2025-02-23 00:54:38
First, a piece of literary history. The phrase needle in a haystack is commonly credited to the book Don Quixote from the early 1600s (“needle is a bottle of hay”) but there’s also a Fujian proverb “To dive into the sea, to feel for a needle” that is thought to be even older and gets to the same point. The idea that it’s nearly fruitless to blindly search for a single small object when it’s located in a vast container.
Ok, back to the VC content marketing.
A few years back I helped start Screendoor, a fund that backs new venture firms by hopefully being one of their earliest and largest supporters. As a result I’ve seen hundreds of VC decks, all certain they will be among the top performers. Most strategies are some combination of innovation and best practices along the classic five steps of venture investing: See, Pick, Win, Service, Exit. This post is about ‘seeing.’
In addition to hustle and one’s existing network, I’m always interested in whether or not a ‘needle magnet’ is being built alongside the other efforts to find startups. What’s my needle magnet definition? Some force that pulls exceptional startups to you, directly or via intermediaries, in a privileged and sustainable fashion. What are, in my mind, some examples of needle magnet strategies that exist today?
Content Marketing of all Forms: Social media presence, podcasts, blog posts, How To manuals
Running Workshops and Other Experiential Programs/Events: On leadership, finding PMF, pricing and GTM, hiring, and so on
Humans Outside of the Firm With Incentive to Source For You: Scout Networks are Like Distributed Mini Magnets and we see all sorts of version here. People who can invest with the firms money at arms length, bounties for sourcing a startup, small investments in other VCs that are upstream from your firm.
and related, of increasing importance.
Data: Turn the needle magnet into needle radar, by pinpointing the location of the needles.
So my general advice is as you’re building a firm, think about which magnets feel right to you and start investing in them early. You’ll also need to tune the magnet over time so that it pulls less detritus – or at least build a great sorting filter so that you can kindly decline/exclude other stuff which gets pulled in.
Don’t be afraid to experiment, don’t be afraid to try something new – unless you’re really excited about podcasting and have a novel idea on how to break through the noise, it’s not worth doing. Pick the magnet strategies which are consistent with your brand, stage, resources, and temperament.
There, some loose thoughts on magnets. Did I miss any categories?
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2025-02-21 03:29:14
Sometimes I write a post just to be able to send the URL to people when they ask me a specific question. This one is “what advice do you have for someone who is a new VC analyst or wants to join a firm at that level?”
If you’re joining a venture capital firm as a junior professional I’d recommend against being a generalist, or trying to get good at everything. Instead once you’ve gotten your bearings optimize on developing distinct super powers.
One super power that is in service of your GP. Assuming you’re working for a particular partner or a specific coverage team, pick something that is of great value to you partner and can be performed repeatedly. Maybe it’s around sourcing and depth within a particular network. Expertise in a technology platform. Or some data analysis competency. A tool you can build and maintain for the partnership. Something along the See, Pick, Win, Service, and Exit spectrum that creates value and is distinct from how any other person would approach the job.
The other super power should be in service of the founders you back. Pick something that is matched against the stage and markets you partner is investing in and just become the go-to person for the founders. Maybe you are just excellent at sourcing new grad engineering hires from your old school. Or running data analysis projects. Or whizbang at influencer marketing. It almost doesn’t matter what – it just needs to be high value, repeatable and welcome to come from the cap table (vs needs to live on the org chart).
Sure beyond these two items you will have responsibilities, and should have capacity, to spring into action for one-offs, or other jobs to be done. But I think a beachhead of value aligned against these two ‘customers’ will make you more valuable in specific ways and build your reputation versus just being ‘responsive’ and a ‘good guy.’
Of course YMMV – I’ve never hired or mentored a venture analyst – I’m just observing from my experiences working with founders and venture co-investors. Good luck!
