- Duration: 25 min
- Platform: zoom
- Source: Read.ai 01JQ9FAVW9Z6XTQS843S373YVF (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JQ9FAVW9Z6XTQS843S373YVF)
Transcript
[Michelle Kwok]: Oh, I’m a bit late. [Michael Houck]: Oh, you’re good, Michelle. [Michelle Kwok]: How you doing? How’s it going with you? [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: It’s good. [Michael Houck]: I saw one of my favorite bands last night, which was nice. It’s, um, this band called dark side. I don’t know if you’re like into, I don’t know, the genre is kind of weird. Uh, Nicholas jar, like house and techno stuff at all. [Michelle Kwok]: Do you know it’s on how it’s in tech now, but Nicholas jar sounds familiar. [Michael Houck]: Let me, I’ll, I’ll drop one of his tracks here. [Michelle Kwok]: And, um, Oh, I watched his boiler room set. [Michael Houck]: Oh yeah. Yeah. Yeah. He’s, he’s, he’s really good. [Michelle Kwok]: Um, you know, I’ll drop this dark side. [Michael Houck]: Why do I, I don’t know that though. Dark side is like his like jam band kind of, um, very different than his normal stuff, but very, very cool. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: New York. Cool. [Michael Houck]: Um, But yeah, so I think the reason I just looped Jamie in yesterday, she was like super sick. And so I didn’t know if she was going to be able to do it, but she’s really the right person for this in our team. So I really wanted her to be able to do it. She’s down for the book too, which is great. So we can talk about that. But first, I mean, let’s probably just talk about process and we can talk about the video strategy and everything. I mean, it’s pretty process-wise, it’s pretty straightforward from here. Basically, Jamie will be sharing ideas and like specific questions about those ideas that come up during her process. And, you know, if you have- That’s on the Slack? Yeah, just through Slack. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just want to reply to those just with like, hey, here’s our viewpoint on that. Great. That’s all we need. Voice notes are preferred. But text is okay and she’ll get the content to you each week and we’ll sort of work a few weeks ahead too so we’re not you know scrambling from week to week but yeah pretty pretty straightforward process wise from here and then you’ve been doing an amazing sort of sending so many links over with like why you like those posts please keep doing that some clients don’t share a ton of context with us and the more you share the the sort of better the the output will be movie. So we appreciate it. [Michelle Kwok]: I think the thing that’s missing from the links that I sent is like the voice. Basically, like everyone’s voice is very blah. And him wants to be like, not borderline controversial. But like, oh, never really expected that he would talk like that. [Michael Houck]: That’s cool. I like it. [Michelle Kwok]: I had trouble kind of going through the type form because I would say he has controversial beliefs sometimes and he’s willing to say it, but because he’s a public figure at the same time, we don’t want it to be [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: too crazy. [Michelle Kwok]: Especially with the political environment. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. [Michael Houck]: How much do you want us to stick to like startup world topics versus like going into some other things that he has, I guess, strong opinions on? [Michelle Kwok]: I definitely think we have to stick to the VC startups right now for the next few months because we just need to be clear. My goal right now is on both DAs and PIMs, like what I said, We have very similar beliefs, obviously, with the DA, what we want to be showcasing on DA and what we want to be showcasing on Tim. It is an extension of him, essentially the VC firm. And so right now, what we lack is clarity. People who know Tim are like, oh, I know that he invests in crypto because that’s where we made a lot of our money. But we’re obviously investing in so many different things. Now, and one of our first investments was SpaceX, and we’ve invested in a lot of aerospace, and like defense tech and stuff like that, and people don’t know. So I think what I sent over with the investment philosophy is like, we need to have a lot of clarity around what we invested in, why and why we’re different. And the biggest read, like one liner kind of thing of why we’re different is, we’ll invest in moonshots before anyone believes in and that’s kind of the voice that we want to have is that people might think we’re crazy or people might think this is bizarre or like for example the I guess the level of controversial we’re willing to go is we invested in um we invested in a artificial womb technology company and obviously yeah yeah so obviously like that is a controversial