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#19 - Make Yourself Seen, by Building Your Personal Brand & Breaking into VC through cold outreach? - Advice From a16z VC Professional

#19 - Make Yourself Seen, by Building Your Personal Brand & Breaking into VC through cold outreach? - Advice From a16z VC Professional

Building Your Personal Brand & Breaking Into VC through cold outreach possible?

VC Crafters
August 29, 2024

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👋 Hey there! Welcome to Thursday's edition of this week's Break Into VC Newsletter. We've got a packed issue focusing on everything you need to break into venture capital.

Deep Dive On Make Yourself Seen, by Building Your Personal Brand - Why & How ?
Today’s Tips From VC Professional Breaking into VC through cold outreach? - Advice From a16z VC Professional.
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Must Read Articles on Startups, Tech & Venture Capital
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DEEP DIVE

Make Yourself Seen, by Building Your Personal Brand

One of the main hack to stand out from the crowd and break into VC - which even you can start from today is Building your personal brand. Why does it help you? and How can you do that?

Although “Building Personal Brand” is not strictly indispensable (as many great VCs are not particularly public people), developing your personal brand and thought leadership can significantly increase your chances of finding your dream VC job, as it will:

make you more visible to VCs, who will be more likely to know about you
make you more desirable in their eyes, since your brand will help them attract more founders and also positively impact their fund's brand

Today, building a personal brand in the startup world for someone who doesn't have any investing experience is mostly done through online content.

While creating content may seem scary at first - because you may think you have to find genius things to say or show - it shouldn't be: many people have became very visible online without adding many new ideas to the world, but just by enriching the content of other people (or democratising it) in intelligent ways.

Personal branding content can take many different shapes. The most important thing is to pick a medium that makes sense to you and that you can have fun with. You could be:

Hosting a weekly / monthly podcast about a certain topic
Writing a publication or weekly / monthly newsletter
Writing a few, heavy-hitting articles
Building a great Twitter profile with a strong following
Becoming a thought leader of a certain trend or industry

🎤 Hosting a weekly / monthly podcast about a certain topic

I am sure most of you’re following the 20 minutre VC podcast by Harry Stebbings. He started this podcasr from his bedroom when he was 18. Since then, it's become one of the most valuable media assets in the world of Venture Capital, with some 200,000 subscribers and 80 million downloads to date. It helped Harry build a name in the VC world, become friends with many of the top VCs in the world and launch not one, but two funds.

Here is an article to help you get started: How to Start a Successful Podcast (For Under $100).

🖋 Writing a publication or weekly / monthly newsletter

E.g. Sarah Nöckel - now VC at Northzone - started Femstreet, a newsletter for women in tech and venture, back in 2017. It quickly grew to 9,000 free subscribers and started monetising. Similarly, Gonz Sanchez started Seedtable in 2019 as a weekly newsletter on European tech for himself and a few friends. It is now read by 12,000+ founders, investors and operators from all across Europe.

Here is an article to help you get started: The Ultimate Guide to Writing Online.

📝 Writing a few, heavy-hitting articles

You don't necessarily need a weekly / monthly cadence to build your brand online. Many people have done so by writing a few, heavy-hitting articles or pieces of research that gave them huge visibility.

E.g. Paige Finn Doherty had a lot of success with an article laying out the foundation of getting into VC / startups. Similarly, Sarah McBride got a ton of visibility through a post about how startups can build an organic marketing engine à la Spotify Wrapped.

What both articles have in common is that they portray 'insider knowledge' to whoever reads them. What's great is that today you don't necessarily need to be an insider to make readers feel like that. Having read about a topic much more in-depth or for longer than them will do the trick.

🐦 Building a great Twitter profile with a strong following

E.g. Brianne Kimmel - now VC at Worklife - has been building a very strong brand through Twitter (amongst other channels), where she got a lot of visibility in the founder world through educational tweets about the founder journey and about fundraising.

Similarly, Paige Finn Doherty has been following a similar approach, posting tweets that explain complex topics in simple words.

👾 Becoming a thought leader of a certain trend or industry

Repeatedly writing about a certain topic and going very deep into it can have a massive impact.

E.g. Andreas Klinger has been tweeting and writing about remote work for 5-10 years. On the back of that, and of other achievements, he became "Head of Remote" at AngelList and consequently launched his own fund, Remote First Capital.

Similarly, Ben Tossell has been constantly talking about "no-code" applications. On the back of that, and of his no-code company Makerpad, he just raised his own makerpad.fund.

Choose a topic that you're interested in, or know a lot about, and become one of its masters.

You shouldn't worry about starting big. Content has incredible compounding effects: small steps lead to great outcomes. Even if you start with a very small following and nobody seems to be consuming your content, the process of creating it will build your muscle and knowledge. You can start with very small initiatives or pieces of content and a year later you may suddenly realise you have a blog or podcast. Start today.

