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- 🦉 The VC Community Moat
🦉 The VC Community Moat
Examining three VC community engines in NYC to discover how VC firms can differentiate through irl interaction.
Coeus Collective
February 24, 2025
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Welcome back to the Collective. Last week, we wrote about alternative VC models. Today, we’re writing about another format for VC firm differentiation: community-building strategy.
There has been a clear opening of growth for irl interactions in the New York City tech ecosystem. We saw it during our live podcast recording with Siya Raj Purohit of OpenAI, for example. But we’ve also seen it by interacting with three organizations in NYC: all in all, GenZtea, and NGEN.
We’ll call these organizations community engines: because they do not just seek to build community in terms of event attendance, but rather to create a powerful network that reinforces a unique and differentiated flywheel effect for their members.
It is our opinion that when a VC firm creates a partnership with one of these community engines (or successfully develops a community engine of their own), the VC develops a moat in its competition against other firms.
So, the purpose of this newsletter is to show founders, community builders, and VCs three distinct examples of community-building engines that are currently in action in our NYC tech ecosystem. They each have unique elements that we can all learn from.
Let’s get to it!
— By Antonio DiMeglio and Leon Li
