VCs Become Media Companies by Telling Founder Stories

Balaji Srinivasan says every startup now needs a founding creator. Someone who speaks for the product before it even exists. The 3rd co-founder. He says the founding engineer is the how, but the founding creator is the why. And the more time I spend working with India’s top founders, the more obvious this becomes. A product without a founding creator is like a rocket without a launchpad. It can be beautifully built but it has nowhere to take off from. Because before the product ships, the story has to ship. I see this at Binge Labs everyday. The founders we work with treat content like core IP. They build in public, talk to their market daily, and use those signals to sharpen the product long before launch. With Balaji’s statement, it’s proven that content creation is no longer nice to have. It’s distribution + credibility + market fit rolled into one. In short: Code builds the product. Content builds the demand. & a founding engineer builds your core product so a founding creator needs to do the voice as well If there’s 1 thing I’d bet on for the next decade, it’s this: every great company will have a founding creator before they have a marketing team. Cheers :)

India's biggest VC funds have a content strategy. It's just a bad one. I've spent the last year producing content for brands, so I went and studied what the top funds actually publish. Open their pages yourself. You'll see the same broken playbook everywhere Blume Ventures. 3one4 Capital. Peak XV Partners. Accel in India. Elevation Capital. Some of the sharpest investors in the country and their feeds are fund announcements, congratulations posts, and event photos. That's not a media strategy. That's a press release archive. Here's why it sucks: founders don't pick investors from logo walls anymore. They pick the investor whose thinking they've been consuming for months. By the time a founder takes your call, the decision is half made and it's made on whoever showed up in their feed, not whoever has the bigger fund. 20VC built a $400M fund off a podcast. a16z speedrun calls itself a media company. This isn't arrogance. I've watched what moves the needle for brands up close. Content isn't marketing for a fund. It IS the deal flow engine. We broke down the entire gap into a free playbook what the top funds do, what everyone else gets wrong, and the exact system to fix it. Comment "playbook" and it's in your inbox.

Without AI, a lot of 2025’s VC rounds would quietly disappear. Today fundraising isn’t about building companies, it’s about riding the narrative. ₹20 crore Series A easily becomes ₹100 crore once you add: > AI in the pitch deck > OpenAI API integration > “ML-powered” in the tagline > Slide showing TAM multiplied by “AI adoption curve” Last month, a founder told me they added “AI-powered” to their deck. Revenue didn’t change, product didn’t change. Just the pitch. Three weeks later, they closed at 2x the valuation. The irony? Mega-rounds are up. Mid-stage deals disappeared. But most founders are chasing capital, not building businesses. The VC landscape in 2025 revealed something uncomfortable: fewer companies captured most of the capital. AI dominated every conversation. Series A and B rounds became endangered. Capital concentrated at the top. The middle vanished. 2 years of AI hype. 5 years to figure out what actually works.

Expired: listening to podcasts Tired: reading podcast transcripts Wired: AI summaries of podcasts (feeding podcast transcripts to LLMs and prompting for a granular summary) (too many podcasts to consume, so little time!) The second order effects of 1.5x-2x playback was that most tech / VC podcasts got longer (75-120mins now), as hosts anticipated that most people will listen at 1.5-2x, and the second order impact of AI parsing is that I fear podcasts will get even longer. What needs to be built 1/ Transcription needs to get better at identifying who is speaking. Right now, unless you get a manually edited transcript (How I Write, Dwarkesh, Colossus, Cheeky Pint) it is hard to know who is speaking sometimes. Even more painful when it is a multi-guest format. 2/ AI summary in video snippets format. Parse a Dwarkesh video and give me 10 key moments that effectively summarise the show.

indian vc funds are still 7 years behind the usa on content. a16z started treating content like infrastructure in 2009. full media team, studios, named hosts. they made content to win deals before anyone else gets a meeting. india? one podcast and a guy cutting clips on the side. ~5-8% of us firms run real content ops. in india it's 1-2%. about 4-5x behind. but here's the thing nobody says. india isn't behind on distribution. our short-form reach is ahead of the us. the pipes are better, clippers are cheap, the audience is already watching. the funds just aren't using any of it. so the gap isn't demand or reach. it's production. indian funds have all the raw material - founders, deals, access nobody else has - and no system to turn it into content. the day a fund figures out it can turn its access into hundreds of clips a month without building a media team, the gap closes overnight. the question isn't whether indian funds get into content. it's which one wakes up before its competitor does.

