layer remains significantly more closed than the founder/VC side of the ecosystem.
The main thing is that GP generation is clearly changing. Emerging managers (who represented over 50% of new funds in 2024) are increasingly shaped in environments where public thinking is not perceived as a marketing layer but as a natural part of professional identity. Writing, speaking, articulating investment theses, explaining portfolio decisions – these behaviors are increasingly normal for younger managers.
They grew up in an ecosystem where intellectual visibility compounds over time, and when they begin building funds, they often bring that instinct with them. Narrative becomes part of franchise-building rather than an external communication layer.
However, once this logic encounters the allocator layer, the response is not always symmetrical. For many LP institutions, what still matters most is not public articulation but the depth of personal references, institutional lineage, prior working relationships, and behavioral consistency within closed cycles.
At the same time, it would be misleading to describe the LP layer as static. It is evolving – just more slowly. A new generation of allocators is emerging, particularly within:
Family offices
Newer fund-of-funds platforms
Institutional teams with younger structures
Inside these environments, a growing number of professionals follow the same Substack newsletters, participate in the same discussions on X, and understand the dynamics of creator-led distribution just as well as many GPs.
Who Is Trying And What They've Built
A small number of practitioners have begun building meaningful content presences at the intersection of venture capital and the LP ecosystem.
It is important to clarify that the examples below are not presented as criticism of their work, nor as an attempt to suggest that these efforts are somehow insufficient. Quite the opposite – many of these projects are thoughtful, high-signal contributions that have already improved the visibility of allocator-level conversations (and I personally love content of these people!).
The structural observation is simply that the content being produced across this layer remains highly fragmented, with very different motivations, formats, and intellectual drivers behind it.
Several distinct approaches have emerged:
Beezer Clarkson – an effort to make the allocator perspective more visible and institutionalized through the creation of OpenLP, one of the first platforms attempting to aggregate signals and relationships across the LP ecosystem.
Peter Walker – an example of how proprietary corporate data can be transformed into public intellectual capital. His work at Carta takes an analytical rather than editorial approach, producing benchmarks, trend reports, and data narratives derived from the platform’s underlying dataset.
David Zhou and Meghan Reynolds – operating at the intersection of private ecosystem insight and public analysis. Much of their work functions as signal filtration, bringing into public view the conversations, relationships, and developments that typically circulate inside allocator and emerging manager networks.
Dan Gray – building a layer around venture that is closer to institutional research than social media commentary. The approach resembles the type of primary research workflows that professional investors actually consume, and the audiences that accumulate around this style of work tend to be smaller but significantly more decision-relevant.
Doug Dyer – producing a structured digest of hot news and data drops relevant to GPs and LPs, with particular emphasis on fund economics, market analysis, and the aggregation of industry reports and benchmarks.
There are, of course, many additional creators contributing to this ecosystem – several of whom were highlighted by David Zhou in his recent analysis of how LPs evaluate emerging managers heading into 2026 (which is well worth reading).
What these examples collectively demonstrate is that each represents a partial solution to the information infrastructure problem at the VC/LP layer.
But important structural gaps remain.
None of these efforts, individually or collectively, yet serve VC/LP community with the same combination of depth, consistency, and editorial infrastructure that First Round Review once provided to the early-stage founder ecosystem.
No fund-of-funds has built a meaningful public media presence designed to shape allocator discourse. No family office operates a content platform intended to systematically attract and filter emerging managers.
Aside from OpenLP, originally launched by Sapphire Ventures, there is still no widely adopted platform that aggregates allocator-relevant data into a true “one-stop shop” for emerging managers and LPs.
Even at the level of design and presentation, very few projects maintain the level of editorial and visual quality seen in publications such as The Generalist or the media operations built by a16z.
And it is precisely within this structural gap that Murph Capital begins.
Enter Murph Capital
If the sections above have laid out the structural case for why venture media is being rebuilt from the ground up (and why the VC/LP layer specifically remains an open field) then what follows is less a pitch than an explanation of how we’ve thought about building into that gap.
