The VC Platform Sponsorship Playbook

The exact steps I took to build a $350k sponsorship business with 100% YoY renewal

Happy 2025, platform pals! This is the first edition of Platform Shift in the new year. Unfortunately, I didn’t write or publish anything in January. While I want to stick to a bi-monthly groove this year, I’ve been finding it difficult to stay consistent with writing. There are a few reasons for this.

First– I haven’t been feeling particularly inspired or called to write. I’m starting to feel some renewed inspiration, but I’d also love to hear from you about the topics you’re interested in. To help with momentum, I’m launching a new series, Dear Platform Pal, where I’ll answer reader questions—ensuring I have some kindling for one of the monthly editions.

Second – I’m a recovering Type-A, people-pleaser who historically found it really challenging to relax. I’m sure some of you can relate to that nagging feeling that you should be doing more at all times. Watching TV or lying around used to feel like a huge waste of time. Over the past few years, I’ve worked through a lot of these internal struggles, and thanks to the help of my partner I now feel *almost* no guilt for allowing my mind and body to rest. This year, I’m intentionally choosing more rest —even if that means letting some “productive” balls (like this newsletter) drop from time to time.

Third – I’m currently training for a marathon on March 1st, with a big, audacious goal to run 3:20. Marathon training takes a lot of time and effort, and I’m reminding myself that we’ll never get everything on our to-do list done. Choosing one thing often means saying no to another.

Anyway, that’s what’s been going on in my world. I’d love to hear from you—what topics are you interested in this year? And if you have a question for the first Dear Platform Pals edition, you can submit it here.

Unlocking Platform Budget

One of the biggest challenges I hear from Heads of Platform is:

“I’m a team of one with very limited support, resources, or budget—and I’m trying to do it all myself."

While I love the scrappy hustle that comes with being a solo team, it’s incredibly hard to create real leverage. Sure, you can build systems and maintain consistency to drive momentum, but at a certain point you need a budget to scale your impact. A budget that allows you to hire more people (full-time or fractional) or invest in the tools and initiatives that really move the needle.

I get it—unlocking more budget is easier said than done.

Unlike traditional companies where increased revenue leads to more budget, VC firms can only access additional operating capital every few years when they raise a new fund. This is especially challenging for emerging managers with smaller AUM. Even an impressive $30M Fund I translates to just $600k (standard 2% fees) in annual operating capital —which only goes so far.

When I first entered the venture world, my firm was in a similar position. The fund was small, budget was tight, and we needed a way to bring in more money. One of the first big challenges I had to tackle was: How do we generate more operating capital?

What follows are the exact steps I took to build a six-figure annual sponsorship business—with 100% year-over-year renewal.

State of Sponsorship

When I started this quest in 2020, the sponsorship industry was going through a reset. A wave of venture-backed companies who had scaled meaningfully (Series B+), were starting to invest real dollars into marketing, and were targeting early-stage startups as their ideal customers. At the same time, large established enterprises were developing startup-focused offerings and looking for ways to build authentic relationships with founders.

Both types of companies had a central thesis: invest early.

If they could acquire companies when they were small and just starting out, they’d reap tremendous benefits as those companies scaled with their product. While many startups wouldn’t graduate and grow, the ones that did would make it all worth it—following the same power-law dynamics that VCs operate under.

There was a strong appetite to put these marketing and partnership dollars to work, but many companies had been burned by accelerator and VC sponsorships that charged exorbitant—often nearing six figures—with little to no ROI. I can tell you firsthand: a partnership manager cannot go back to their team lead and CFO and say, “Hey, we got an NPS 10, but no new customers—let’s renew for another year."

That’s just not how it works.

I also acknowledge that over the last few years, the sponsorship landscape has continued to evolve. So while I wouldn’t suggest you copy my exact outputs, I’m confident that this playbook will still work—even if your focus areas look completely different, like owned audience development, community building, influencer content, or events.

Step 1: Internal Audit

Before you have any external conversations, the first step is conducting an internal audit. There are three key takeaways you need from this process:

For example, one of my biggest goals in building our sponsorship program was to shift away from one-off event sponsorship and instead create predictable, annual revenue streams. While one-off sponsorships were easy to sell, they were time consuming and added unnecessary complexity every time we wanted to run an event or initiative. Since money was coming in on an event-by-event basis, it also made forecasting and long-term planning more difficult.

I also wanted to ensure that everyone—our founders, sponsors, and team—genuinely benefited from these sponsorships. Start by mapping out your key stakeholders and forming initial hypotheses about their needs and goals. As you begin having conversations, refine these assumptions based on real learnings.