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2025-02-20 22:44:10
Homebrew makes investments by consensus – it works because there’s just two of us. We’ve done it this way for two reasons – first, it works internally given our style of decision-making and respectful but loud debate. Second, it matters to us externally that founders know it’s always Homebrew making the investment – never a situation where one of us was excited and the other one didn’t block it. To that end, backing Regal, now a leader in AI Powered Calls for your businesses’ sales, support and operations, was quick to mutual agreement. Satya and I were excited by the vision and the cofounders’ previous work experience together. Since the world of AI is moving quite rapidly, I wanted to check in with Regal CEO Alex Levin to ask Five Questions.
Hunter Walk: In a recent Five Questions the person I was interviewing said to think about your career as a story you’re telling about yourself. What story does your career tell?
Alex Levin: I remember studying the philosophy and psychology around consciousness in college and thinking I might pursue academia. One day I realized that I could study my topic for my whole career and never get to the end of what was already known. And at that moment, it was crystal clear to me that I had to find a career where I could get to the forefront of what was known more quickly so I could help contribute instead of feeling like I was always behind.
After graduation, I dove headfirst into tech startups as it was clear they were investing the future every day. I knew that one day I wanted to be an executive, or even the top executive. And I understood that if I didn’t know how the sausage was made—if I didn’t know how to build technology—I’d never be eligible for those top roles. So early in my career, I prioritized being close to engineering teams, teaching myself how to build software, and learning how to be a product manager.
When I came across Marc Andreessen’s article, “Why Software is Eating the World” in 2011, it felt like a vindication of the direction I had chosen, but I was already down that path.
I’ve experienced both large and small companies, and I’ve found that I thrive in early-stage environments. It’s like how they describe the professional leagues of any sport: “things move faster”. Also, there’s more opportunity, and you really feel like if you’re not there one day the project doesn’t move forward. I love that sense of accountability.
I’ve been fortunate to take on progressively senior roles, mostly on the commercial side, and experience scale, including reaching $1.5 billion in revenue at Angi. And now, I’ve taken everything I’ve learned and put it to the test by starting a company myself.
Looking ahead, I hope my story is one where I continue to take on challenging opportunities, create something where nothing existed before, and build companies that truly change their markets. And, ideally, not just once—but many times.
HW: Similar to you, I started Homebrew with a former coworker. How did your relationship with Rebecca evolve and do you remember the ‘we’re going to do this!’ moment?
AL: While we were at Handy, Rebecca and I both had our first kids, and I distinctly remember talking about starting something together soon afterwards. We spent months having general conversations, but eventually, we sat down and did a “Founder Dating Quiz”. We went through a list of 20 to 30 key questions—things like our working styles, how big we wanted the company to be, what a good exit looked like, whether we wanted to raise money, what could go wrong, and what we were most worried about. After that, it really felt more real as we knew we were aligned.
It still took some time to land on Regal as the company we were going to start as we had two or three other ideas we seriously considered (which is a story for another time). But when we talked to potential Regal customers about our vision, and how we wanted to change the way companies engage with their customers, the response was overwhelming. People were pulling for it. And once we felt that “market fit”, we jumped in fast.
HW: Regal is an AI-driven company that was founded prior to the ChatGPT launch. How have the last few years accelerated the roadmap? How has it challenged the company?
AL: Coming from a background in product and marketing before Regal, Rebecca and I were used to great tools that could tap into data sources, personalize customer interactions and even apply machine learning—it wasn’t really AI back then—to do some pretty smart things. Meanwhile, in contact centers, teams were afraid to change anything in their software for fear it would all break, let alone try using data for personalization or machine learning. So we knew it would be a bit of an uphill battle to get contact centers to change.
From the very beginning in 2020 we had a vision of better business-customer interactions powered by customer data + ml/ai + software for teams to make changes easily. In 2020 the avant-garde AI was for assisting human agents, not autonomously handling tasks, but as we started building, we knew customer data and orchestration had to be at the core of our platform, hoping that one day, autonomous AI Agents could take over the customer conversation instead of a human.