If your content ends up not being particularly successful after all, the process behind it can still be extremely useful to:

Stay updated about the startup world
Connect with people you admire and see how they think (for free!)
Learn in a more structured way (e.g. Writing is one of the best ways to show to yourself that you actually understood a concept)

No matter what medium you decide to adopt, you should give huge importance to distribution.

Many people spend hours and hours on writing extremely thoughtful articles or Twitter threads or recording podcasts, and then - once those are "out in the real world" - they just wait for engagement to magically happen.

Unless you have dozens of thousands of followers, engagement doesn't happen that way.

You'll need to make an incredible effort and invest a huge amount of time in getting your articles / tweets seen by the audience you are targeting. Here is how I do it:

I ask all my closest friends (even the ones that don't have much to do with the startup world) to engage with my content (like & comment on my LinkedIn posts, clap 50 times on my Medium articles, retweet my tweets etc.). I do it quite shortly after I post, as the first few minutes of a post's lifetime are the most crucial according to Twitter & LinkedIn's algorithms
I text or email each article / tweet to every person in the industry who has written something about the same topic in the past; who is known to be interested in the topic; or who - in whatever way - inspired my writing
I share it with every person I've mentioned in the article / tweet

Sometimes, these efforts literally take hours (e.g. personalising each message / email), but they are always 100% worth it.

TODAY’S TIPS FROM VC PROFESSIONAL

Breaking into VC through cold outreach? - Advice From a16z VC Professional

Breaking into VC through cold outreach is rare, but possible. Kimberly Tan got her foot in the door at Andreessen Horowitz by dropping her resume into the firm’s job portal on LinkedIn.

Building on this Tweet (Source: X)

In the same tweet Kimberly shared: “Curate your interview process. You can send cold emails, but make sure that the emails are targeted to the firm and the individual you're reaching out to – it's very easy to tell which cold emails have been mass-sent vs which show genuine interest in the specific firm and person”

Kimberly’s experience is a good case study in not being afraid to shoot your shot. However, she emphasizes the importance of being authentic when reaching out.

“Curate your interview process. You can send cold emails, but make sure that the emails are targeted to the firm and the individual you're reaching out to – it's very easy to tell which cold emails have been mass-sent vs which show genuine interest in the specific firm and person. Always attach a resume or a LinkedIn.”

— Kimberly Tan, a16z

Find a firm that's culturally aligned, that needs your skillset

“a16z's interview process spoke volumes about the culture: no one asked me about who I knew or what companies they should invest in. Instead, they asked me about who I was, how I made life decisions, and why I wanted to be an investor. What I realized was that a16z was testing for slope, a hunger to learn, and raw judgment – not y-intercept (thankfully, since mine would have been literally 0).

In the 3 years since I’ve learned just how much the entire firm has been built around this philosophy. We approach hiring the same way we approach investing. We don't just look for founders who have done it all before & who have all the answers. We look for people who are scrappy, hungry and willing to put in the work to build something generational from the ground up.”

— Kimberly Tan, a16z

It’s not enough to want the job just because it’s cool. Investors will be screening for your genuine passion for VC. Doing the job before you have the job is one way to do this, as is having a track record of being obsessed with your craft. (You can check out our all in one VC Interview guide here)

What’s more, the world of VC is demanding, with boards, LPs, and founders constantly pulling for attention. A passion for the work is key to endurance in the field.

‍What stands out to Anne Dwane when hiring investors at Village Global

“Venture Nerds: Folks spending free time (weekends as Ryan & Vedika might say) immersed in the startup ecosystem…for fun… are up our alley! Early-stage investing works best when there’s a real love of the game. My colleague Max Kilberg exemplifies this archetype.”

— Anne Dwane, Village Global

‍What stands out to Michael Dempsey when hiring investors at Compound

“What stands out to me is people who treat venture capital and investing broadly as a craft, versus those who treat it as a role.

What I mean by that is that it's a type of job where you are constantly decaying because you have time being pulled at you due to boards or LPs or just having more portfolio companies. It's also the type of job that you must improve to stay great at, and that means understanding the past, present and future of the technologies and asset classes you're investing in, and the participants of the markets. What stands out is when people are really obsessive about all these different dynamics or about the things they care about and can have strong recallability and flow when talking about these areas.

To be honest, I think every person I've hired at Compound has embodied this. They all had some level of obsessiveness in their own way and showed that through a dedication to sharing those thoughts publicly and soliciting feedback from talented and thoughtful people.”

— Michael Dempsey, Compound

What stands out to Joanne Chen when hiring investors at Foundation Capital

“Hiring investors is like making seed investments in people. We look for grit, ambition, and a desire to learn about the world. Venture is a decades-long investment so we also look for people who have a long-term mindset.”

— Joanne Chen, Foundation

That’s it. We have created all in one guide for aspiring venture capitalist. You can check out here.

DON’T FORGET

How Can People From Tech Background Break Into VC? (Highly Recommend)

Check out SWE2VC article’s - it’s written by VC Professionals where he shared insights on how people from tech background can make career in VC.

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