These founders landed early checks by being savvy about social media

On first blush, founders building a coffee brand, a social networking app and a fintech-focused venture fund wouldn’t appear to have much in common. But at TechCrunch Disrupt, the founders, together on stage, credited their early success in raising venture capital to their use of social media platforms.

It’s an interesting and increasingly necessary ingredient. While one founder, Nik Milanović, who launched a small fintech-focused media company and an associated venture fund, happens to enjoy the kind of profile that VCs tend to notice (Stanford grad, biz dev experience at Google, white), the checks the other two founders raised are something of a statistical anomaly.

Gefen Skolnick, the founder of coffee brand Couplet Coffee, is a woman; just 2.4% of venture dollars flowed toward women-led companies in 2021. For a Black founder like Josh Ogundu, whose app Campfire invites users to create and share 30-second audio stories associated with pictures on their phones, the odds of getting a check were an even more abysmal 1.3% in 2021. (For Latin and Black women founders, the chances of receiving venture funding in 2021 were closer to zero.)

Though Ogundu and Skolnick made the point that going to esteemed schools and logging time at brand-name companies helped even the playing field (he attended both Michigan State and the University of Southern California and had a stint at TikTok; she attended UCLA and worked at Tesla, among other internships), all three suggested that savvy use of social media can do more than make it easier to connect with investors and customers — it can keep a founder and their brand relevant and accessible, too.

Skolnick said that being authentic on Twitter helped her attract attention from consumers, community members and investors alike.

In fact, Away co-founder Jen Rubio first noticed Skolnick on Twitter and reached out to see about investing in her company. What’s Skolnick’s secret to being authentic?

“It’s ramblings. It’s dating stuff. It’s [fund]raising stuff. It’s coffee stuff. It’s consumer packaged good stuff. It’s really just what’s on my mind, but obviously here and there, I’ll talk about the progress with Couplet and gets people enticed [ … ] there’s a lot going on in the DMs.”

Like Skolnick, Ogundu said he doesn’t have an overarching strategy when it comes to social media — he isn’t posting on a regular cadence or coming up with elaborate routines — but he is mindful to use it, particularly TikTok, where he spent nearly two years in product operations. Indeed, it was then that he began posting TikToks, including tongue-in-cheek takes on Silicon Valley that attracted the attention of investor Charles Hudson of Precursor Ventures, who ultimately led Campfire’s pre-seed round of funding.

Milanović has also been consistent about building up a following. He has largely done this through a weekly email newsletter called This Week in Fintech that he said has tens of thousands of subscribers — some of whom he has turned into limited partners in an accompanying seed-stage venture fund.

But he said Twitter is at the heart of much of that networking.

“If you’re interested in a space and you’re really passionate about it, connect with other people who are also interested in that space on Twitter,” he said at Disrupt.

Twitter doesn’t require that you “broadcast some kind of like perfect picture of your life,” a departure from platforms like Instagram. Instead, he said, it “really is creating a focused conversation and allowing dialogue between people who otherwise wouldn’t have a chance to connect, adding that there is a “kind of slow and steady build.”

Interestingly, all of the founders said that being authentic — including revealing online that things aren’t always going flawlessly — has actually helped, not hurt, despite the common wisdom that to maintain the confidence of investors and potential hires and even customers, founders need to project an aura of success at all times.

“I think we’ve seen a generational shift toward authenticity, which I really appreciate,” Milanović said. “Something that I admire a lot more about Gen Z and millennials is I think people feel a lot more comfortable with being their whole selves and not compromising and only bringing their work self to work.”

Indeed, he added, while “social media used to be Facebook and Instagram — this super-curated version of your life — now it’s TikTok and BeReal, where people are authentic; people reward that authenticity and they build each other up.”

Skolnick echoed the sentiment. “Being able to say, OK, cool, [here’s some] progress, but also being also to say that you’re dealing with a lot of these major problems” has proven effective in her community-building efforts.

“I even tweeted yesterday that it was kind of not a good day as a founder, and it was really nice and people engaged with that. [ … ] I don’t believe in constantly showing that things are good. Some days things are just not good.”

That said, all three panelists said that while they were comfortable sharing their thoughts about their careers and their work on social media, they’re careful not to involve too much of their personal lives or the lives of others in these same streams.

“I tweet my thoughts but I don’t tweet my life on TikTok,” as Ogundu put it. “I’m making videos [with a] lens [on] the industry. That’s not a personal thing; that’s more of a creative thing.”

As for sharing more of his personal life, “I personally get no value out of that,” he added. “There are certain things, for me personally, that I just want to keep to myself.”