For years, though, AI just wasn’t good enough. But we kept pushing on it because human agents cause issues because they have other motivations, weren’t always well-trained, could quit, or just have an off day. The public might assume humans are the gold standard, but anyone who has actually operated contact centers with human agents knows it’s actually really difficult, and there are plenty of challenges with human agents.
Then, about a year and a half ago, everything changed. LLMs finally reached a level where they could understand and generate language and make decisions similar to humans. And we got to a point that our AI agent demo completely opened our eyes as to what was possible. We started focusing on creating an “omni-agent” system, one where both AI and humans could operate seamlessly. Build the policies, scripts, orchestration, guardrails once, and deploy them to both human and AI agents.
A year and a half ago, not many companies were ready for AI. They worried about hallucinations, customer reception, and whether it would really work. But AI agents have advanced incredibly fast, and the platform we spent four years building to help human agents take the right action actually gave us the best-in-market platform to operate AI Agents and we now have a huge advantage over companies just starting to build AI agents from scratch. So we are seeing a seachange at consumer companies – everyone is evaluating AI Agents in 2025.
The best part of this shift is that it’s made our GTM simpler. To move human agents into Regal required ripping and replacing their current contact center software. Now when we sell Ai Agents, we roll out without touching their contact center software, accelerating the sales process and implementation.
HW: Content marketing dominates the venture industry these days, much of it about Artificial Intelligence. Since you’re down on the field with the actual companies buying these products, what’s something that we’re missing? Share an ‘earned insight’ that you have from the work at Regal?
AL: Rebecca and I are not naturally public people, so for years, we didn’t focus much on marketing. That was a mistake. With our newly built marketing team (who have strongly encouraged us to get on our game and step up), we are finally getting in front of more customers, and Rebecca and I are starting to embrace building in public.
One simple earned insight is about how to start testing AI Agents in production. Every company wants to start small. And most gravitate to small use cases (like out of hours) to test. I always advise against that as even if that succeeds, it won’t have a material impact on the company and you will need to start again with a larger use case. Instead, pick the largest use case for voice (like your main inbound or outbound calls) and test your AI Agent on 1% of calls to start. Then as it succeeds, scale up to have impact immediately.
HW: What’s your advice for founders who might be starting companies today in the general AI space – let’s focus on those who are using AI to solve problems for customers (applied AI) versus lower in the stack base models or deployment infra.
AL: Rebecca and I are founders and angel investors in the AI Voice space. You have to assume every company will have access to the same LLMs and voices. The challenge, then, is to build a company that thrives despite this reality. Said otherwise, build a “thick” workflow or application layer that will provide value no matter what the LLM and voices do.
So much of what Regal focuses on, and what we invest in as angels focuses on role-specific or industry specific workflow tools for generative AI to solve problems that LLMs alone cannot. For example, integrating AI into customer data systems, and enabling actions (like processing payments, updating CRMs, or sending SMS messages). Or ensuring AI stays within its intended scope, provides accurate information, and recognizes when it should say, “I don’t know.”
These challenges exist across industries and roles, and won’t be solved by LLMs alone.
Thanks Alex! To demo Regal, or learn more about their product, head to their website. And if you want to join a fast growing company that cares not just about what they’re building, but how they’re building it together as a team, well, Regal is hiring.
Bluesky has the JUICE – follow me there
2025-02-17 08:55:52
Podcasts are typically escapism for me, which is why I don’t listen to very many about tech or venture capital. Except The Learning Corner from Precursor, because I love Charles Hudson.
A few months back they were discussing Solo GPs and some ways their processes differ from larger partnerships. Prompted by a blog post from Ubiquity Ventures, Charles notes “the whole ‘I couldn’t get it through my partners,’ I’ve always found that to be a really unsatisfying thing to tell a founder,” for reasons of intellectual honesty, competency and/or agency.