Participation rights is one of those terms that sounds technical but directly affects how much money you make when you exit. When investors have participation rights, they get their money back first, and then they also participate in whatever’s left based on their ownership percentage. Here’s the math: An investor puts in ₹10 crore for 20% of your company. You build for five years and sell for ₹100 crore. Without participation rights: They get ₹20 crore (their 20% share) With participation rights: • First, they get their ₹10 crore back • Then, they get 20% of the remaining ₹90 crore (another ₹18 crore) • Total: ₹28 crore instead of ₹20 crore That extra ₹8 crore comes out of what you and your team would have made. This is common in down rounds or risky deals where investors want extra protection. But if you’re raising in a normal market with decent traction, you should push back hard. It’s not just about the valuation you raise at. It’s about how much you actually take home when you exit. #Fundraising #TermSheet #Exits

Books that will help you understand startups, VC and tech a lot better: - Zero to One: Why competition is for losers - Hard Things about Hard Things: Reality of running a startup - Power Law: Why VC works the way it does - Alex Ferguson: How to manage stars and egos - Shoe Dog: How to start a disruptive brand from scratch - VC: How risk capital started with whaling expeditions - Golden Tap: Starting up in India is both exciting and hard - Like, Share and Subscribe: How YouTube became the machine it did - Big Billion Startup: Why Flipkart's story was not as easy as it seems - Innovator's Dilemma: How to spot a disruptive company before anyone - Matchmakers: Why platforms like FB, GOOG and AMZN are closer than you think - Bad Blood: When startup dreams evolve into fraud - Steve Jobs: Why confrontation drove the biggest innovator of this century - The Thinking Machine: How Nvidia's overnight success took 35 years - No Rules Rules: How to build a startup culture Big gap on Indian startups and tech which I hope to fill, but these will take you very far ahead

A friend sat through a Tier 1 VC fund GP pitch this week. ₹4,000 crore corpus. The whole choreography, the watch, the deck, the soft confidence of a man who has never once had to do the math out loud, and something weird happened. Because of my friend’s family status, he’s sitting on some very rare tables. Some with hunger and others with brand. The truth that nobody in our industry will say out loud is that they are not the same game. The math doesn't care about pedigree. The spreadsheet has been screaming this for ten years and we keep pretending we can't hear it. So I wrote a short story. Two fund managers, one drawing room in Worli, fifty crore on the table, and the kind of arithmetic your Fund manager hopes you never learn to do. It's 55 slides. It's longer than what works on LinkedIn. I don't care. Some things deserve their full length. If you read it and recognise yourself in either Vikram or Kabir, or worse, in my friend Aryan. Then that is the whole point. Brand mat dekh. Math dekh. #VentureCapital #Fundraising #VC #LPPitches

The early-stage VC game in India is changing and LPs need to pay attention. Just read Inc42’s piece on how Indian LPs should approach early-stage VC now. The funding mindset is shifting, and it’s about time. For years, the focus was on big checks, big valuations, big exits. Growth at all costs. That worked when capital was cheap and exits were easy. Not anymore. LPs are realizing that early-stage isn’t just about backing the loudest pitch or the fastest-growing startup. It’s about fundamentals. Business models that actually work. Founders who can build sustainably. Here’s what this means for founders like us. Raising money is going to get harder. But that’s not a bad thing. It weeds out ideas that were only surviving on hype. The LPs who win will be the ones backing real businesses, not just stories. Patient capital. Long-term thinking. Backing founders who are in it for the marathon, not the sprint. This shift? It’s necessary.

India does not have a startup innovation problem. It has an originality problem disguised as entrepreneurship. We produce incredible founders, operators, and builders. Many go on to help build world-class companies globally. But at home, too much of the ecosystem still rewards what is safer, faster, and easier to sell. You can see it clearly in consumer hardware too. So many “hardware startups” are basically Canton Fair sourcing, white labelling, better packaging, and good marketing. That may build a business. But it does not build a real product company. And maybe that is the larger issue. We are getting very good at repackaging. Not as good at building from first principles. Until founders and capital both start backing originality, deep product, and long-term bets, we will keep celebrating Indian talent globally without building enough truly iconic global companies from India. #IndianStartups #IndianVC #ProductBuilding