📶 Podcast Wisdom of the Year: The Best Takeaways from Confluence.VC Podcast Guests in 2022

1,663 members 👥 from 1,291 unique funds 💸 across 120 different cities 🌎

Login 🔑 | Join 👥 | Hire top VC talent 📌 | Find software 🔎

We spent ~40 hours interviewing 21 investors and startup founders this year.

Here are the best takeaways from our podcast guests in 2022.

P.S. We're running our annual VC comp survey.

We'll be sharing results next month, and we're running this survey for the next two weeks. If you want an easy way to help us help you, let us know how you got paid this past year.

Amir Kabir (Partner @ AV8 Ventures)

• Topics covered: The hierarchy of VC priorities, finding product-market fit as an insurtech business, and looking for honesty when evaluating founding teams

Full talk + all top takeaways

Jake Barry + Kai Han (Co-Founders @ Pallet)

• Topics covered: The past, current, and future state of business recruiting, community-based marketing, and creating value through aggregation

Full talk + all top takeaways

Kenny Rose (Founder @ Franshares)

• Topics covered: Cash flow compared to speculative bets, creating hype before a product launch, and unromantic parts of startup life

Full talk + all top takeaways

Michael Quigley (Co-Founder @ Impel)

• Topics covered: How to balance multiple responsibilities, partnerships and commitment in a world of abundance, and the most exciting trends in venture

Full talk + all top takeaways

Tyler Denk (CEO @ beehiiv)

• Topics covered: Creating an “us vs. them” mentality, processes to ship product faster, and why free is not always better

Full talk + top takeaways

Dustin McCaffree (Founder @ Marvel)

• Topics covered: Winning at SEO, why every company is becoming a media company, and overcoming bottlenecks

Full talk + top takeaways

Fed (Founder @ Hive Index)

• Topics covered: Things that great online communities do well, community-focused businesses, and the rise of the solopreneur

Full talk + top takeaways

Nic Talreja (CEO @ Sydecar)

• Topics covered: Why more junior investors are using SPVs to build their track record, the benefits of not building in public, and attracting top talent as an early-stage startup

Full talk + top takeaways

Kirby Porter (Founder @ New Game Labs)

• Topics covered: Figuring out your “why”, NIL and its impact on college athletes, and layering on community to improve your offering

Full talk + top takeaways

Nick Moran (GP @ New Stack Ventures)

• Topics covered: Becoming an insider, the solo capitalist movement, and why it’s worth betting on talent outside of the hubs

Full talk + top takeaways

Alexa Grabell (CEO @ Pocus)

• Topics covered: Branding as a product-led growth company, creating early demand for your product, and extracting value from investors after they write checks

Full talk + top takeaways

Zain Jaffer (Head @ Zain Ventures)

• Topics covered: Prepping for a successful exit, non-obvious differences between family offices and traditional funds, and opportunities in the future of real estate

Full talk + top takeaways

Melissa Widner (CEO @ Lighter Capital)

Topics covered: Revenue-based financing dynamics, ownership preferences, and how downturns affect capital markets

Full talk + top takeaways

David Kobrosky (CEO @ Intros AI)

• Topics covered: What makes a great place to gather, differences between Web2 and Web3 communities, and similarities between choosing jobs and communities

Full talk + top takeaways

Mike Suprovici (Head of Acceleration @ VC Lab)

• Topics covered: Candidates to become emerging managers, the most challenging parts of raising fund one, and non-obvious things about pitching LPs

Full talk + top takeaways

Jacob Peters (General Partner @ House Capital)

• Topics covered: How the younger generation is influencing investment decisions, evaluating community-led companies, and non-obvious things that make great communities

Full talk + top takeaways

Anubhav Srivstava (Founder @ Tactyc)

• Topics covered: Why fund managers should never be creating spreadsheets, the importance of portfolio construction and scenario planning, and what’s going on behind the scenes in the venture services market

Full talk + top takeaways

Drew Glover (General Partner @ Fiat Growth)

• Topics covered: Differences in evaluation and investment frameworks at different parts of a company lifecycle, overcoming hurdles of selling into financial services, and subsectors of fintech worth betting on

Full talk + top takeaways

Mack Kolarich (VP @ Assure)

• Topics covered: Perspectives on building track record, SPV trends, and takeaways on innovation within the VC tech stack

Full talk + top takeaways

Matt Knight (Founder @ Proptech Angel Group)

• Topics covered: Running an angel group vs. running a traditional fund, subsections of proptech worth betting on, and takeaways from growing a paid community to 200 members

Full talk + top takeaways

This week's episode is brought to you by:

Jasper.ai: The Best AI Writing Assistant

If you are creating content, you NEED to be using Jasper.

We started using Jasper last month, and it's been a game changer for us.

Especially as a small team, we're usually limited by time and bandwidth. We can't afford to spend days writing blog posts, but we also didn't want to outsource writing to somebody that we would need to invest a bunch of training into.

Lucky for us, Jasper exists, and we've used their copywriting software to automate blog posts, feature descriptions, listicles, and other parts of our content creation.

We've started referring it to some of our friends, and this is what they've had to say. Forgive the grammar - maybe they need an AI writing assistant?

Check out Jasper if you want to level up your content game, rank higher in Google, and get more traffic to your business.

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