subject. But yeah, it’s not controversial to the point where it’s like, I love Trump, you know? Yeah, for sure. For sure. [Michael Houck]: Yeah, there’s, there’s gonna be people who are like, artificial wounds are scary. Like, that’s weird. People are being created in artificial wounds. That’s weird. But then it’s like, it’s not like political extremism. It’s just like an interesting frontier. [Michelle Kwok]: Even liberal people can be like a third of women have endometriosis or PCOS and will not be able to have kids or it’ll be extremely, there’ll be a suffering. And, you know, there’s like a point on both sides of it being good, you know, like people can be like, okay, I get how that can be good for society. And our, the way we are coming in is like, there are crazy things that we can do that sound crazy today, but overall will be good for society and will be good for people. And there’s always, you can always trace it back to something that will be good for someone, like good for like people as a whole. But we need to have that, like, we want to be at the frontier of things. People would think this is fucking crazy. But we want to be the first investors in it and have that type of energy and voice, you know. [Michael Houck]: I really like that because I feel like so much of just VC in general over the past, I mean, especially since sort of the Zerp era ended and folks are like, I don’t be a lot more conservative with their investments now. I’m not taking crazy shots. Like you’re going to attract the best founders and who are thinking on those frontiers if you’re publicly communicating that you are, like, that’s what you’re looking for, you know? Yeah. [Michelle Kwok]: And I think Tim sometimes tweets crazy things and people get it a bit, but it’s not structured. Like, in the same way of the video, like, I don’t know what I’m getting from this video. It’s like, it needs to be structured, and this is the hook, and it’s like, nobody’s gonna read past the hook, basically. If nobody, if you don’t read, if you read the first two lines, and you’re like, I don’t know what the fuck this is. Like, I’m not going to click more. And that’s where we’re lacking structure in the post. But obviously you guys get that. [Michael Houck]: Yeah. I mean, you know, I went from 400 to 56K on Twitter in this niche doing that, like taking Fred’s strong hooks and time and time again. [Michelle Kwok]: So we… Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Lacking the hooks in the list. [Michelle Kwok]: Like we literally, that’s just, we just need the structure right now of like hook and then this is what we do. Or this is what I believe in. And it’s really easily readable. And right now, it just isn’t like, it’s like sometimes like random thoughts. And that’s just like how he is, right? Because he’s so busy. He’s just like, I think this thing and people will agree with it. And people will probably like think it’s interesting, but nobody’s going to read it if they don’t get the first three sentences. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: And I mean, that’s what I saw with the videos too. Like, you know, I think the beginning of the videos is like, hello, this is Tim Draper’s like AI avatar or whatever, you know? And it’s like, you lose 80% of people right away. They’re already gone. So, yeah. [Michelle Kwok]: Whether it’s- The issue with the videos is that Tim signed them to a contract basically. Oh no, okay. So yeah, okay. So I really only found out about this yesterday. Okay. And so, Maybe even like in there, we can, we can get on a call and give them notes because he’s so open. This guy, Mark is so open to editing the videos and he wants them to be good. Um, we unfortunately are signed to a contract because him is like using them to launch his TV series or some shit like that. Um, yeah, I don’t really, I don’t know what’s happening to be honest with that. Um, like, My goal, I would like it to be very clean. We have one to two social posts a week and they’re clean and thought through and stuff like that. We do have to work with some stuff like this sometimes just because he has, the Draper ecosystem is so large and he has to promote so many different things. So there will be some stuff like that and there needs to be structure in the noise. One, yeah. The posting, they don’t do the posting of the videos. So there’s this like random dude, Mitch that I haven’t met, who’s apparently on one of the other Draper teams. Sorry, I’m being like really honest right now. [Michael Houck]: I know, I appreciate it. [Michelle Kwok]: It’s helpful context for me as we walk into this though, it’s all good. That apparently posts all the videos. So I need to find him and be like, I’m going to post them or at least take over that or something like that. Apparently, he’s not like a social media guy. So you can