CHARLES WE ARE SINGING FROM THE SAME HYMNAL MY FRIEND. Here’s the post I wrote a while back about the same topic.
So, if you’re raising from a multipartner VC firm, as most are, you should always:
I. Understand the decision making process at the firm
II. Use your lead partner to help you understand the firm’s general sentiment towards deals like yours (partnerships have long histories and they will/won’t like deals because it reminds them of successes/failures in the past)
III. Help your lead partner with their partners. You want as many advocates in the partner meeting as possible. Work with, but not around, your lead partner to ID backchannel references you can be providing, etc
And always enroll any current investors to help you navigate this – Homebrew can help 
Bluesky has the JUICE – follow me there
2025-02-15 02:34:50
Valentine’s Day. Perfect time to curl up with a good URL.
How to Plan An Annual Family Summit [Bethany Crystal/Hard Mode First] – Bethany and I were grabbing wine one evening in NYC over the December holidays when she mentioned this was underway (Family Summit 2024). Before I could even complete the sentence “And are you blogg….,” she said yes, there was a post underway detailing how she and her husband run this process for themselves. And here it is – “Simple strategies for setting goals and Priorities with Your Partner for the year ahead”
The Evolution of Perception Markets: Schelling Point Companies, Reality Ratios, & Narrative Receptacles [Michael Dempsey/Compound] – I only understand about 50% of what Dempsey writes about, but that’s enough to earn a spot here. This essay hits for me. Basically it asks what happens when the reality distortion field of technology isn’t about convincing consumers to believe, but investors. And how enough durable investor belief (in the form of high P/E ratios, ongoing new capital) can make the future come true. I’ll give you a quote from the end that stood out for me
A consistent theme I’ve observed over the past few years has been human’s increasingly aggressive speculative nature and our inability to parse signal from noise. These concepts permeate into so many different branches of our lives.
Back to Text: How AI Might Reverse Web Design [Tomasz Tunguz/Theory] – What does the web look like when it’s optimized for AI Agents instead of people and web crawlers? Tomasz’ posts are always brief, but I think this is a good starting point for the question.
9 Signs a Startup Isn’t Going to Make It [Jason Lemkin/SaaStr] – I throw up a little in my mouth every time I read this post because there’s a lot of truth here in terms of startup warning signs. For example, Sign #1: A Founder’s Understanding of Their Market Doesn’t Get Deeper Over Time.
Losing It On Live TV [Jason Zinoman/NYTimes] – In honor of the SNL50 show coming up this sunday, here’s a fun article about when their performers start cracking up on camera, something which show creator Lorne Michaels supposedly hates, but the audience generally loves.
Bluesky has the JUICE – follow me there
2025-02-08 01:06:13
I’ve changed my mind about something.
It stings when someone I know starts a company and doesn’t tell me about the financing. Either to consider participating (since it’s my job) or at the very least to say, hey, FYI, I wanted to let you know before you heard elsewhere but I founded a new thing and it got funded.
My well-adjusted mature adult self understands these situations [I’m not all things to all people; they have their own priorities; etc] but my lizard brain still twitches with “fuck them” or “I’m a failure.” Or both. Then I calm down by reflecting, “don’t take it personally,” and let it pass. But it sometimes, kinda, often, still lingers around the person for me.
But now I’m not even thinking about it personally. I’ve replaced that word for these situations with ‘professionally’ instead. And I am ok taking it professionally.
Taking it professionally means understanding why I didn’t have the chance to chat with the founder during a financing event. And using that feedback – if applicable – to continue improving our communications, our product SKU, and so on. To treat it like a To Do, or an Action Item, or just a piece of data to be prioritized accordingly. Not needlessly letting it weigh on my psyche, or my relationship with the individual (unless there’s really something between us that needs to be resolved in order to strengthen both the personal and professional bond).
Take it professionally.