Thought Leadership Secrets of a $1B AUM VC Founder

Most founders get this wrong, Chris built a venture empire out of it

Thought leadership has become the business world’s most overused, underleveraged asset.

Open LinkedIn on any given morning and you’ll drown in a sea of “thought leaders” dispensing wisdom. Founders sharing morning routines. VCs pontificating about market dynamics they’ve never actually navigated. Consultants recycling Harvard Business Review articles with a fresh coat of personal branding paint.

The term has been stretched so thin it’s practically translucent—everyone claims it, few deliver it.

Most of what passes for thought leadership today is performance art. People playing dress-up with ideas they haven’t earned through experience.

But that doesn’t mean that thought leadership doesn’t work at all.

Real thought leadership, the kind that comes from actually putting skin in the game, still moves mountains.

The problem isn’t that thought leadership doesn’t work. It’s that most people don’t understand what it actually is, why it matters, or how to build it without sacrificing their soul (or their startup) to the content machine.

Which is why I was so excited to interview Chris Tottman.

Chris is Founding GP at Notion Capital, an investor in over 500 founders across Europe, co-founder of Included.vc, and author of The Go To Market Handbook for B2B SaaS Leaders, and The Big Book of BrainDumps: How to Grow, Run and Raise Capital for Your Software Business.

When Chris talks about thought leadership, he’s not theorizing. He’s unpacking how it shaped his path from operator to investor.

What strikes me about Chris is his passion for simplifying the complexity of startup-and-scale challenges. He gives away these powerful, pragmatic tools to thousands of founders in his BrainDumps series, and in everything he creates. So I was excited to interview him about this topic.

In this conversation, Chris cuts through the noise to reveal what thought leadership looks like when you strip away the performance and focus on the fundamentals.

This isn’t another guide to “building your personal brand” or “becoming an influencer.”

This is about understanding thought leadership as what Chris calls “infrastructure”—not an add-on to your business, but part of its foundation.

That’s what we’ll tackle today.

Part 1: The architecture of thought leadership

Note: The sections below will feature Chris’s insights in all their depth. I’ve changed my “parts” to make it a bit more reader-friendly in an article format, but Chris’ parts remain the same.

What thought leadership actually is

Chris writes deeply from his experience. He has scars in the trenches as a Founder and Operator, built companies, and now invest.

But thought leadership is a big part of what he does.

I asked him, “When you look back, how has thought leadership shaped your own path? Not just as the output but as something that changed what you did and who you became?”

Chris: Thanks, James, always good to sit down and unpick this stuff. I think for me, thought leadership came before I even knew to call it that. One of the earliest things I realised is that every battle, every bad hire, every messed-up go-to-market gives you a lesson. If you are paying attention, you can distil it. And once you do, you have something that helps not just you, but others.

Over time, I leaned into it more deliberately. When you run a fund, your credibility matters. When you write a BrainDump or publish something in The Founders Corner, you are saying: I have been there. I messed up. Here is what I learned. That builds trust. It opens doors. Founders reach out, co-investors listen, people join programs, apply to Included.vc. Thought leadership becomes not just content, but part of the infrastructure of what you are building: the network, the brand, the deal flow, the impact.

So it is not an add-on. It is deeply integrated. It shapes what I invest in, who I partner with, and even how I coach Founders. Because I believe clarity in thought leads to clarity in action and clarity is rare, so people gravitate towards it.

Distilling complexity into clarity

Thought leadership as a distillation of experience is a powerful definition. Speaking of distillation, Chris has written a lot about making things simple, visual frameworks in running businesses, and BrainDumps that reduce complexity.

I asked him, “How do you pick which topics to turn into a BrainDump or where to invest effort in producing more enduring content rather than something to say now?”

Chris: Great question. The filter I use is roughly: is this something people are struggling with again and again? And can I render it more digestible than it currently is? If the answer is yes to both, then it is worth the work.

I also try to think: will this still make sense six months, a year, or five years from now? Because content shifts fast. If something is tied too closely to trends, you get short-term noise. But foundational things, like customer problems, go to market architecture, pricing levers, and investor psychology, those change more slowly. They benefit from frameworks and visuals.

What often happens is you start with shaky ideas, you test, you write, you get feedback, and you adjust. Sometimes you launch a BrainDump as a note, see how it lands, then iterate. If it holds up, you build more around it, whether that is talks, workshop modules, or a chapter in a book.

Also, every time I see Founders repeatedly stumble on something like clarity of value proposition, investor deck confusion, or scaling go to market, that is a signal. That often becomes a BrainDump or a chapter in The Big Book of BrainDumps.

AI, authenticity, and the human moat

One of the big concerns people have nowadays is AI. With Write10x I talk about unpromptability, being irreplaceable in voice, mission, and actually creating real-world impact. So, I wasn’t going to let the interview pass without asking for his input.

I asked Chris, “Can you stay authentic when there is pressure to automate, streamline, and over optimize voice?

What is your take on AI as a tool or threat in the context of thought leadership and content?”

Chris: I think AI is massively interesting and it is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it lowers many barriers: speed, iteration, drafting, exploring ideas. That is good. It means more people can try more ideas, make mistakes, learn faster. On the other hand, you get saturation: content that looks polished but hollow, imitation rather than insight, echo rather than lived experience.

My view is that authenticity comes from scars, contradictions, and failures. Those are things AI cannot genuinely manufacture. You can use AI as a helper for drafting, for surfacing related ideas, sometimes for making visuals or summarising, but the core of what people connect with is real stories, real paradoxes, real nuance.

In practice, I try to force in human friction. Moments where I share what is not working, what surprised me, where metrics misled me, where I changed course. Those are not always pretty, but they are essential. Because if everything is perfect, clean, and polished, people stop trusting.

The weird paradox is that as more people use AI, the differentiator is being unapologetically yourself. The lived path, what you care about, your sense of humour, the way you see odd connections, that becomes your moat. And to me, that is exciting. AI raises the baseline, but it also raises what people notice.

The real edge of thought leadership

True thought leadership isn’t just “building an audience” or “posting on LinkedIn”.

Rather, it’s building advantage. The best founders and investors aren’t chasing visibility; they’re codifying lessons, shaping markets, and deepening trust through clarity.

What Chris describes isn’t the glossy, performative version that clogs feeds—it’s the kind that compounds. The kind that turns scars into frameworks, insight into opportunity, and credibility into capital.

This is the form of thought leadership that wins business, attracts talent, and shapes ecosystems.

In Part Two, we’ll dive into how Chris measures the ROI of thought leadership, what changes in the next decade, and the hard-earned advice he gives to founders trying to weave content, company, and community together in a noisy, AI-saturated world.

PS. If you found this valuable, dive deeper into Chris’s work.

His recently released book, The Big Book of BrainDumps, distills decades of founder lessons into visual frameworks that simplify the hardest parts of building — from go-to-market clarity to investor psychology.

It’s an extremely targeted, and therefore valuable, read — for founders in this exact same journey. Follow Chris on LinkedIn or subscribe to The Founder’s Corner for early excerpts and updates on the book