The Role That Shouldn’t Exist

Our Next Team Member & How AI is reshaping VC teams

We spent the last 18 months building AI agents that handle the work traditionally done by three full-time people at a venture fund. Deal sourcing. Meeting prep. Portfolio monitoring. CRM hygiene. LP report drafts. Content scheduling.

Then we decided to hire someone new.

Not an analyst. Not an associate. Not an IR person. Not a marketing lead.

A role that does not have a clean precedent at most venture firms: a Chief of Agents and Head of Growth.

This is the story about how our thinking has evolved on team building at a early stage VC fund (our current thinking, since the world is quite dynamic).

It is also a story about why I’m not all doom & gloom about jobs in the AI era.

—> By the way, if you’re interested in being considered, apply here.

What We Automated (and What We Didn’t)

Let me be clear about something first: venture capital is not an automatable business.

The core of what we do is irreducibly human. Trust by and in founders. Judgment about markets. The ability to sit across the table from someone and assess whether they have the grit and clarity to build a company in a place where the infrastructure is working against them. The relationship with an LP that took three years of coffees, dinners, and honest conversations to build.

None of that is getting automated.

None of it should be.

But surrounding all of that human work is an enormous amount of tasks that are repeatable, deployable, and benefit from consistency and best practices. Things like:

• Deal sourcing and screening. Automated scanning of inbound deal flow, scoring against our investment rubric, competitive mapping, and market sizing across the geographies we care about.

• Meeting intelligence. Pre-meeting briefings that pull from our CRM, email history, web research, and relationship graphs. Post-meeting extraction of every commitment made, with follow-up drafts generated automatically.

• Portfolio monitoring. Tracking quarterly founder updates, flagging who is overdue, processing updates into LP-ready format, and maintaining a health dashboard across the portfolio.

• Pipeline hygiene. Stage-based staleness alerts, record creation, enrichment, and weekly pipeline reviews that would take half a day manually.

• Content and communications. First drafts of LP reports, outreach sequences, editorial calendar management, and scheduling.

• LP operations. Prospect research, scoring, outreach personalization, and event preparation.

• Memo generation. Canvas dataroom, assess gaps, deploy TAM analysis agent or competitive landscape agent, etc to generate a full 20 page memo.

Some of these workflows encode our specific views on how things should be done. Our deal scoring reflects our investment rubric. Our pipeline reviews enforce the stage-specific timelines I think are right. These are not generic automations. They are our judgment, codified and deployed at scale.

Staffing these functions with people at a traditional fund requires an analyst, an associate, a platform/BD person, and an ops hire. We run all of it with agents today.

But here is the part that surprised me: removing the throughput did not just save time. It changed how we think about the team.

What Removing Throughput Revealed

When you strip away the tasks that agents can handle, the remaining jobs-to-be-done at a venture fund cluster into three buckets.

The first is investing judgment. Which companies to back, at what terms, with what conviction. This is the GP and the investing team. AI makes them faster and better-informed, but the decisions are theirs.

The second is long-term relationship and trust building with LPs. This is the GP and the IR team. Similarly, AI makes them more efficient, but does not remove the human connection.

The third is everything that makes the fund visible, trusted, and funded. GTM. Brand. Content. LP relationships. Founder community. Events. Ecosystem presence. Coinvestment campaigns. Media. This is the work that determines whether the best founders choose you when they have options, whether LPs return your call, and whether your portfolio companies feel supported.

At most funds, many of these tasks are scattered across three or four people, or it is the GP’s side project. Nobody owns the system. IR reports to the GP. Marketing reports to the COO (if it exists at all). Events are ad hoc. Content happens when the GP has time, which is rarely. Founder engagement lives in the GP’s head.

As the tasks were automated, two nuanced things happened. More started shifting to Alex (our GP)’s plate. And the velocity of executing sped up.

The gap we identified was not just organizational. It was about ambition. With the throughput handled, we could think bigger:

• More impact on companies. When you are not buried in CRM updates and report formatting, you can build real systems for cross-pollinating insights across the portfolio, organizing founder peer learning, and connecting the dots between what one company learned and what another company needs.

• More systematic searching. When your deal scanner runs weekly across 20+ geographies automatically, you can spend human time on the highest-signal founder conversations instead of manually combing through databases.

• More value for LPs. When quarterly reports draft themselves and portfolio health dashboards update in real time, you can invest your LP-facing energy in building genuine community, running curated events, and creating the kind of insider access that turns Fund II investors into Fund III ambassadors.

At a traditional fund, nobody is focused exclusively on connecting all of these into one engine. Nobody is treating the fund itself as a product that needs a go-to-market strategy.

That is the role we created.

Why We Are Hiring This Role Outside Silicon Valley

Fluent is a global fund. We back proven models adapted for underserved markets across Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Southeast Asia, MENA, and South Asia. Over half of our fund is non US. Our thesis is geographic arbitrage: the best business models travel, but they require local adaptation and local founders to succeed.