Murph Capital launched in its current form as an MVP. The architecture is intentional, not finished. But the principles behind it are worth making explicit, because they inform every editorial and product decision we make.
Aggregation and Proprietary Content
In the era of practitioner-led media, the biggest challenge is content fragmentation. If you live on X (Twitter) all day, you’re in the loop, but if you don’t – you’re missing the market discourse entirely.
That’s why we’ve built a central nervous system for the ecosystem. We pull high-signal insights from LinkedIn, X, and Substack (with institutional outlets coming soon) and manually organize them into a single destination for LPs and emerging managers.
Beyond curation, our proprietary content is scaling rapidly. We now publish original analysis across 8 distinct categories, deepening our qualitative and quantitative coverage of the market.
The model mirrors what a16z, First Round, and Y Combinator built for the VC/founder layer – starting with curation, moving progressively toward exclusive, data-driven output. The audience is different (emerging VCs and LPs) but the compounding logic is the same.
Looking ahead, we’re shifting our focus toward proprietary reports, benchmarks and data drops. We aim to evolve into a standalone media outlet defined by independent, in-house content.
Design as a First-Order Decision
We treat design as a differentiator, not a finishing layer. The firms we've drawn from (Terrain, Sequel, Spacecadet) are design-forward because they understand that in a digital-first environment, aesthetic quality signals judgment quality. This applies to everything we produce: the website, content materials, newsletter layouts, cover images.
In an era where the US government is launching its own design function and the "Costco era of software" is setting a new baseline, design is one of the few areas where a small operation can visibly outpunch its weight.
Open Source as a Flywheel
The data we collect, we share – for free. Not Pitchbook quality, but that's not the point. In a layer where information is still largely gated by relationship, making useful data freely available creates a different kind of entry point.
We're already aggregating benchmarks from fund administrators using different underlying datasets – comparative data that no single source currently provides. The more we share, the more LPs and GPs engage. The more they engage, the better the data becomes. That flywheel is the longer-term asset.
Media Page
The Media Page is where Murph Capital functions as a journal. At its core, it is an aggregation layer. As mentioned above, we manually pull news from Substack, LinkedIn, and X, with top-tier institutional outlets being added shortly. Everything is tagged and searchable, so you can filter by what’s relevant to you rather than reading everything.
Monthly Newsletter
If you’re not tracking the VC/LP space daily, you don’t have to. On the first of every month, without exception, we send a single compressed digest that covers everything that mattered:
Best tweets and LinkedIn posts from the ecosystem
Substack reports and benchmarks worth reading
Fund formations, events, and podcasts tracked that month
One email. One date. Everything in one place.
VC/LP Podcast Directory
There are a lot of podcasts in venture. Most of them cover technology trends, founder stories, and consumer markets. We don’t include those.
The Murph podcast directory is curated specifically for Emerging Managers and LPs – content about building funds, allocating to managers, and navigating the institutional layer of private markets.
Instead of maintaining a dozen separate subscriptions, you can come here and find everything relevant in one place.
Emerging Manager Interviews
Longer-form journalism takes time to build. We’re building toward it (inspired by publications like Arena Mag and Colossus) but we started with something more immediate: a blitz interview format with Emerging Managers who have recently closed funds.
10 short questions. Candid answers. Shared openly with everyone who is currently raising or considering investing in emerging managers.
It’s a small format with a specific use case: giving the community direct access to firsthand fundraising experience, without the noise.
Reports & Benchmarks
The venture data landscape is fragmented. Carta, AngelList, and Aduro Advisors each publish useful benchmarks – but from different datasets, on different schedules, in different formats. Comparing them requires tracking multiple sources manually.
We’ve built a single directory for reports and benchmarks relevant to the VC/LP layer. The goal is straightforward: you should be able to come here, compare fund data across sources, and understand where the differences come from – without assembling it yourself. Filters are coming shortly. The directory is also available inside the community.
Templates
Fund managers spend a meaningful amount of time looking for things that already exist. We know this because it’s one of the most common reasons people reach out.
