Albi here from the IFF team! Allow me to introduce myself: I spent the last 2 years working in venture capital and startups around the world: San Francisco, Berlin, Stockholm. Most recently, I started a new media adventure with Unlinear: the place where the best Italian founders, technologists and investors tell their stories to inspire the next generation of Italian entrepreneurs.
I joined IFF because I believe Italy sits at an inflection point. If we do things right, we have a real chance to close the gap with our European counterparts and start producing global, successful companies at a faster rate.
The VC game has changed
Venture capital used to be quiet, behind the scenes, and largely undifferentiated, especially in Italy. With relatively few people choosing to start companies, VCs would be the gatekeepers to capital, resulting in bad terms and low effort to differentiate their product. That product turns out to be one of the biggest commodities ever: money. Money is always green.
But as more talented people decide to start companies, and more dollars get poured in venture capital as an asset class, the power dynamic has flipped. A few years back, VCs had to be convinced to invest in someone. Now the opposite is true: the best founders have multiple firms competing to let them invest.
So how do you win the best deals as a venture firm? You convince founders that your money is greener than other people’s money. Historically, that meant three things: terms, connections, and brand. If founders had the privilege of choosing, they would pick the firm with the friendliest terms, the best access to talent and customers (connections), and the credibility to help them raise the next round (brand).
Turns out that media can meaningfully move two of those three. If I, as a venture firm, can put your company in front of a large audience of potential hires and customers, suddenly my offer is more compelling.
Last week, we hosted an event with Marcello Ascani to discuss how startups should communicate in a shifting media landscape. The main takeaway was: every company needs to become a media company. We believe the same is true for venture capital firms.
The best firms have figured this out
At 17 years old, Harry Stebbings started a podcast from his room. By interviewing the best founders and tech leaders in the world, he built a media empire, turning it into 20VC, a venture firm that closed a $400M fund in 2024 and leverages its media presence to win deals.
He’s not an outlier anymore. Look at what the biggest platforms are doing:
A16Z, which raised over $15B in 2025 (that’s about 18% of all venture capital raised in the US that year) launched a New Media Fellowship that embeds creators and storytellers directly into its portfolio companies. They have newsletters for basically every vertical; it’s the first thing you see when visiting their website.
Y Combinator, the most prominent early-stage investor in the world, spends serious effort engineering virality for its startups while they go through the batch, announcing them through its own platform so they get users, and fast feedback, in a predictable way.
Founders Fund, Peter Thiel’s venture capital firm, just launched “MAFIA the GAME”, a YouTube series where prominent tech figures like Sam Altman, Palmer Luckey, Bryan Johnson, play Mafia together. Please go and watch it! It’s the most fun I’ve had watching a YouTube video in a while (what does that say about me, btw?).
Lightspeed just hired tech content creator Claire Zau as a partner on its early-stage team, to build the firm’s new media practice. The press has started calling this a new species: the creator-investor.
And basically every fund has started a podcast, which also makes it pretty lame, because if a fund starts a podcast you know it’s likely going to be biased and they’re going to push their own portfolio companies. That’s why we decided to keep Unlinear separate from IFF: because we recognize the importance of an independent media channel. Independence is what keeps it genuine.
You get the point. If the biggest venture platforms in the world are spending serious time and money making YouTube videos and Instagram Reels maybe we should pay attention.
What about IFF?
At IFF, we want to lead this shift. I joined the team not only to make sure we communicate our activities transparently, but to offer what will shape up to be a real media platform at the service of the founders we invest in. To give you an idea, over the past 3 months of creating content:
I got in touch with multiple incredible talents that I put in touch with our portfolio.
I interviewed a serial founder who then became an investor in IFF.
A portfolio company booked a demo that came through an Instagram reel.
How insane is that? And that’s only the beginning. We believe in media as a way to have exponentially more impact on our ecosystem. We live in an unprecedented time in human history where we’re able to reach thousands of people at the touch of a button. This allows us to broaden our community and reach, and help our portfolio companies to attract more talent, customers, and capital.
Some of you might have noticed how much content we’re making at IFF. We’ve always aimed to communicate transparently what we do and how we do it, because we believe the ecosystem benefits from us being vocal. But over the past few months, we stepped on the gas:
Started this Substack, which is slowly but surely growing (we’re close to 500 subscribers!).
Started posting Instagram reels, from my personal page (@albertotrevisanato), from IFF’s page (@italianfoundersfund), and from Unlinear (@Unlinearmedia).
Started the Unlinear YouTube channel where we interview some of the best Italian founders, technologists and investors.
The results, in only 3 months:
+5,000 followers across Instagram pages
400K+ views in the past 30 days on Instagram
10K views on YouTube
But besides the numbers, we have gotten a lot of lovely feedback on the work we are doing. Here’s some of it (in Italian, sorry!)
We want to keep this up, and do more of it. We’re cooking some very cool projects. And we want to do this at a global level, because we want the world to turn to Italy as a factory of global startups.
Let’s get to work!
-Albi
