Every founder knows how to use an investor for the next round. Warm intro to the lead for Series B, a reference call vouching for the team, a nudge to a fund that’s been slow to respond. That muscle is well developed because the incentive is obvious and the ask is familiar - investors expect it, and the relationship is structured around exactly this kind of favor.
What’s almost never asked for is the version of that same favor pointed at earned media instead of capital. The investor who sits on four other boards in adjacent categories, who gets taken to lunch by three business journalists a quarter, who is quoted in trend pieces about the sector - that person is a press bench a founder already has access to, sitting unused, because the founder has mentally filed the relationship under “money” and stopped looking for what else it contains.
Why this channel is structurally underused
Part of the reason is etiquette. Asking an investor for a fundraising favor feels transactional in a way that’s accepted as normal. Asking the same investor to connect you with a reporter they know, or to mention your company unprompted in a panel they’re speaking on, feels like it’s outside the lines of the relationship - even though most investors would happily do it, because a portfolio company getting credible press is good for their own returns and their own reputation as a value-add investor.
The other part is that founders underestimate how much of an investor’s actual day is spent talking to exactly the people a founder is trying to reach. Investors sit in rooms with journalists, LPs who run media properties on the side, other founders who’ve already built the distribution a smaller company is chasing, and conference organizers building next year’s speaker list. None of that shows up on a cap table, which is precisely why it gets ignored as a resource.
What activating it actually looks like
The ask doesn’t need to be large or frequent to work. A founder who tells an investor, specifically, “we’re trying to get in front of trade press covering this category” or “we’d value an intro to the organizers of X conference” gives that investor a concrete, low-effort way to be useful outside of writing a check - and most investors take that kind of request as a sign the founder understands how to use the relationship well, not as an imposition.
The founders who get disproportionate press relative to their size are rarely the ones with the best PR agency. They’re usually the ones who quietly treated every investor on their cap table as a distribution channel in their own right, and asked for exactly that, instead of waiting for the next fundraising conversation to remember the relationship existed.