The Templates section is where we collect and share ready-to-use materials that fund managers can take and adapt immediately:
Pitch deck cases and templates
LP update templates
LPA references
Fund modeling spreadsheets
AI agent instructions and pre-built skills (.md) for Solo GPs and allocators
The goal is simple: let managers spend their time on the work that actually requires their judgment, not on reinventing infrastructure that already exists.
Open Source Data
The data layer we are building at Murph Capital starts from a simple premise: most of the intelligence that Emerging Managers and allocators need already exists in public sources – it just hasn't been systematically aggregated and made accessible. We are changing that.
Funds
We track funds across social networks, PR outlets, trade publications, third-party aggregators, and a range of reputational data sources – with the goal of mapping virtually every active fund in the market.
For each fund, we capture raise size, the GPs behind it, and the key individuals whose names define its identity. The public-facing site offers search and filter functionality so users can navigate the landscape efficiently.
For members who join the community, the data goes deeper: direct access to GP-level contact information, including LinkedIn profiles and email addresses, sourced exclusively from public records. We do not scrape, purchase, or infer private data. Everything we surface comes from what is already out in the open – we simply make it findable.
Events
We track the full spectrum of VC and LP events – from flagship conferences down to the small, invitation-only gatherings listed quietly on Lu.ma. Coverage is global, with filtering by geography and detailed recommendations layered on top. If there is a room worth being in, it should be findable here.
Signals (Coming Soon)
The next layer we are building is signals – a real-time feed of meaningful market movements: spin-outs, internal promotions, shifts in social activity, and other soft indicators that precede formal announcements.
For allocators, this creates an early-relationship advantage: the ability to engage with potential fund managers before they have even begun raising. For Emerging Managers, the mirror image – visibility into which LPs have recently closed funds, changed mandates, or signaled fresh dry powder, making it possible to approach the right people at the right moment.
Data Inside the Community
A meaningful portion of the data we aggregate cannot be published openly – particularly anything that touches individual contact details or commercially sensitive fund information. This material lives inside the Murph Capital community, which we are launching shortly.
Within the community, members will have access to:
A live tracker of funds currently in fundraising mode, with a dedicated GP data tab
A proprietary database of GPs and LPs built from our ongoing research
Curated venue recommendations for hosting events and directory of sponsors willing to underwrite your next AI-focused meetup
Growing library of AI prompts, skills and automation tools designed for solo fund operators.
The scope of what we add will be driven directly by what allocators and Emerging Managers tell us they need – the community itself becomes the product roadmap.
What’s Next?
Community
Over the years, I have had GPs reach out directly – not to pitch anything, but simply to ask:
Whether a particular fund structure was market standard
How other managers had navigated a difficult LP conversation
What terms were actually reasonable versus what lawyers tend to present as non-negotiable
I was happy to help, but I was aware of something each time: the best answer I could give was my own perspective. What they actually needed was a room – a room of people one step ahead of them, or walking the same path at the same moment, where that question could surface a dozen different lived experiences at once. That room is what we are building.
So the newsletter, the data, the analysis – all of it functions as the top of a funnel that leads here. The community is where that gravity becomes something real: a place where people already orbiting the Murph Capital ecosystem can find each other, ask the questions they can’t ask publicly, and build relationships that the industry’s closed networks have historically made inaccessible.
The waitlist is open. If you have been reading this far, you already know whether this is for you.
IRL Events
The most durable insight from years of working with LPs is straightforward: funds close because of relationships, and relationships form in person.
Every allocation decision I have witnessed that moved with real conviction had a moment behind it where something shifted from professional interest to genuine trust. And that moment does not happen on a Zoom call.
We want to create the conditions for those moments, and we want to do it in formats that feel nothing like the standard industry mixer. Inspired by Cercle, we want to bring that sensibility into venture.
What exactly this looks like is still taking shape. A small dinner (inspired by Alicia’s story). A private mixer in an unusual space. Something closer to what Terrain built (Terrain Invitational 2025) – events designed as experiences first, networking second. The goal is not to fill a room but to create a room worth being in.
We will be announcing our first event soon. In the meantime – let us know in the comments: what format would you actually show up for?
Syndicate Newsletter
This is not a traditional syndicate.