Defining the goals of your sponsorship or partnership program

Sponsorship programs can easily become a lot of work, especially if you’re a team of one. Instead of thinking about all the net-new things you can create, make a list of the assets you already have within your firm or closely tied to it.

As I thought through what we could offer, I looked at the assets we already had: an accelerator program, a portfolio of 150+ companies, a steady pipeline of founders pitching us, founder-focused educational programming on topics like GTM, and a strong presence in the ecosystem through external events.

While you don’t need to map out exact deliverables just yet, you should have a clear sense of what’s available to you and your unique value. For me, being a high-volume investor certainly helped with sponsorship conversations because we had a large, engaged audience—but there are creative ways to work around this even if your audience isn’t massive.

Step 2: Outreach & Discovery

Next, you need to reach out to potential sponsors for discovery conversations. It’s crucial to enter into these discussions with a learning mindset—your goal is to understand their needs, how their partnership managers are compensated, and how their business makes money.

This is not the time to sell or pitch.

If you’re able to genuinely lean in and learn during these conversations, you’ll gain understanding that make every subsequent selling conversation easier. Here are two different templates you can use for outreach:

Template to use if you already have a relationship with the sponsor

Template to use if you’re reaching out cold to a sponsor

Once you get folks on the phone, your jobs is to uncover a few very important things:

• How does their business make money? What does a customer lifecycle look like? Do they make money right away? Do they lose money at first? What’s the life-time-value (LTV) of each customer? What’s their current customer acquisition cost (CAC)? For example, in my own partnership discovery, I learned that Vouch has a 20% take rate on the total premium a startup pays for business insurance. Dig in here. Ask clarifying questions. I also discovered that Brex doesn’t really make money on their startup customers until they raise a seed round and that, at the time, the average CAC for their marketing team was $500. This type of information is crucial.

• What does success look like for them? If they crush this year, what will they have accomplished? What KPIs are they measured against as individuals? What about their partnership team? What broader goals is their team working toward?

• What did they try last year that worked well? What went poorly, or where did they feel burned? This is incredibly useful because it helps you position and counter-position your offering accordingly. What are they planning for this year?

• How much budget do they have allocated for partnerships? What does their budgeting process look like? Who are the key decision makers? Do they have specific ROI or return-on-spend targets?

The goal of these conversations is simple: understand.

The deeper your understanding of a sponsor’s business, goals, and success metrics, the better equipped you’ll be to craft a compelling sponsorship package—one that aligns with their needs and delivers real return-on-investment (ROI). Too often, people focus only on what they can get from sponsors, skipping over essential questions about budget, decision-making, and process. I’ve been there—it can feel awkward at first. But avoiding these questions sets you up for failure. You might still close a deal, but the sales and delivery process will be infinitely harder.

Remember—partnership managers have revenue targets and KPIs to hit. If you can help them hit those targets, your sponsorship program becomes a no-brainer.

Step 3: Pitch, Pilot, and Prove Out

Once you’ve nailed down your sponsor’s goals, the next step is to compare them with the goals of your firm and founders. If there’s strong alignment, you can start reviewing your assets to determine what a sponsorship package might look like and how you'll measure success.

One non-negotiable for me was that the partnership had to deliver real value to our portfolio founders. After running this playbook a few times and building a strong book of business, I had sponsors coming inbound, offering tens of thousands of dollars to partner. I turned many of them down—either because I knew I wouldn’t be able to deliver the value they needed or because I didn’t believe in the product.

For the sponsors we did (and do) work with, we genuinely believed they were the best in the market. Take Vouch, for example—a long-time partner of ours. We think they’re the best business insurance provider out there, and we even use them ourselves.

P.S. If you don’t yet have business insurance for your firm or your portfolio companies, you should really reach out to Allison Schneider. It’s cheap, easy, and essential.

The Pitch

Once you understand your sponsor’s buying decision, your goal with the pitch is to demonstrate alignment—showing that you understand their goals and ambitions, how they intersect with your firm’s objectives, and how your program will deliver measurable value.

Your pitch materials should clearly articulate:

I’ve always been a firm believer in starting with a pilot program. These are lower-risk for both sides—they allow you to prove ROI, while also giving you a sense of what the sponsor is like as a partner. I structured my pilot programs at $10K–$15K, an automatic renewal (and an opt-out clause) that increased to $35K annually for the full sponsorship package.

Note that these numbers will vary based on what you learned in discovery around LTV, CAC, budget, etc.

If a sponsor needs their CAC to stay at $500, then in order to deliver on a $35k sponsorship, you need to feel confident you can send them 70 customers over the duration of the sponsorship. If you have a big portfolio, or an engaged audience via LinkedIn, Newsletter, or Events - this might feel completely do-able.