So when we designed this role, we looked for someone with a genuinely global lens. Not someone who studied abroad once and calls themselves “global.” Someone who has lived and worked across multiple geographies. Someone who brings cultural fluency, not just language skills. Someone who understands that the way you build LP relationships in the Gulf is different from how you build them in Sao Paulo, and both are different from New York.

We ended up deciding to hire outside Silicon Valley, preferably in one of our core emerging markets. That was by design.

Having our growth lead embedded in a market we invest in is a strategic advantage. They see the ecosystems from the ground. They bring a network we cannot build from California. They can represent Fluent at conferences and ecosystem events across time zones we would otherwise miss.

This is a version of our own investment thesis applied to our team. We tell founders that the best companies are built where the customers are. The same logic applies to a global fund. If you are investing across six continents, your team should not all sit in one city.

What This Means for Venture

The infrastructure we built works extraordinarily well for our geographic alpha strategy. But the underlying capabilities are not unique to our thesis. Some of what we have built is internal and proprietary. A lot of it is replicable by any fund willing to invest the time and the thinking (and for those already building here excited to get your feedback on what we should add!).

This creates four specific pressures:

• Proprietary sourcing dissolves. When any founder and any GP has dramatically wider reach through AI-assisted discovery and relationship mapping, “we see deals others don’t” becomes a weaker claim. Proprietary sourcing shifts from access to judgment, speed, and thesis clarity.

• Content becomes table stakes. When every fund can produce regular, polished content because AI handles the first draft and the editorial calendar, having a “strong brand” stops being a differentiator. What matters is whether you have something original to say. Thesis depth, not content volume.

• Platform value gets commoditized. When AI can cross-pollinate portfolio insights, generate warm intros, and automate 80% of portfolio support workflows, the traditional platform team’s value proposition thins. The question becomes: what do your humans do that agents cannot?

• LP diligence gets sharper. LPs will increasingly ask: what is your AI infrastructure? How lean is your team? What is your management fee actually funding? Funds that cannot answer these questions clearly will look expensive relative to AI-native competitors.

How VCs Win in This World

The squeeze is real, but it is not a death sentence. It is a forcing function for clarity. The funds that thrive will share specific traits.

Specialization over generalization.

Pick your lane: geography, sector, stage, or thesis. The generalist middle is where the squeeze hits hardest. Specialist funds can defend their position because their knowledge, networks, and pattern recognition are harder to replicate with any AI stack. A fintech-focused fund investing across six emerging markets has an information advantage that no generalist’s agent layer can match.

Relevance over reach.

AI gives everyone reach. Every fund can now send a well-crafted, personalized outreach email to any founder on earth. So reach stops being the differentiator. What matters is whether founders choose you when they have options. Relevance comes from thesis depth, portfolio proof points, and genuine expertise in the sectors and geographies you serve. Relevance is earned by humans, over years, through work that compounds.

Real human connections as the moat.

When every fund has AI-powered outreach, the founders who matter will filter on: who do I actually trust? Who has built a real relationship with me? Who took the meeting when we were pre-revenue? Who sat on the board and made the hard calls? The human layer becomes more valuable, not less. The best funds will invest disproportionately in relationships. The fund that flies to Lagos, Sao Paulo, and Jakarta is building something an agent cannot replicate.

Know your expertise and own it publicly.

If you cannot articulate in one sentence what you are the best fund in the world at, AI will not save you. The funds that win will be the ones where the thesis is so clear and so publicly demonstrated, through content, track record, and portfolio, that founders self-select. You do not need to find them. They find you. This is the ultimate GTM: a thesis so sharp that it does the sourcing for you.

Team rounds, not solo leads.

Co-leading with local funds, sector specialists, or stage-specific partners creates a combination of expertise that is genuinely hard to replicate. At Fluent, we co-lead with local funds in every geography precisely because two specialized perspectives are worth more than one generalist’s AI-augmented view. Syndicate construction becomes a strategic advantage, not a compromise. The best deals of the next decade will be won by teams of funds, each bringing a distinct edge, not by a single firm trying to cover everything alone.

Back to the Role

We built (and continue to build) AI infrastructure. It shifted (and continues to shift) our perspective on team design. We designed a role around the gap. And we are hiring someone with a global lens, embedded outside Silicon Valley, to build the GTM engine that connects Fluent’s brand, content, LP pipeline, founder community, and portfolio value into one system.

The venture industry is entering the same kind of transformation that hit media, financial services, and software over the last decade. The firms that rethink their team structures, their go-to-market, and their operating models will thrive. The ones that keep running the 2015 playbook with a Claude subscription bolted on will wonder what happened.

We are hiring a Chief of Agents and Head of Growth.. If this sounds like you, check it out here.

And if you are a GP or fund manager reading this: what would your team look like if you rebuilt it from scratch today?