Investors: What Have You Built for Me Lately?

Every emerging manager gets asked the same question eventually, usually by an LP who has seen too many pitch decks: “Why do you exist, and what are you genuinely better at than everyone else?”

A thesis and a network are table stakes. Everyone has those. And in a world where founders can get further on less capital than ever before, and where the number of funds multiplied wildly a few years ago, table stakes aren't going to hold up much longer.

The funds that are going to matter are the ones that have built something irreplaceable beyond the checkbook.

This isn't a new idea. First Round Capital didn't rest on having a great platform — they looked around, saw that other funds were doing content, and decided to build one of the most important repositories of startup knowledge that exists. The First Round Review raised the bar for what "being helpful" even means—and a huge percentage of the founders that they back, as they’ve discovered, have been subscribed well in advance of ever pitching the firm. Similary Jason Lemkin didn't just throw a SaaS happy hour — he built SaaStr—the preeminent conference and community in the space, which is even its own business.

These aren't investors who did the minimum viable version of differentiation and called it a day. They went all the way.

The next generation is doing the same thing, and the pattern I keep noticing is that none of them started by asking how to differentiate their fund. They started by asking what problem founders in their space actually had — and then built the thing that solved it.

Sophie Purdom, who I interviewed about this last summer, noticed that nobody was rigorously tracking every transaction in the climate tech space. Not as a fund strategy, just as a genuine gap in how the industry understood itself. So she and her co-founder started doing it, newsletter by newsletter, for six years. That data became Sightline Climate, now a thirty plus-person company selling market intelligence to corporates, banks, and governments. The investing came later, almost as a natural consequence — founders sought her out because she understood their space better than almost anyone. She calls it "earned deal flow." The differentiation wasn't the plan. Solving the problem was the plan.

Vic Singh, a GP at RRE Ventures, is co-founder and CEO of Originalis, building what he describes as the operating system for venture capital. He started from the observation that venture is a craft business that somehow runs on file cabinets — unstructured data, non-repeatable processes, institutional knowledge that lives in people's heads and degrades every time someone leaves. The problem he's solving isn't abstract. It's the one he lives every day: how do you move fast enough to win a deal without cutting corners on the work that tells you whether you should? His board pushed back on tackling network intelligence specifically. He did it anyway, because he knew from experience that the signal you actually need — relationship strength, domain expertise, recency — has never lived in any database.

I went in depth around the problem in this interview here:

What's interesting is that you're seeing this problem get solved from both sides simultaneously — vendors like Vic who are also practitioners building for the industry, and firms building internally for themselves. Melody Koh at NextView recently stepped back from full-time deal flow to focus on building the firm's own AI and data infrastructure internally. When I asked her why it had to be her and not an outside hire, she was direct about it: workflow problems belong to the people actually in the workflow. Someone who has never decided whether to spend a partner's time on a company can't build tools that make that decision better. You can buy scaffolding. You can't buy the judgment about which problems are worth solving.

USV took a different path to the same destination. Spencer Yen and the USV team spent three months building a team of internal agents — Arthur for deal analysis, Ellie monitoring investment emails, Sally for meeting transcripts, Connor tracking the calendar. What started as a simple meeting recap email became, incrementally, the foundation for how the firm organizes everything it knows. The problem they were solving wasn't "how do we become an AI-native firm." It was simpler: how do we make sure the context from our conversations doesn't get lost?

Everything else followed from that.

Mike MacCombie has built 146 communities across cities, stages, sectors, and functions. Not because community is a good differentiator on a pitch deck, but because he understands from a behavioral science background that the highest-trust networks are the ones that compound — and that founders in his verticals need access to each other as much as they need access to capital.

The thing worth noticing is that none of these people are building to impress LPs. They're building because they identified something founders or the industry genuinely needed, and they had a specific ability to provide it. The fund differentiation is real, but it's a byproduct.

Which brings me to the question I'd ask any investor who's reading this: what problem are you solving for founders that nobody else is solving? Not what makes your fund unique on paper. What do founders in your space actually need that they can't get anywhere else — and are you the person to build it?

It’s something I try to help my coaching clients—VCs and those trying to break in—think about.

If you don't have a clear answer to that, that's where to start.