Through the strength of the Murph Capital brand and ecosystem, we organically surface and evaluate Emerging VC funds, and share concise memos with our LP network through a free monthly newsletter. No paid placement. No hidden incentives. No investment advice.
We believe in trust, long-term relationships, and real value creation. The Murph gravity effect naturally surfaces high-quality managers and connects them with aligned allocators – making the industry, in a small but measurable way, healthier and more efficient.
I was actually inspired by Ryan Hoover’s newsletter and his piece on why he invests in funds.
Don't miss a launch: follow us on Substack for real-time updates.
Expanding to Instagram and Beyond
We believe in multi-platform distribution because different platforms serve different functions – the format changes, the audience changes, and the relationship between creator and viewer changes.
What matters most is not where we are today but where the next generation of GPs and LPs is forming.
It took me over a decade to reach the position I am in now. The compounding that mattered most was not any single deal – it was the slow accumulation of reputation, relationships, and presence in the right rooms. We are building media infrastructure for the people who are, right now, at the beginning of that same curve.
The data is undeniable: with YC at 571k followers on Instagram, a16z hitting the 115k mark, and TBPN nearing 30k, it’s clear where the audience actually lives today.
YouTube
Video is the hardest format to do well and the easiest to do poorly.
Podcasts are the obvious entry point – and the most crowded. The market is saturated in ways that are difficult to overstate, and the irony is that despite the volume, genuinely high-quality production is rare (it sometimes feels like 80% of venture podcasts were recorded in the same SF studio, with the same setup, the same guest rotation, and the same questions).
What interests me is something different. I have always been drawn to cinema – film scores, documentary storytelling, the kind of short-form work where every frame is intentional. High-production advertising, beautifully shot short films – these shaped how I think about what content can be. That sensibility is what I want to bring into the VC/LP context.
The market is already showing what this can look like at its best:
a16z launched “Originals", a dedicated filming branch helping portfolio companies tell their stories with A24-level production quality
Oscar Lindhardt is documenting the process of building a private equity firm from zero in vlog format – raw, personal, and surprisingly compelling
Founders Inc is filming the actual journey of building companies from a 42,000 sq ft campus at San Francisco’s Fort Mason
Y Combinator has built an audience of over 2 million subscribers through a disciplined mix of founder interviews and educational content
The template exists. The question is what version of it makes sense for the GP and LP world – and that is what we are working out.
Merch
This is purely about culture.
Watching what TBPN built – and before them, what Litquidity did with financial humor swag, and what a handful of GP-led brands have done with limited drops – the pattern is consistent: the best venture merch is not branding. It is identity. It signals membership in something, a shared understanding of what the job actually feels like.
We want to make something for the community that captures the texture of the experience – the unglamorous, repetitive, occasionally absurd reality of building a fund or allocating capital as an individual. Not “Murph Capital” across a chest. Some kind of reference only a GP or LP would catch.
The details are still in progress. But the spirit of it is clear.
Conclusion
If you made it this far, you already feel what we are building and why.
This is not content for everyone – and that is intentional. It is for the people who are in the middle of it: raising a fund, allocating capital, navigating an industry that still runs on access and relationships more than it runs on information.
A few people deserve to be named directly.
The Team
First, the team. The people working with me right now (Andrei, Liza, Liza, Nikita, Art, and a few others who prefer to stay anonymous) are among the most talented I have encountered in this industry. Non of this exists without them.
Rings AI
Second, Martin and Mark from Rings AI – our founding sponsor.
They are building an intelligent, AI-powered CRM with relationship mapping designed specifically for GPs and LPs, and it is one of the more thoughtful products I have seen in this space. We are grateful for their early belief in what Murph Capital is becoming.
If you want to try it, use code “MURPH” for 20% off your first year.
And if any part of this resonated – there are a few simple ways to be part of it:
Upgrade to a paid subscription to support our independent research
Become an official sponsor to position your brand at the center of the VC/LP ecosystem
We are just getting started.
Thanks for the shoutouts! 🫡
Excellent work Pavel 👏🏼🤌🏽