I feel like "lure" was used here to trigger people.
The smartest thing a VC ever said to me was, "I am in the business of selling money. I'm a salesman, money is my product, and I'm trying to convince you to buy it from me by telling you how my money is better than everyone else's".
VCs have to prove their value to startups, because good ones have choices. A podcast is a great marketing opportunity.
If you have a good track record of execution and have enough experience in your domain, you should be able to raise money (it's a slog but it is doable).
As such, we need to convince promising founders to come to us, convince prospects to become LPs in our funds, and convince other VCs to buy into our investment thesis (and thus build the pipeline to fund additional rounds)
Every job is basically a mix of sales, marketing, and domain experience.
There always seems to be this implication in anti-VC rhetoric that founders are somehow gullible to VC's (whatever that means). I've yet to meet a founder where this is true.
Most people on HN aren't even founders or experienced ICs anymore. It seems to be burnt out junior ICs with a chip on their back, as well as a lot of overlap with some of the more toxic parts of Reddit.
I've heard this pitch too. My favorite is when a VC told me my expectations were "too high as 90% of us couldn't get a job at Goldman and that we are just content marketers" which I felt was wonderfully honest.
I sometimes listen to (parts of) the All-In podcast because I think it is useful to understand what powerful people in our industry think.
The four of them are really quite unlikable, and I can confidently say that if any of them happen to read this comment then they would not care in the slightest that I said that.
Here's a solution: BG2 with Bill Gurley and Brad Gerstner is imho superior in quality and depth and bonus points as you don't have to listen to those 4 people.
I have the same thought process. What do they think about current high level trends, the economy, but otherwise I don't think very highly of them. The one bio science guy is decent, somewhat grounded compared to the others.
I did get kind of tried of their non-stop AI hype train talk. Seems like for majority of the last 1-2 years that's all they've talked about most of the time.
I find it educational and entertaining. Even though I am not in the VC industry in the sense that I'm not raising money or currently VC-backed, I find their insights into financial markets to be very useful. That isn't to say that I think everything they say is true — it just means that it often provides insights into things that are happening or are about to happen.
This is partly because of who listens to the podcast, and what they do after hearing about things on the podcast. For example, they may help move markets a bit due to their insider (not in the sense of illegal) information regarding tech companies and trends.
Knowing that they have said XYZ can help explain why a certain stock popped or dropped, or was written about in a major media publication.
As for whether they would care what you said about them in an online forum...I would think that would apply to pretty much any podcaster — even ones with 1/1000th of their audience.
It’s just levels to how little you actually know. I don’t actually know too much more than what I knew when I only had 20k compared to more than that. They are rich, but they also don’t know too much more than their first million or so.
The only thing you’ll learn from this class of rich is how to stay rich. Most of us are stuck on step 1.
When Chamath explains the practical steps of his wealth it all sounds like psychopathy and luck. You can’t follow these game plans for shit, too much luck involved.
Actually, I think I like them more as people that I would like to hangout with every now and then. They have a silly sense of humor that I like (though JCal tries too hard).
I find their commentary to be so incredibly biased that it is 99% useless. They are all peddling their investments, positions etc. Chamath, for example, claimed that he did not know what Waymo was: either he is an idiot (since knowing this shit is his job), or this is all a show to promote their positions. I believe the latter.
It does help for picking up certain topics if you were out of the loop. However, I find that my HN+Twitter addiction makes me more aware of recent news than what they provide.
Other VC podcasts I find more informative, but also less entertaining: Village Global, Cognitive Revolution, World of DaaS
I can say that Acquired at least has done some of the most interesting storytelling on the founding of companies. It's like taking 5 different books on the same topic and abridging the best parts together with some commentary sprinkled in.
If it is simply a platform for them, I'm okay with it because of the quality of content.
I like how Acquired ventures beyond recent tech startups and discusses older and non-tech companies like Walmart [1] or Hermès [2]. Their interview with Charlie Munger [3] was a particular treat and ended up being one of his last interviews.
I’ve tried some of them, but I was put off by some of the “I got all the answers” vibes most of them have. The only exception for me has been the Dalton & Michael videos/podcast where they just both seem to really, really care about helping out.
You can feel that what they’re saying comes not just from 1-2 successes, but also from hundreds of failures that they’ve seen. They also seem aware of (and are vocal about) the limits of their advice.
I don’t, know. Maybe I’m drinking the cool-aid, but they did convince me to apply to YC…
The article doesn’t quite capture that a16z, in my memory, played a major role in popularizing podcasts as a direct media strategy. Fred Wilson, for example, was commenting on it way back in 2014 [1].
I’ve talked a lot about propaganda as a war invention, like many great technological advancements, found its way into these civilian systems. Capturing mindshare with propaganda is basically what this is.
Marketing is the commercial term (brand ambassador, Orwell sleeps soundly). Propaganda has a lot more coercive connotations.
This is very true. What so many large corporations (VC firms like in the article, but also firms like Nestle, Google, Exxon Mobil, etc) are doing here has many of the same features as what governments do by producing propaganda. They have some set of interests and they want to convince the public to see things from their perspective and get popular consent.
It's not necessarily nefarious, but if there's a need to do it in the first place then it often has self-serving end goals in mind.
There's so much dumb VC money again that there's a shortage of startups?
Looks like the next big growth area is weapons. Big market for artillery ammunition. Lower-cost smart weapons are needed in quantity. Drones are needed in vast quantities. AI-powered murderbot drones that don't need a radio link have real market potential.
Interesting read. Contrary to what HN thinks, I think its good that VCs feel a forcing function to differentiate themselves. Like any other market, competition is good.
I don’t know what HN thinks, but you touch upon a good point that VCs do feel this need to differentiate. It reflects the broader shift where promising founders have more say and VCs aim to offer more than just money.
The smartest thing a VC ever said to me was, "I am in the business of selling money. I'm a salesman, money is my product, and I'm trying to convince you to buy it from me by telling you how my money is better than everyone else's".
VCs have to prove their value to startups, because good ones have choices. A podcast is a great marketing opportunity.