This week: Claire Zau’s Founder-Led Content Playbook and upcoming events.
UPCOMING NYC EVENTS
FOUNDERS COFFEE & CO-WORKING Th Oct 8 | West Village 8-11 AM
We’re back at our favorite West Village outpost for coffee, matcha and co-working with fellow founders.
ROOFTOP SOCIAL | Thu Oct 15 | SoHo 630-830 PM
Join us on a refined SoHo rooftop next Thursday. Come join for drinks, views and conversation with fellow founders & operators. With a 3x exited founder, friends from Prosper, a16z Speedrun, YC and more.
CLAIRE'S FOUNDER-LED CONTENT PLAYBOOK
Claire Zau is Partner and New Media at Lightspeed, Forbes 30 Under 30 in VC, and has built an audience of 400K+ people reaching millions monthly. She led a workshop in NYC last week on founder-led content. Here's our TL;DR:
Her opening frame was: "Capital is commoditized. Attention is not." That's the reason this conversation matters. It’s not about vanity metrics, but the fact that a potential hire, customer, or investor who has read your thinking for six months before you meet them is a fundamentally different conversation than a cold intro.
The most practical thing she said: give your content a job before you make it. "Get more views" is not a job. "Help technical buyers understand why this problem is harder than it looks" is a job. "Attract engineers who care about this specific domain" is a job. The content strategy should follow from that, not the other way around.
At the same time, not everyone needs to be out there and build in public. The more consumer facing you are, the more helpful it will be. In enterprise or deep tech, you may want to spend less effort on content, or tailor the tone and cadence it to your specific audience.
One number worth remembering: a single post promoting an engineering role for a portfolio company got 15,000 views and resulted in 700 applications. That's content leading to tangible results and conversion.
You’re welcome to join our WhatsApp Community where we share additional resources and you can connect with other community members. We’re also working on improved matching and introductions based on interest at our events and beyond, and have exciting updates to announce on that soon. As a first step, we’ve added ‘Who are you looking to meet’ to our event RSVP flow.
Looking to partner with us, or want to join the team? Shoot us a note here.
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See you soon,
Stephan, Jacqui & the F&O Team