Web3 Venture Capitalists Struggle to Stand Out

The typical pitch from a Web3 venture capital firm has become all too familiar. Claims of deep connections and valuable networks are made, but these assertions have lost their impact due to their ubiquity. The result is that these claims have become essentially meaningless. Liquidity providers have grown weary of hearing the same pitch repeated, with its obligatory logo slide, vague investment thesis, and generic "value-add" bullet points. The track record of most emerging managers is nonexistent, leaving them to repeat the same pitch ad nauseam in the hopes of securing funding. My colleagues and I at TBV spent considerable time reflecting on what truly sets us apart from others. The answer was humbling: very little. This realization prompted us to create something distinct. A crucial insight that the industry has consistently overlooked is that emerging managers tend to outperform established funds. Studies have shown that they are more likely to achieve top-quartile performance and deliver higher average returns. The issue lies not with the potential of emerging managers, but with their inability to effectively communicate their unique value to clients. As a result, capital tends to flow towards established brands rather than promising newcomers. When we founded TBV, we decided that our pitch had to be tangible, rather than a mere promise. We focused on what our fund could realistically own and control, rather than who we knew. Connections, no matter how valuable, are not a defensible advantage. What has our fund built, what data has it generated, and what value does it create for founders? These are the factors that truly matter. Our answer was to create events. We weren't interested in merely hosting networking opportunities or branding exercises. Instead, we sought to develop a people-centric deal engine. The Web3 ecosystem is driven by conferences, with founders traveling vast distances to attend side events and VCs paying substantial sponsorship fees for access to people they could have easily reached via email. The return on investment for these events has always been unclear. We wanted to flip this model on its head: rather than paying for access, we would create the environment, own the data, and foster relationships on a large scale, feeding them directly into our sourcing, diligence, and value creation processes. In 2025, our event series attracted over 43,000 attendees and more than 100 partners. This was not an accident, nor was it a mere marketing stunt. It was a deliberate effort to build infrastructure. Every interaction, connection, and emerging trend spotted at these events feeds into TBX, our AI-driven deal engine. The events and the fund are two components of the same flywheel. We are not alone in rethinking the traditional venture capital model. What is interesting is the diversity of approaches and how few of them resemble a traditional fund. Outlier Ventures, for example, has adopted an accelerator model, providing genuine support to early-stage founders rather than simply writing checks and attending board meetings. The result is a fund with over 300 portfolio companies and a compelling reason for founders to choose them over others. Paradigm has taken a different approach, focusing on technical contributions to protocols in which they invest. This level of depth is genuinely difficult to replicate, and liquidity providers can see the value. What these models share is that the fund itself is a product with utility beyond capital. The question is no longer "how do we tell a better story?" but "how do we build something that makes the story self-evident?" The good news is that there is no one-size-fits-all answer. Our events model works for us, while the accelerator model works for Outlier and the technical contribution model works for Paradigm. What does not work, and has never truly worked, is a pitch based entirely on intangible relationships and unmeasurable value. As the Web3 ecosystem evolves at a rapid pace, managers who build real infrastructure now will be difficult to displace in the future. Those still relying on pitches about their networks in a few years will find that the room has emptied out around them. I am genuinely curious to see what other innovative models emerge. Competition in this space, when focused on doing something different, is the best thing that could happen to it.