“Chief Meme Officer” was once Turner Novak’s tongue-in-cheek job title, and his 161,300 X followers probably know why. Yet, he has it clear: “If you think about raising a venture fund and you need to raise $50 million, somebody’s not going to say: ‘Wow, that’s a great meme, here’s $10 million.”
Why all the memes, then? Because “it’s a good way to fill up the pipeline and maybe meet someone,” Banana Capital’s founder said at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Novak was sharing the Builders Stage with fellow emerging fund managers Noramay Cadena and Mac Conwell. The three of them have one thing in common: They are building their venture firms in public.
“Building in public” means different things to different people. “I don’t practice absolute transparency in any aspect of my life,” Cadena said, eliciting laughs. Her firm, Supply Change Capital, also leans more toward blogging and LinkedIn posts than memes and tweets. But she, Novak and Conwell agreed that creating content is a pipeline strategy.
When launching his firm RareBreed Ventures while being very active on social media, Conwell noticed firsthand that it wasn’t a panacea. “In my first 90 days of fundraising doing the Twitter strategy, I did over 1,100 meetings; that only soft-circled $3 million because at the end of the day, . . . they still have to want to invest in you or invest your fund because you have a thesis, because you have a point of view, because you have a product.”
While the panelists are VCs, their advice also applies to founders: “Just because you have 100,000 followers on Twitter doesn’t mean you’re going to get funded,” Conwell said.
Why bother?
It may not get you funded, but a strong online presence can get you the first meeting, and that’s important, too.
Conwell’s anecdote on his 1,100 meetings is not that anecdotal; Cadena recalled sitting down with some 400 prospective LPs in the first six months of raising her fund. “Those meetings yielded 19 investors and $2.1 million, and that’s the capital that got us in business,” she said.
The fact that this initial sum wasn’t that far from what an entrepreneur might seek to raise also indicates that this piece of advice applies to both sides of the table. Even more so in the current fundraising environment: When “no” becomes the default answer from investors, closing a round often becomes a numbers game. The more meetings, the more chances to succeed, and that requires a wide funnel.
Getting enough people to pay attention to you and to your thesis can help beyond raising money. For example, Cadena recalled that it also helped Supply Change Capital build a network of co-investors, and make sure that the inbound deals coming her way were relevant. And again, that’s just an example.
“Building in public is a way to fill up a pipeline of some kind, whether you’re raising a venture fund, a founder acquiring customers, raising money for your company, you know, insert whatever you’re doing,” Novak said. As for our three panelists’ takes on how to do it and what may or may not work depending on your profile, make sure to watch the full video: