Storytelling @ Aleph: A case study

Erica Marom is the Chief Communications Officer at Aleph - an early-stage venture capital fund that has 60+ companies in their portfolio and more than $850M under management.

I have a soft spot for marketers that don’t come from the world of marketing.

Especially since some of the best and most talented marketers I’ve met were ex-journalists. Like Erica - who was a journalist for the BBC for 15 years.

The reason I wanted to have this conversation with Erica was because Aleph isn’t just following the same tired playbook for VC content. They’re truly building a media brand.

And I think that VCs are a super interesting niche when it comes to marketing. Because it’s all brand.

There’s no software or ‘product’ to hide behind. The VC world isn’t selling anything.

Well, they’re selling money. It’s take Aleph’s money or take another VC’s money. The differentiators, Erica explains, are your network and your brand. Otherwise money is money.

I sat down with Erica to talk about how they’re establishing these differentiators - from their Invested podcast - to docu-style video content focusing on founder stories.

Plus, I ask her all about their in-house media team, what it looks like, and how they’re measuring success.

Let’s go.

Growing Aleph’s brand through storytelling

Erica’s focus at Aleph is divided into two main areas. On the one hand, she works very closely with portfolio companies and the founders on helping them:

- understand how to build their brands

- tell their stories

- engage global audiences

Meanwhile, she’s also building the Aleph brand. In both regards, Erica’s approach is the same:

“All of our content is very much about going a level deeper and understanding the human side - looking at people's values and at the hearts, minds, and souls behind it all.”

Erica

But Erica didn’t know that this is what her day-to-day would look like when she joined Aleph. She actually knew nothing about the tech world or the venture capital world.

“I was brought into this ocean, trying not to drown and figuring out how to bring unique value. I didn’t want to just copy what other VCs were doing and just have the same events, the same end of year reports…”

Erica asked herself: what can I as Erica uniquely bring to the table?

As soon as she started meeting with the portfolio companies, she understood that founders were super exciting people:

“These people are dynamic, they're passionate, they're motivated, they'll go to the ends of the earth to make their idea come to life.”

She wanted to share that with the content they put out:

“What was interesting to me was what's the story here? What was the motivation behind starting this company? Why was this important to you? What's the impact it's going to have on humanity?

And so, they started off by creating some founder videos, which were a very human look at the company through the lens of the founder.

From there, they started creating series, hiring an in-house team of creators, and scaling this humanity-focused content creation approach to all of their channels.

Aleph’s media motions

On the Aleph brand side, they have two main media motions: The Invested video podcast and a short-form style video series called Partner Perspective. Both are video-first.

This is part of their distribution strategy. They create a lot of video clips from the episodes and they share those clips across their LinkedIn and Twitter pages.

The Partner Perspective series is hosted by the other partners at Aleph and it’s dedicated to addressing issues that every founder needs to deal with at the beginning of their company. Just sharing super relevant advice for founders and those are released about once a month.

Invested was launched about a year and a half ago.

Aleph Co-founder, Michael Eisenberg sits down with business leaders, founders, and investors and they tell the story of people who are having an impact on the world. Globally. From different VCs, companies, backgrounds, etc.

One of the unique things about Invested is that it’s run by Michael.

Erica shares that Michael was the obvious podcast host choice because he has excellent communication skills, public speaking skills, but mostly because he was already a leader in their space.

“Honestly in the beginning, in the very beginning, it was his relationships and his personal brand that helped build the podcast.”

Erica

Because when you have a podcast that doesn't exist yet, how do you invite people to come on it?You have nothing to show them. You can't tell them to check out previous episodes, because you don't have anything to show them. So Aleph’s podcast really took off at first because of the personal relationships and brand Michael already had.

While not every founder has a big following or personal brand like Michael’s - Erica is a big proponent of putting founders on a pedestal, showing off their successes and setting them up as leaders.

That’s why on the portfolio company side, they produce the founder stories, which are docu-style films.

In Erica’s words: It’s the most exciting thing she’s worked on in the last 5 years.

The first one they did was a 7-min episode on Noam Toister, the CEO of Travelier (formerly Bookaway Group).

The opening scene starts with him at home with his family, and it then follows him throughout a day in his life as he tells the story of how the company overcame going from zero in sales during COVID to buying out all of their competitors and now seeing $3M in sales through their platform every month…

Erica believes that it’s through these content plays that founders get established not only as founders but as humans, people, and leaders with a backstory…and that’s powerful enough to influence people to want to invest in them, partner with them, work with them or for them, etc.

This is the essence of founder-led content and why it’s so so important.

As Aleph gives them the platform and stage to get their story out there, the idea is also to get founders excited to be amazing storytellers.

“They need to get the world excited about them, whether it's clients, the media, potential partners. So I don’t think every CEO needs to be a podcast host, but they do need to learn how to be the best storyteller for their company.”

Measuring success

Aleph has almost 2K subscribers on YouTube, with videos that have gotten over 20K views, and has had guests on from Palantir’s Co-founder to Apollo’s CEO.

But Erica explains that what they’re doing at Aleph is a hard play. Mostly because it’s very hard to measure success.

When it comes to the podcast, they have very real number KPIs that they measure - but in addition, they also care equally about the anecdotal data as well.

“Feedback from anyone in our niche audience - global investors, founders, business leaders - is very valuable for us. If a global investor sends a message to Michael after listening to an episode of Invested, saying he loved it…that’s way more meaningful to us than the number of plays per episode.”

Erica

I loved hearing this from Erica because not everything about success is quantitative. To really see results from your owned media channels, I truly believe that it starts from above. Management needs to be ok and on board with a long-term play.

It doesn’t mean that you can’t have other lead gen motions going on as well - but you just can’t measure media in the same way that you measure paid and growth tactics.

If you’re speaking regularly to the people who you ideally want as your clients, bringing them on your podcast, setting these people up as thought leaders, talking about the issues that they care about…that’s going to eventually pay itself forward.

It’s just not going to happen overnight.

“A podcast is a long-term play that beyond the vanity metrics, you might not be able to see meaningful outcomes for an entire year of doing it. That’s why most people start podcasts and then stop after 10 episodes. Because they don't see any immediate gain. But if you keep doing it, depending on what your goals are, and keep doing it well, you can see real, real value come out of that.”

Erica

Erica doesn’t look at how MQLs translate to SQLs. But rather at things like founders engaging with Aleph’s content and how that could lead to potential deal flow.

That’s why meaningful engagement (people in their niche audience) is everything.

She shares that they had an episode a few months ago that was retweeted by someone from one of the best VCs in the entire world. That was extremely meaningful for them. That meant that this person watched the episode and liked it enough to share it with millions of his followers.

These are the things that give them hints that not only are people engaging, but that it's the right people. That they’re reaching the people that they want to reach.

And then there are the results that come with strategic networking.

Every guest can be a potential opportunity. For Aleph, a guest might invest in a follow-on round for one of their companies, or introduce them to a potential partner. That’s a huge power multiplier.

You just can’t fake networking or treat it like a transaction. You need to put sales aside, metrics aside, and focus on exchanging value.

Building a media team

Once you figure out the stories you want to tell and the ways you’re going to measure success- the next question is understanding how you’re going to do it.

In-house or outsourced? Owned media or earned? Both?

For Aleph, Erica knew that she didn’t want to rely on mainstream media and she believes that any company that cares about telling its story and building its brand should be investing in building out its own media.

That’s why she doubled down on building a strong in-house team.

“I knew immediately that we needed to do it in-house. And that's something I understood because I worked with producers, media creators, cameramen, and editors. That was my day to day job at the BBC. I understand the relationship that you need to have. You can outsource stuff. Sure. But it's not going to be 100% on brand. They don't exactly understand what your goals are or your audience. And I understood that the best way for us to do it would be in-house.”

But she kept things simple and small. Because at the end of the day, you don’t need 50 person teams or $20 million budgets to run this kind of motion in-house. You just need to hire for the right roles.

“I think what's special about our team is that it is small and nimble. We don't outsource anything that we do. Everything is in-house. Everything that Aleph is creating is done by our very small, very talented team.”

Their team is made up of an in-house producer who handles all of the logistics, operations, scheduling, etc. They have a media creator who does all of their filming and editing in-house.They have a Head of Content who manages distribution and runs all of their social channels, newsletters, etc. They also have a designer and then there's Erica and Uri Ar - Chief Brand Experience Officer.

Erica’s first hire was for the media creator role - and then after a few months, they realized that the amount of work was growing and they also needed a producer. This move really made them much more efficient as a team.

But even though they create content with a professional cameraman and they have their own studio and everything is high-production value…that kind of stuff shouldn’t hold back founders and marketing teams from getting in front of the camera or recording content.

“Here's what I really believe: every company is a media company, and it's the same thing with brand. You have a brand, whether you invest in it or not. Companies are already media companies because they all have blogs and social media channels. So it's just about whether you invest in it or not.”

Erica

It’s definitely not easy to create good content. But it’s getting easier and easier to get something out the door that at least you can build on and iterate on.

Especially with so many great AI tools right now that can help with that.

Aleph’s podcast tech stack includes apps like:

🎙 Logic by Apple and Ableton Live - Uri Ar used these to compose the music for Invested. Yes, he actually composed it himself.

🎙 OpusClip - for creating shorts for every episode.

🎙 Descript - for subtitles.

🎙 Riverside.fm - All of their remote episode are filmed on Riverside.

I personally love using Captions AI and CapCut for video and I shared my full repurposing tech stack for interviews here.

The alternative is relying on mainstream media to tell your story. The problem is that they usually won't, because it's not interesting enough for them.

And Erica adds that even when they do finally tell your story in an article here or there, it might not be told the way you want it told. Earned media definitely has its place in a marketing strategy but it can’t be the only card you play.

Takeaways

Here’s what I’m taking away from my chat with Erica and what I think all founders and marketers should keep in mind:

It all starts with good leaders.

Aleph creates content that stands out. They could’ve stuck to the VC content playbook. But Erica, on premise alone, didn’t want to do that. And it’s thanks to that that she built the team and strategy the way she did. If you ask me, that’s why it all starts with the manager. If that person doesn't want to bring that unique aspect of themselves into it, you're never going to create content that stands out. You're just going to build a team and a program that replicates what's out there.

Personal stories are worth telling.

I think in B2B marketing we shy away a lot from doing a lot of things just because we want to stick to the best practices. But best practices don’t tell raw and honest stories. And it’s those kinds of stories that ultimately move people. You need to have a good mix of personal with practical and actionable to build trust and make your brand feel relatable.

Have a true media-first mindset.

Marketing teams that try to launch owned media channels and fail or give up are usually trying to measure things like a marketer. When really, there are no perfect equations or funnels or workflows to directly measure the impact of media on brand and business. It’s not that you can’t be result-driven or data-driven, it’s that you need to be OK shifting what that might mean or look like.

Founder-led content is everything.

I’ll say this again and again. There’s no reason to not be investing here. Nobody reached 10, 20, or 100K followers overnight. Nobody’s social network grew from one day to the other. You need to start somewhere. Use content as your way to connect. Use content as your medium. As your craft. It’ll take you far.

Go Aleph!