Partner Thought Leadership

A venture firm competes for founders, and founders choose partners before they choose firms. So a firm's reputation is really the sum of six or seven individual reputations — and those live on personal accounts belonging to people with no time to run them.

A venture firm competes for founders, and founders choose partners before they choose firms. So a firm's reputation is really the sum of six or seven individual reputations — and those live on personal accounts belonging to people with no time to run them.

The firm's own channel was behind its peers. Against a16z at 6% engagement across 300,000 followers, and Sequoia at half a million, Lightspeed sat at 2.4% and under 90,000 followers — posting at a reasonable cadence and getting a fraction of the response. An audit also found more than a quarter of its Twitter following was fake, above the median for accounts its size.

One partner named the real problem himself, unprompted: he wanted to post more, but didn't have time to scan the news for anything worth saying.

The temptation with executive ghostwriting is to build one voice and distribute it. That fails immediately, because the audience is founders and founders can tell.

So the work started as research. A fixed intake for each partner — personality, tone, genuine areas of expertise, subjects to avoid, how personal they were willing to get, whether they wanted emojis at all. Then a separate interview guide aimed at their thinking rather than their style: what a particular win or loss had done to their investment strategy, what they expected the next decade to look like, how you build a value system across a large firm.

Out of that came a voice specification per partner, and they were not similar. One needed simple copy that worked identically across platforms. One needed help sounding like a team rather than an individual. One had good ideas, knew they weren't a writer, and wanted that owned rather than papered over. One wanted coaching rather than finished drafts. Getting those differences right is most of the craft.

Around it, house rules everyone shared, sector messaging so a personal post still laddered to a firm position, and delivery mechanics negotiated individually — one partner wanted email rather than documents, before 10am, because that was when he actually posted.

Underneath ran paid, targeted by affinity rather than demographics: followers of specific technology publications, listeners of specific venture podcasts, followers of specific rival firms and investors. If the goal is founders, the reliable way to find them is what founders already read.

What actually happened

Very little got published.

The system worked. The drafts were good, the voices were right, the recommendations arrived on time in the format each partner had asked for. And most of them still didn't post.

That is worth saying plainly, because it's the most useful thing I know about this kind of programme. Executive thought leadership doesn't stall on content quality. It stalls on trust and habit — on whether a busy person believes a draft actually sounds like them, and on whether publishing has become part of their week rather than another thing someone is asking them for.

The fix isn't a better process. It's a relationship with each person, built slowly, usually one conversation at a time. We had started that work when my involvement ended. Anyone selling you an executive programme that doesn't budget for it is selling you drafts.