Every emerging manager gets asked the same question eventually, usually by an LP who has seen too many pitch decks: “Why do you exist, and what are you genuinely better at than everyone else?”

A thesis and a network are table stakes. Everyone has those. And in a world where founders can get further on less capital than ever before, and where the number of funds multiplied wildly a few years ago, table stakes aren't going to hold up much longer.

The funds that are going to matter are the ones that have built something irreplaceable beyond the checkbook.

This isn't a new idea. First Round Capital didn't rest on having a great platform — they looked around, saw that other funds were doing content, and decided to build one of the most important repositories of startup knowledge that exists. The First Round Review raised the bar for what "being helpful" even means—and a huge percentage of the founders that they back, as they’ve discovered, have been subscribed well in advance of ever pitching the firm. Similary Jason Lemkin didn't just throw a SaaS happy hour — he built SaaStr—the preeminent conference and community in the space, which is even its own business.

These aren't investors who did the minimum viable version of differentiation and called it a day. They went all the way.

The next generation is doing the same thing, and the pattern I keep noticing is that none of them started by asking how to differentiate their fund. They started by asking what problem founders in their space actually had — and then built the thing that solved it.

Sophie Purdom, who I interviewed about this last summer, noticed that nobody was rigorously tracking every transaction in the climate tech space. Not as a fund strategy, just as a genuine gap in how the industry understood itself. So she and her co-founder started doing it, newsletter by newsletter, for six years. That data became Sightline Climate, now a thirty plus-person company selling market intelligence to corporates, banks, and governments. The investing came later, almost as a natural consequence — founders sought her out because she understood their space better than almost anyone. She calls it "earned deal flow." The differentiation wasn't the plan. Solving the problem was the plan.

Vic Singh, a GP at RRE Ventures, is co-founder and CEO of Originalis, building what he describes as the operating system for venture capital. He started from the observation that venture is a craft business that somehow runs on file cabinets — unstructured data, non-repeatable processes, institutional knowledge that lives in people's heads and degrades every time someone leaves. The problem he's solving isn't abstract. It's the one he lives every day: how do you move fast enough to win a deal without cutting corners on the work that tells you whether you should? His board pushed back on tackling network intelligence specifically. He did it anyway, because he knew from experience that the signal you actually need — relationship strength, domain expertise, recency — has never lived in any database.

I went in depth around the problem in this interview here:

What's interesting is that you're seeing this problem get solved from both sides simultaneously — vendors like Vic who are also practitioners building for the industry, and firms building internally for themselves. Melody Koh at NextView recently stepped back from full-time deal flow to focus on building the firm's own AI and data infrastructure internally. When I asked her why it had to be her and not an outside hire, she was direct about it: workflow problems belong to the people actually in the workflow. Someone who has never decided whether to spend a partner's time on a company can't build tools that make that decision better. You can buy scaffolding. You can't buy the judgment about which problems are worth solving.

USV took a different path to the same destination. Spencer Yen and the USV team spent three months building a team of internal agents — Arthur for deal analysis, Ellie monitoring investment emails, Sally for meeting transcripts, Connor tracking the calendar. What started as a simple meeting recap email became, incrementally, the foundation for how the firm organizes everything it knows. The problem they were solving wasn't "how do we become an AI-native firm." It was simpler: how do we make sure the context from our conversations doesn't get lost?

Everything else followed from that.

Mike MacCombie has built 146 communities across cities, stages, sectors, and functions. Not because community is a good differentiator on a pitch deck, but because he understands from a behavioral science background that the highest-trust networks are the ones that compound — and that founders in his verticals need access to each other as much as they need access to capital.

The thing worth noticing is that none of these people are building to impress LPs. They're building because they identified something founders or the industry genuinely needed, and they had a specific ability to provide it. The fund differentiation is real, but it's a byproduct.

Which brings me to the question I'd ask any investor who's reading this: what problem are you solving for founders that nobody else is solving? Not what makes your fund unique on paper. What do founders in your space actually need that they can't get anywhere else — and are you the person to build it?

It’s something I try to help my coaching clients—VCs and those trying to break in—think about.

If you don't have a clear answer to that, that's where to start.

I've been doing a lot of talks with students and founders related to my new book, Founder Unfriendly: What Investors Won't Tell You About Getting Funded which is now available for pre-order. (If you enjoy my writing here, please consider buying it now. If you e-mail the receipt to founderunfriendly@next.nyc, I’ll invite you to this amazing AMA series we have with founders from Datadog, Brigit, Zerohash and more…)

Here's how the post-talk networking usually goes: a minority of the people follow up with a LinkedIn invitation, and that's pretty much going to be it. They'll never follow up again. Ten years from now, either one of us will notice the other as a potentially important connection that seems valuable, but we have no idea how we're connected.

That's not a relationship. That's network lint that just gets in the way of a search to find a useful bridge to someone.

There’s a better way to establish yourself as a three-dimensional, memorable professional that adds value and offers a connection from a position of strength, no matter how down the ladder you feel.

I Will Follow

First, LinkedIn has a Follow button. It's one-directional. Use it. Follow me and set a notification to get my posts as they come in. You don't need my permission and you don't need me to accept anything.

