How VC Firms Win Competitive Rounds Before the Term Sheet, With Content
Every venture investor knows the specific feeling of losing a round they really wanted, right, the founder was great, the fund moved quickly, the terms were competitive, the partner meeting went well, and then the founder picked someone else and, when you ask why, the answer is something vague and personal, they just felt more aligned with the other partner, or they had been following that investor's thinking for a while, or a couple of founders they trusted had spoken highly of them, and none of those reasons had anything to do with the term sheet.
That is the part of competitive rounds that content can genuinely change, because the founder's sense of who they feel aligned with is usually formed long before the round, and a lot of it is formed by what the investors have published. I run a content and distribution studio, and Pixel Samy has an investing side, so I have watched this dynamic from a few angles, and I want to break down how content actually wins rounds, what founders look at when they are deciding, and what a fund can do before and during a round to make sure its partners are the ones founders feel they already know.
What do founders actually check when choosing between investors?
More than most funds realise, and a surprising amount of it is public.
When a founder has more than one offer on similar terms, they start doing their own diligence on the investors, and it looks roughly like this. They talk to founders in each fund's portfolio, especially ones who had a hard time, to hear how the investor behaved when things went badly. They look at the partner's public presence, what they write and say, how they talk about founders, whether their thinking about the founder's market seems genuinely informed. They look at what the fund has published in their space. And they ask their own network, other founders and angels, what they have heard. By the time a founder is weighing term sheets, most of these impressions are already formed, which is why the round is so often decided before the paperwork arrives.
Two of those four inputs, the partner's public presence and the fund's published thinking in the founder's space, are things the fund controls completely. The other two, what portfolio founders say and what the network has heard, are shaped over time by how the fund behaves and by how visible that behaviour is. Content touches all four.
What content wins rounds before they start?
The content that makes a founder feel the partner understands their world, and that shows how the partner behaves when things get hard.
The most effective single type, in my experience, is content about the founder's specific market, written or recorded by the partner who would lead the deal. A founder building in a particular space who finds that a partner has been publishing thoughtfully about that space for a year, including the hard problems and the open questions, forms a strong impression of that partner's genuine interest and knowledge. That impression is almost impossible to create in a single pitch meeting, and it is exactly what tips a close decision. It is the same principle that makes thought leadership for PE and VC firms valuable, applied to the moment it matters most.
The second type is honest content about how the fund behaves, and honesty is the operative word. Bessemer Venture Partners has for years published an anti-portfolio, a public list of great companies it passed on, and part of why people remember it is that it is disarmingly candid about the firm's own misses. Most funds will not go that far, but the principle is powerful. A partner who talks openly about a mistake they made with a founder, or a deal they got wrong, earns a kind of trust that a polished showcase of wins never will, because it tells the founder how that partner will behave when things are not going well.
The third is portfolio founders speaking for themselves. A founder deciding between investors trusts other founders more than any investor, and a fund whose portfolio founders appear in its content, talking candidly about what working with the fund was actually like, gives the deciding founder something close to a reference call before they have asked for one. This needs care, because anything that reads as a testimonial about results can raise compliance questions depending on the fund's status, which I cover in the SEC Marketing Rule and fund content, but founders talking about the working relationship rather than returns is usually where the real value is anyway.
In a close round, the founder is not comparing term sheets. They are comparing people, and they have usually made up their mind about the people long before the term sheets arrive.
What should a fund send during a competitive round?
Something tailored and genuinely useful, rather than a generic pitch deck or a list of portfolio logos.
The personal video when terms are close is one of the most effective things I know of, and very few funds do it. Two or three minutes from the lead partner, recorded specifically for that founder, talking about the company's actual situation and how the partner would help in the first year, lands very differently from another email. It is quick to make, and it is the kind of gesture founders remember and mention to other founders, which feeds straight back into the network effect behind every future round.
The ability to send tailored existing content during a round depends entirely on having built the body of work beforehand. A fund that has spent a year publishing on a range of markets and founder problems can pull the three most relevant pieces for any founder within an hour. A fund starting from zero has only its deck. That is why I think of content as an investment that pays out in competitive rounds, and why the long, patient work described in venture capital content marketing matters so much.
Who should be creating this content?
The partners who lead deals, primarily, because founders are choosing a person, and supported by the platform team and the fund's portfolio founders.
A founder choosing between investors is choosing the specific partner who will sit on their board, so the content that wins rounds needs to come from the partners themselves. That does not mean every partner needs to become a prolific creator. It means each partner who leads deals should have a consistent, visible presence in the markets they invest in, built with as little of their time as possible. The platform team, where the fund has one, can do a lot of the work of turning partners' thinking and portfolio resources into public content, which I describe in content strategy for VC platform teams. And the podcast is often the most efficient format of all, because it combines partner presence, portfolio founder voices and relationship building in a single recording, which is covered in VC firm podcast strategy.
Does this work for smaller funds?
It works better for smaller funds, in a sense, because they have the most to gain from winning on relationship rather than on brand or check size.
A small fund or a solo GP competing against a large, famous firm for a round is at a disadvantage on almost every visible dimension, except one. They can have a deeper, more specific and more personal presence in the founder's market than the large firm's partners, who are often spread across many sectors. A founder who has been following a small fund's GP on their exact market for a year may well choose that GP over a bigger name, precisely because they feel understood. That is the core argument in solo GP content strategy.
How do you know content is winning rounds?
By asking, consistently, and by tracking the answer against your competitive win rate over time.
The simplest method is a question in every first meeting with a founder, how did you first come across us, and a note in the CRM when a founder mentions specific content. Over a year or two, a fund doing this will see whether the founders who arrived through content convert at a higher rate in competitive situations, and in my experience they do. The other signal is harder to measure but easy to notice, which is founders in the first meeting referring to things the partner has said publicly, because that is the moment you know the relationship started before the round did.
How Pixel Samy helps funds build this
The content that wins rounds has to be consistent, specific and genuinely from the partners, and producing that without eating the partners' time is exactly what we are built for. We are a boutique content and distribution studio in Dubai, close to 50 people in-house and founder-led, and the part of our work that matters most here is that one recording with a partner becomes a month of content across YouTube, LinkedIn, X and a podcast feed, so a partner can have a real presence in their markets on a few hours a month. We have tested our video and clip formats on our own seven channels, each over 100,000 subscribers, before recommending them, and our editors handle more than 400 podcast episodes a month, which matters because so much round-winning content starts as a conversation. And because Pixel Samy invests as well, I understand exactly why a partner cares about the founder's decision more than about any metric. I will tell you clearly which parts of this we have done before and which we would be building for the first time with you.
For the YouTube side, our sister studio ClickTheory designs the packaging, and its guide on packaging a VC firm's YouTube channel is a practical starting point. The guides on positioning as the go-to firm and content marketing for PE and VC firms fill in the wider picture.
If you have lost a round recently to an investor the founder said they just felt more aligned with, send me a note and I will show you what a year of content on your markets would look like, you see what I mean here. So yeah. That's my way of saying it.