Building a repeatable media programme for a portfolio of founders

A venture fund can help a founder with capital, introductions and advice. There is another problem that tends to become more obvious as the company grows: people still need to know the founder exists.

Blockchain Founders Fund works with founders building across blockchain, fintech and emerging technology. Its portfolio contains companies solving very different problems, at different stages, for different markets.

That made the visibility challenge interesting.

There was no single BFF story we could package and repeat across every founder. Each company had its own market. Each founder had different expertise. Some stories were immediately easy to understand. Others needed more work before they made sense outside the founder’s immediate industry.

Our job was to create media opportunities across that portfolio without making every founder sound like they had been handed the same PR playbook.

The Challenge

Portfolio visibility has a different set of problems from promoting a single company.

With one founder, you can spend time developing a narrative, researching the market around them and building outreach around a handful of strong ideas.

With a portfolio, the variables multiply quickly.

One founder might be building financial infrastructure. Another might be working on identity, payments, developer tooling or consumer technology. Their experience levels differ. Their media experience differs. The audiences they need to reach differ too.

Sending all of them to the same collection of podcasts would have been easy.

It also would have defeated the point.

The programme needed enough structure to work repeatedly while leaving enough room for each founder to sound like themselves.

That became the central challenge of the engagement.

We Treated Every Founder as a Separate Story

Being part of the same portfolio did not mean sharing the same narrative.

Before outreach, we looked at what made each founder worth talking to independently of Blockchain Founders Fund.

What were they building?

What problem had they spent enough time with to understand unusually well?

What could they explain that would actually be useful to someone listening?

Where did their personal experience create an interesting angle?

What was happening in their market that made the conversation timely?

The answers shaped how we positioned each founder.

This prevented the programme from becoming a stream of generic founder interviews built around company descriptions.

The portfolio gave us access to the founders.

Their individual stories gave us something worth pitching.

Finding the Conversation Before Finding the Podcast

One principle carried through the entire programme: we did not want to begin with a database.

Starting with a giant list of podcasts would have made the process faster at first and much worse afterwards.

Instead, we developed the founder's story first.

Once we understood the conversations a founder could credibly lead, finding the right shows became much easier.

A fintech founder did not simply need a fintech podcast. They needed a host whose audience cared about the particular problem the company was solving.

A Web3 founder did not automatically belong on every blockchain show.

The match needed to work at the level of the conversation.

That meant researching hosts, previous guests, recurring subjects, audience fit and the kinds of episodes each show actually produced.

Sometimes that gave us an obvious match.

Sometimes it told us not to pitch a show at all.

Both outcomes were useful.

The Outreach Had to Sound Like the Founder

There is a particular kind of email that podcast hosts receive constantly.

A founder is “revolutionising” an industry. Their company is “disrupting” something. They have an “incredible journey.” They would “love to share their insights with your audience.”

You can change the company name and send the same email again.

We wanted to stay away from that.

The pitch needed to tell the host why this founder, with this experience, could have a conversation their audience might actually want to hear.

Sometimes the company itself was the interesting part.

Sometimes it was a problem the founder had encountered while building it.

Sometimes the strongest angle came from a broader shift happening around their market.

The pitch changed because the founder changed.

That sounds obvious. At portfolio scale, it is remarkably easy to lose.

Then Came the Operational Work

Getting a host interested is only one part of a media programme.

Someone still has to manage what happens afterwards.

Introductions turn into email threads. Email threads turn into scheduling. Calendars move. Hosts ask for biographies, headshots and talking points. Founders become busy. Recording times change. Someone misses an email. Another person needs a reminder.

Multiply that across several founders and several podcasts and the administrative layer becomes substantial.

Nodè Narrative became the coordination point between founders and hosts.

We handled outreach, follow-ups and scheduling, kept track of opportunities and worked through the inevitable friction that comes with coordinating independent people across different companies and time zones.

Some founders responded immediately.

Others needed follow-ups.

Some opportunities progressed quickly.

Others took considerably longer.

That is what real media work looks like.

There is rarely a neat straight line from pitch to publication.

The system needed to keep moving anyway.

The Programme Started Producing Founder Stories

Among the founders who moved through the programme were companies such as Kredete and Uniblock.

The important part wasn't simply putting another founder behind a microphone.

Each booking created a place where the founder could explain their company through a longer conversation than most marketing formats allow.

That is especially valuable for companies working in markets where the problem needs context.

A homepage has to compress.

An advertisement has to interrupt.

A social post has to earn attention quickly.

A long-form conversation has room for the founder to explain why the company exists, what they have learned about the market and how they think about the problem they are trying to solve.

That was the medium we were trying to use well.

What Changed When We Stopped Thinking One Founder at a Time

Working across the BFF portfolio exposed a useful distinction.

There are parts of founder visibility that should never be standardised.

A founder's story is one of them.

Their opinions, experience, market context and reasons for building cannot be pulled from a template without flattening the very things that make them interesting.

The infrastructure around that story is different.

Research can have a process.

Media qualification can have a process.

Outreach can have a process.

Follow-ups can have a process.

Scheduling can have a process.

Opportunity tracking can have a process.

Once we separated those two things, the programme became easier to understand.

Personalise the story. Systemise the machinery around it.

That principle allowed us to work across founders without turning them into interchangeable spokespeople.

What the Engagement Became

At the beginning, the assignment could have been described quite simply: help portfolio founders secure relevant podcast opportunities.

Over time, the work became broader than the booking itself.

We were helping create a repeatable path from founder expertise to media opportunity.

A founder entered the programme with a company, a background and a collection of ideas that often had never been packaged for media.

We worked out which parts of that story could travel.

We found the conversations where those ideas belonged.

We identified relevant hosts.

We handled the outreach and the operational work required to get the founder from introduction to recording.

Then we did it again for another founder with a completely different story.

That repeatability is what made the engagement interesting.

What This Taught Us About Working With Venture Portfolios

Venture funds already sit on an enormous amount of expertise.

It lives inside their portfolio.

Every founder is accumulating knowledge about a market in real time. They are talking to customers, watching behaviour change, seeing problems up close and making decisions based on information most people outside the category never encounter.

Much of that knowledge stays inside investor updates, internal meetings, customer conversations and the founder's head.

Media gives some of it a way out.

The opportunity for a fund is not to make every portfolio founder famous.

It is to help the right founders become easier to discover for the things they genuinely understand.

That can create a different kind of portfolio support.

One that continues working after the introduction has been made and after the capital has been deployed.

The Bigger Lesson

The BFF engagement changed some of our own thinking about visibility.

We had already seen how strategic media could work for individual founders.

Working across a portfolio forced us to think about the infrastructure behind it.

How do you make visibility repeatable without making it generic?

How do you coordinate multiple founder campaigns without treating founders like inventory?

How do you build a process while protecting the thing that makes each story interesting?

The answer was never going to be more templates.

It was a better system.

One flexible enough to accommodate different founders while giving the operational work enough structure to scale.

That thinking became part of the foundation for how Nodè Narrative approaches founder visibility today.

Final Takeaway

Blockchain Founders Fund did not need every founder to tell the same story.

It needed a system capable of carrying different stories.

We built the machinery around the founders while keeping the part that mattered most individual: what each of them had to say.