Why I Write (These Days)
A VC Blogging About VCs Blogging
Good blog post this morning from Fred Wilson. In it, he attempts to give some insight into the motivation behind VC blog posts (inspired by this tweet from Joe Fernandez) as well as dispel the notion that these should be taken as scripture. Instead, it’s mainly marketing.
As Fred writes:
So how should entrepreneurs use this knowledge that is being imparted by VCs on a regular basis? Well first and foremost, you should see it as content marketing. That is what it is. That doesn’t mean it isn’t useful or insightful. It may well be. But you should understand the business model supporting all of this free content. It is being generated to get you to come visit that VC and offer them to participate in your Seed or Series A round. That blog post that Joe claimed is not scripture in his tweet is actually an advertisement. Kind of the opposite of scripture, right?
I have perhaps a unique vantage point on this having come from the world of professional blogging and having moved into the world of professional investing. And, of course, I still write from time-to-time.
I often get asked about the motivation behind my writing these days. My first answer is the best one: writing helps me clarify my own thoughts on any given topic. For me, this has always been the case and will undoubtedly always be the case. But the second answer has changed, since I no longer get a paycheck for writing (at least not directly).
As Fred suggests, it is essentially marketing these days. But coming where I come from, that’s a weird concept to think about — especially since I feel like I still write about many of the same things I used to write about. At the same time, I know he’s right because with increasing frequency, I get entrepreneurs who reach out to me based on something I’ve written.
It’s great: I write about something I’m interested in and it finds its way to someone working on something in that field. Very efficient… marketing!
The term gets a bad rap. It sounds dirty. It’s because the most-frequent connotation implies that the message is disingenuous.
These days, we seem to have more VC blog posts than ever before. This may or may not be a direct result of Medium — a platform which, get ready for it: I’m an investor in through GV. Some are great. Some are not great. Plenty are misguided. But very few seem disingenuous.
Most are simply boring.
The more pressing issue to me is to remain interesting. While I’m perfectly happy to have my thoughts on a topic find their way to the right entrepreneur working in the space, I still hope that an even broader audience finds what I’m writing about interesting as well.
Maybe that’s why I still largely shy away from writing directly about investing-related topics. Plenty of folks, like Fred, write about such things in an interesting way. I’m not sure I could. Perhaps that comes with time. Perhaps not. The excuse used to be that I was still learning. But I’ve come to realize that I’ll always be learning in this field. That’s sort of the job.
And with that in mind, I’ll echo the sentiment never to take anything you read — from a VC, but generally as well — as gospel. Settle for insightful.
