The average Web3 VC pitch sounds like our pitch from three years ago. “We have deep relationships across the ecosystem.” “We add value beyond capital.” “Our network is the edge.” Not that any of these statements are false. Since everyone is saying that, it becomes virtually meaningless.
Liquidity providers (LPs) have heard this phrase so many times that it has lost its form. Yet somehow the industry continues to copy the same decks. Impressive logo slide. Ambiguous thesis. Three bullet points about “added value.” This is an achievement that doesn’t yet exist for most budding business owners. Repeat until funds are deposited or until no funds are deposited.
My TBV colleagues and I spent a lot of time really asking ourselves what we had that no one else had. As it turns out, the answer was a humble one: not much. So we created something different.
Here’s what the data is trying to tell the industry and what it continues to ignore. That means emerging managers are actually outperforming. Research consistently shows that they reach top quartile performance more often than established funds and deliver significantly higher returns on average. The benefits are real. The problem is entirely structural: emerging executives are unable to communicate to customers a clear reason to support their company over others, leading to money going to the brand rather than the potential.
When we built TBV, we decided that our pitch had to be a product, not a promise. The question we kept coming back to was, “What does the fund actually own?” It’s not about who knows. Connections cannot be defended. What will you build, what data will you generate, and what platform value will you bring to the founders? It’s defensible.
The answer we arrived at was events. We were looking for more than just networking and branding activities. We wanted to develop a human-centric trading engine. Web3 runs in meetings. Everyone already knows this. Founders travel thousands of miles to shake hands at side events. VCs pay huge sponsorship fees to gain access to people they could probably contact by email. ROI calculations are always vague at best. What we wanted to do was flip the model. Instead of paying for access, we built the environment. Own your data. Build relationships at scale and provide direct feedback on sourcing, diligence, and value for everyone involved.
In 2025, our event series attracted over 43,000 attendees and over 100 partners. It didn’t happen by accident, and it wasn’t just a marketing stunt. It was intentional infrastructure. Every interaction, every connection, every emerging trend discovered in these rooms feeds into TBX, our AI-driven trading engine. Events and funds are the same flywheel.
“We’re not alone in rethinking this. What’s interesting is how different the approaches are and how little they resemble traditional funds.”
Another venture capital firm, Outlier Ventures, came at this from a different angle. They’ve leaned into an accelerator model and built a real support platform around early-stage founders, rather than just writing checks and sitting on boards. The result is a fund with over 300 portfolio companies and a real reason for founders to choose it over other companies with higher AUM. The paradigm went in a completely different direction and became technical. They don’t just invest in protocols. They contribute to them. This kind of depth is really hard to recreate, and you can see that on LP.
What these models share, and what the next generation of interesting managers share, is that the fund itself is a product with utility beyond capital. The question is not, “How can I tell a better story?” The question is, “How do we structure the story to make it self-evident?”
Fortunately, there is more than one answer. The event model is useful for us. The accelerator model works for Outliers. Deep technical contributions contribute to the paradigm. What doesn’t work, what doesn’t really work, and what LPs are increasingly reluctant to pretend does work, is a pitch built on relationships that can’t be fully demonstrated and values that can’t be measured.
Web3 advances so quickly that administrators building the actual infrastructure today will be very difficult to replace later. If you’re still writing about your network three years from now, you’ll notice that the rooms around you are quietly emptying out. I’m really interested in seeing what other models will come out. Competition in this space is the best thing that can happen in the field if you are focused on actually doing something different.
