The average Web3 VC pitch sounds like ours three years ago. “We have deep relationships across the ecosystem.” “We add value beyond capital.” “Our network is our advantage.” It’s not that any of these statements are lies; it’s that everyone says them, which makes them effectively meaningless.
Liquidity providers (LPs) have heard this pitch so many times that the words have lost form. And yet somehow the industry just keeps photocopying the same tire. Impressive logo slide. Unclear thesis. Three bullet points on “added value”. A track record which for most new managers does not yet exist. Repeat until funded, or not.
My colleagues and I at TBV spent a lot of time asking ourselves what we really had that no one else had. In the end, the answer was humiliating: not much. So we built something else.
Here’s what data keeps trying to tell the industry, and what the industry keeps ignoring: new leaders actually do better. Studies consistently show that they achieve top quartile results more often than established funds and deliver significantly higher returns on average. The benefit is real. The problem is entirely structural – new managers cannot communicate a clear reason to customers to support them over others, so capital flows to brands rather than potential.
When we built TBV, we decided that the track should be a product, not a promise. The question we kept coming back to was: what does a foundation actually own? Not who it knows. Connections are not safe. What has it built, what data has it generated and what platform value does it create for the founders? It is justifiable.
The answer we landed on was events. We weren’t just looking for a networking game or branding exercise. We wanted to develop a human-centric deal engine. Web3 runs on conferences. Everyone already knows that. Founders travel thousands of miles to shake hands at side events. VCs pay huge sponsorship fees for access to people they probably could have reached via email. The ROI calculation has always been unclear at best. What we wanted to do was flip the model: instead of paying for access, build the environment. Own the data. Create the relationships at scale and feed them directly back into sourcing, diligence and value for everyone involved.
By 2025, our event series attracted over 43,000 attendees and more than 100 partners. It didn’t happen by accident and it wasn’t just a marketing stunt. It was deliberate infrastructure. Every interaction, every connection, every new trend seen in these rooms is fed into TBX, our AI-powered deal engine. The events and the foundation are the same flywheel.
“We’re not the only ones rethinking this. What’s interesting is how different the approaches are and how few of them look like a traditional fund.”
Another VC firm, Outlier Ventures, figured this out from a different angle. They leaned into the accelerator model – building a real platform of support around early-stage founders instead of just writing checks and showing up to board meetings. The result is a fund with over 300 portfolio companies and a real reason for founders to choose them over others with just more AUM. Paradigm went in a completely different direction: they became technical. They don’t just invest in protocols; they contribute to them. That kind of depth is really hard to replicate, and LPs can see that.
What these models share, and what the next generation of interesting managers will share, is that the fund itself is a utility product beyond capital. The question is not “how do we tell a better story?” It’s “how do we build something that makes the story obvious?”
The good news is that there isn’t just one answer. The event model works for us. The accelerator model works for Outlier. Deep technical contribution works for Paradigm. What doesn’t work, what never really worked, and what LPs are increasingly unwilling to pretend works, is a pitch built entirely on conditions you can’t show and values you can’t measure.
Web3 is moving fast enough that the leaders who build the right infrastructure now will be very hard to displace later. Those still writing decks about their networks three years from now will find that space is quietly emptying out around them. I’m really curious to see what other models emerge. Competition in this space, when it’s actually focused on doing something different, is the best thing that could happen to it.