Then, engage. How about a generous repost of my book announcement on LinkedIn?

“I just had the chance to hear Charlie speak to my class and given how much I learned in just an hour, I’m excited to dive into his book for founders.”

(Or, you know, your own version of that…)

That's your baseline. It costs you nothing but a little time and attention and it keeps the door open. No one is going to find it annoying.

Message in a Bottle

Soon after the talk, email me. Not a LinkedIn DM — email. You can get my e-mail. That’s probably one of the easier things you’ll figure out in your career.

Tell me what specifically you took away from what I said. Not "great talk," but this specific thing you said changed how I think about X. Tell me something about you, briefly. And then — this is the part almost nobody does — offer something.

But what? What’s a student or young professional have to offer? That’s where people get stuck.

The trick: have something ready before you even know who you're going to meet.

The best version of this isn't scrambling to find something useful after the fact. It's walking into any talk, any panel, any networking event with an offer already in your pocket. Something you can deploy for almost anyone—or at least a way of figuring it out quickly.

If you run a student podcast or a newsletter that goes to your marketing club, that's an asset. You can offer almost any founder or investor a platform, however small. If you're involved in a student org that could serve as a test group, you can offer user research — put an app or product in front of 20 people in your demo and send back what you heard. Those are standing offers. You bring them everywhere.

I Would Walk 500 Miles

But even if you have none of that, you have time and a willingness to do legwork that busy people won't do themselves. That's more valuable than you think. Say you meet someone building a proptech company that sells to real estate management firms. You probably don't know any property managers. But you could spend a week emailing 20 of them, introducing yourself as a student researching what technology they use in their operations. Some ignore you. One or two respond. And now you've done something the founder couldn't easily do — gotten a cold inbound from a potential customer — and you have something real to hand them.

Whoever you meet or listen to on a panel or podcast, if you can't figure out who the type of person is that they would accept a connection to any time from anyone, then you haven't understood exactly what this person does for a living and how they earn or what motivates them. You have to ask enough questions or do enough research (PS - AI can be a great partner for this) to understand the type of lead they find indispensable.

This kind of thing is a skill, and the best networkers I know started developing it early.

Ali Hamed, one of the best fundraisers I've come across, was doing this kind of legwork as a student — figuring out what connection someone needed and working hard to make it happen before anyone asked. He asked me for an introduction to one of First Round Capital's portfolio companies. Later on, he forwarded me a note from that founder thanking him for the valuable introduction to a potential customer he had made.

Mitchell Green, founder of Lead Edge Capital, used to blind-email people to each other at the beginning of his career when he was long on chutzpah (look it up), short on connections. I don't necessarily recommend it, but he was uncannily good at it. He once connected the founder of a direct-sales jewelry company to the COO of Avon.

When the founder asked how she knew Mitch, the COO said she didn't — but that he'd sworn she absolutely had to meet this person.

It was, in fact, a fantastic connection.

You don't have to go full Mitch, but I'll tell you one thing: most emerging VCs will take a warm intro to a real family office that's interested in venture. Almost any founder will take a meeting with a potential customer. The threshold for a useful connection is lower than you think, and the willingness to make one — cold, unbidden, with no guarantee it lands — is rarer than it should be.

Here's why this matters beyond the immediate relationship you're trying to build: if you can't figure out how to create value for someone when you're just starting out, with no title and no track record, you're going to have a hard time moving up. Every job you want assumes you have this skill. The people hiring you are banking on it. The question is whether you wait until you're hired to prove it, or whether you show it now — before anyone's taken a chance on you.

There's one more move before the LinkedIn request.

The heartbeat email.

This is exactly what it sounds like: a short, periodic update on what you're working on, thinking about, and learning. Once a quarter is plenty. The pitch to someone you've been orbiting is simple — I send this to a small group of people whose feedback I value. No pressure to respond, just wanted to keep you in the loop as I figure things out. That's it. No ask. No agenda. Just you, showing up consistently, as a real person with a point of view and a trajectory.

If they don’t like it, they can unsubscribe. That’s pretty much the worst that can happen, because if you never reach out, you wouldn’t have had a relationship anyway, so you’re not losing anything.

There are lots of simple tools out there link Mail Merge from Digital Inspiration that allow you to send this out. Claude Cowork can queue this up as individual notes for you as well, even tailoring them to the person.

If someone glances at it and something catches their eye, great. If it sits in their inbox unread, fine. The point is that over time, you stop being the person they vaguely remember from that talk once. You become someone they've heard from. Someone they've seen engage. Someone who's been quietly building in their peripheral vision.

Then you send the LinkedIn invite. By that point, you're not a stranger asking to be let in. You're a memorable, helpful, three-dimensional human being — exactly the kind of person worth having in a network.

You can tailor this in a way that feels authentic to you, as long you don’t end up in the worst case scenario—rediscovering this person ten years from now when you try to fundraise for your startup, realizing that you could have been slowing building up a connection with this person over time in a non-transactional way, but instead you have to go in cold.

You can find more advice like this in my book! Get it now!