If you only have 12 companies in your portfolio, that price-tag might not make sense for that sponsor, but could be great for someone looking to build their presence and credibility in the startup ecosystem.

The pilot approach serves two purposes:

1. It lowere the barrier to entry for potential sponsors who weren’t ready to commit to a full program.

2. It sets a clear path for long-term engagement and recurring revenue.

If the pilot went well—and we ensured it did by tracking clear KPIs—we had a seamless transition into a full annual sponsorship.

A lot of my sponsorship work focused on four key areas:

1. Brand awareness – Making sure they were top of mind for founders.

2. Education – Positioning them as experts in the space.

3. Customer acquisition – Getting them high-intent leads from our portfolio.

4. Increasing LTV – Helping them embed into startup operations early to drive long-term retention.

The deliverables were a mix of co-created content, external events, educational workshops, and direct referrals to our founders. But these aren’t the only levers you can pull. The landscape of B2B marketing is getting more creative, and there are huge opportunities to differentiate.

If I were running this playbook today, I’d be thinking about wellness retreats, newsletter audience building, founder influencer videos, and experiential activations—stuff that builds authentic engagement between startups and sponsors in a way that feels valuable, not transactional and that I inherently love.

Beyond getting creative with your deliverables and assets, don’t be afraid to rethink your sponsorship model too. Some companies might not be comfortable paying a large lump sum upfront—but that doesn’t mean they won’t invest.

Think about how you can structure the deal to be a win-win. Maybe a portion is committed upfront, and the rest is tied to performance—structured more like a channel partnership or success-based model. Flexibility can open the door to sponsors who want to engage but need a different financial approach to make it work

Step 4: Manage & Deliver

Getting the deal done is only half the job. The real work is in partnership management—because a sponsor that sees continuous value is a sponsor that renews.

Figure out a cadence that works best for you. I ran monthly check-ins with sponsors, focusing on:

• Detailed KPIs – Tracking lead generation, engagement, and conversion metrics

• ROI reporting – Showing exactly what value they were getting

• Upcoming initiatives – What was coming up for the month ahead

• Course correction – If something wasn’t working, we fixed it early

Below is a sample ROI tracking spreadsheet I used with one of my sponsors. We both contributed to this sheet to ensure we were hitting our goals and could make renewal an easy decision. Not every sponsor will be this sophisticated—some are happy just showing up at events and organically meeting founders.

But for those with revenue targets or a hard ROI expectation, it’s critical to set up a system to track and measure impact from the start. If they need to see 100% ROI on their investment, make sure you both have a clear plan to prove it.

ROI tracking spreadsheet I used for one of our sponsors

I always had conviction going into renewal season because we kept sponsors engaged, optimized for their success, and built strong relationships along the way.

Traditional sponsorships aren’t the only way to bring in revenue. We built on the momentum of our sponsorship program by launching a paid executive community—a network of CIOs responsible for bringing emerging technology into their businesses. We provided peer-to-peer connections, structured learning, and introductions to strategic startups, while also gaining valuable insights into where these executives were investing their technology budgets and potential customers for our portfolio companies. This community brought in an additional $250k ARR. Maybe I’ll talk about that in another edition. The TLDR: It was great, but a lot of work, and ultimately something we had to wind down due to resource constraints.

I’ve seen other firms run this alternative playbooks effectively.

Hustle Fund and Vitalize Ventures both operate paid angel networks, generating revenue while strengthening their ecosystems. Other firms have used founder retreats as both a sourcing strategy and a revenue driver. There’s no one-size-fits-all approach. There are plenty of creative ways to monetize while adding value.

Key Takeaways

1. Do your homework first. Understand your assets, your sponsor’s business model, and how they measure success before pitching anything.

2. Start small, then scale. Pilot programs de-risk the investment for sponsors while giving you leverage to grow long-term partnerships.

3. Measure and optimize. Monthly check-ins, detailed KPIs, and proactive adjustments ensure sponsorships deliver real ROI.

4. Think beyond the traditional. B2B marketing is evolving—get creative with experiences, storytelling, and community-driven activations.

5. Long-term wins require ongoing effort. Closing the deal is just the beginning; great partnership management is what drives renewals.

This is the exact playbook I used to build a $350K sponsorship business with 100% YoY renewal for three years—but I know I don’t have all the answers.

💬 What’s worked for you? Drop a comment or reply—I’d love to hear your insights.

📢 If this was helpful, pay it forward! Share it with a friend or colleague who’s navigating sponsorships.

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