The Streaming Wars of Venture Capital
Why narrative became table stakes and how purposeful storytelling becomes a moat OR When venture capital stopped distributing deals and started producing originals
The streaming wars did not start because Hollywood got more creative.
They started because distribution stopped being enough.
Netflix used to win by shipping DVDs. Then by being the easiest place to watch. Then by licensing everybody else’s best work. And then the day came when licensing was no longer a strategy. It was a dependency.
So Netflix did the only rational thing.
It became a studio.
That evolution has been stuck in my head because venture capital is going through a version of the same transition. Founders feel it. LPs feel it. Operators definitely feel it.
It shows up as a question I keep hearing, sometimes said directly and sometimes implied:
Why does it feel like every VC is now a social media influencer, a PR firm, a media company, or a streamer?
That question is not cynical. It is perceptive.
Narrative became table stakes. The way you do it became the moat.
A friend told me a story recently that made this painfully concrete.
He built a podcast miniseries out of spite after losing a hot deal.
The story goes: he sent a term sheet to a founder. The founder passed. Later, the founder admitted something that sounded harsh but was probably honest.
“I didn’t really see your expertise online.”
My friend has real operating experience. Real credibility. Real pull in his corner of the world.
But in a market where everybody is busy and everyone is sorting quickly, “real” is not always visible.
That is the new problem.
Narrative is no longer decoration. It is legibility. It is searchability. It is trust, compressed.
And once narrative becomes table stakes, the differentiator shifts.
Not whether you produce content.
Whether your narrative is purposeful enough to become a moat.
But you have to try to find out. The same investor friend once told me that a peer VC once told him that “the optimal level of cringe is not zero.”
