📶 Community, capital, and the future of venture with Jacob Peters (General Partner @ House Capital)

1,891 members 👥 from 1,338 unique funds 💸 across 151 different cities 🌎

📣P.S. Beehiiv (our email host) added new features to help us clean up our page.

Now you can filter previous newsletters by investor interviews, founder interviews, Confluence.VC business recaps, or topic deep dives.

If you run your own newsletter, you're crazy if you don't go with beehiiv to get started.

• Guest: Jacob Peters (@J__Cub)

• Company: House Capital

• Role: Co-Founder & General Partner

• Background: House Capital is the venture arm of Launch House. They invest ~$100k checks to support builders of the next Silicon Valley, and all of their portfolio companies get lifetime access into Launch House.

• How the younger generation is influencing investment

• What the future of venture looks like

• Evaluating community-led companies

• Non-obvious things that make great communities

Key takeaways (30-second version):

• Communities hack their own distribution giving them an unfair advantage. Everybody is competing on attention, and building traffic is way harder than building a product today. Communities create distribution opportunities that are otherwise not available to its members.

• Silicon Valley is no longer SF-based, and today you can bring all the same benefits without forcing companies to move. The secondary effects of this are still unfolding, but the obvious impact is that more companies are becoming investable (funds can't use location as a reason not to pursue a deal anymore).

• a16z built a brand by focusing on media before others. Now this wins them deals that others won't have access to.

• Physical spaces are a marketing tool. If you can occupy cool venues, you attract attention to what you’re building. This all plays back to the first point of winning attention and gaining distribution.

• Community, capital, and media are the pillars of great companies. The largest funds today are investing a massive amount of resources to building / maintaining their communities and media so that they can maintain and grow their capital base.

• Any time you have undifferentiated products, branding becomes more and more important.

• Founders have all the leverage today across all industries. Gatekeeper power declines by the day.

• The founder community space is incredibly crowded; to stand out, you have to offer something different. We've talked about this with previous guests, but a Slack group alone is not enough to get people to show up, and it's definitely not enough to keep them around.

Full talk (50-minute version):

Links we like:

🔮 50 lessons from the next era of venture capital investors

🤝 VC fund decks that close LPs

🧽 Deep dive on curation-as-a-service

🔟 Ten ideas to think about

📶 List of growth tips

⍰ Thoughts on pointless jobs and meaningless careers

🗺 We made our roadmap public (vote on what we should build next)

Sponsored by Subcovery

Don't build your SaaS on hard mode.

Winning at SaaS requires an edge. This will give you that edge.

Whether you need pricing help, ideas on how to market your SaaS, where to find your first 100 customers, or a list of tools to make your life easier, we've got you covered.

Featured jobs:

Lighter Capital is looking for an investment director in SF

Sydecar is looking for a remote marketing manager

How'd we do this week?

I love it 😍 | Meh 😒 | This stinks 🥵

Thanks for reading this far and giving us a little bit of your attention this week.

Feel free to unsubscribe whenever this stops becoming valuable to you.

- Clay and Tyler

Sign up for our referral program if you want to start getting free stuff by sharing what we're working on.