tell from the post, like, you don’t know what is in the video. It just says, like, maybe I think they used to say Draper decentralized number 42. I’m like, what is that? You know, like, it has to have like, the hook and the clear. This is what we’re gonna get from this video at the very least. And then maybe if you’re able to even talk to Mark, who is in charge of editing the videos, and like creating the scripts for the videos, give them direction on what your strategy is so it can kind of align. Because he was like, he wanted to know what social agency we ended up going with so that he could align the strategy. So like, if there is clear content delineation, buckets, strategy, something like that, that you can convey to Mark, it may synthesize things a little bit better. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yep. [Michael Houck]: I think we could also help with is the scripting. You know, we do that for my own content. We do that for a few other people, too. So if that’s an area where we work with them and their scripts are not sort of getting to the point that we would need them to be, obviously, we’ll try to make that work first. But if that’s the case, they just want to handle the sort of video and editing side of it. [Michelle Kwok]: Be happy to help out on that side, too. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Let’s try to make them feel We’ll work with what we got. [Michelle Kwok]: Yeah, let’s try to make them feel like they have control over the whole thing, but then are aligning with our content strategy stuff first and then let’s see what happens. But the posting aspect of it, I don’t know if we can figure something out with that because I’m really not happy with that. [Michael Houck]: Hey, look, we’re going to figure this out together. It’s okay. It’s, we’ve got this, we’ll take our baby steps here. Okay, cool. [Michelle Kwok]: Okay, great. Is there, was there something we had to run through? [Michael Houck]: I’d rather do it with Jamie, the doc, if you’re cool with that. Okay. She can lead that conversation, sort of ask the follow-up questions that come up to her as we go, but yeah, I guess let’s plan to set up some time with, I guess it’s Mark or whomever the video side. [Michelle Kwok]: Yeah, let me put you in a let me put you in a thread with him. He’s very eager and like very down to figure things out. [Michael Houck]: And I definitely want to be respectful of that. [Michelle Kwok]: Yeah, I will. I will be nice. I promise. But you know, I feel like you know exactly what I’m talking about. And yeah, is there any other, I think, yeah, that was the main clarification that I wanted to say with all the posts I found. I just felt like they have really good structure, which is what I really like, but none of them are, have this interesting voice that’s like fun. And a little bit edgier, like a little bit more like we’re willing to say anything. Not like unhinged, but like a, you know. [Michael Houck]: Hey, Tim showed up to the meeting wearing his Bitcoin tie, so I knew we were a little bit, a little bit off. [Michelle Kwok]: Yeah, like he’s like a billionaire, but like, where’s his Bitcoin tie? [Michael Houck]: He’s an eccentric billionaire, that’s what he is, it’s fine. [Michelle Kwok]: He has great ideas. It’s like, he has all these great ideas in his head. He’s fantastic. He just, I think we just need to make sure that we get all of that down. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michael Houck]: Okay, we will. And I think, yeah, when you sit over those examples, we’re mainly looking at them for structure anyway. Like that’s sort of the first thing we evaluate and then- And how long have you worked with her? [Michelle Kwok]: Like who is, I thought that she was at Morning Brew. [Michael Houck]: Oh, yeah, yeah. So we’ve worked together for a bit. We’ve known each other for a bit. She used to write the Morning Brew newsletter, and then also the Robin Hood Snacks newsletter. Not with us, just when she was working at those companies. She’s very, I guess, high quality in terms of ghostwriting. She’s US-based. She’s super solid, strong communicator, gets sort of the startup VC ecosystem and the financial side of it, too, is great. So I think she’s a really good fit. [Michelle Kwok]: Okay, awesome. How did you find her? [Michael Houck]: When she I think she got like laid off from Robin Hood when they did some layoffs and we found her on Twitter and I reached out and we just started talking and we hit it off and she’s been she’s been helping out. [Michelle Kwok]: So yeah. Okay, awesome. Okay, great. Well, I look forward to meeting her? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, we’ll get that set up. I hope she’s better this week. So we can do it on like Friday or something. But if not, we’ll do it starting next week and we can get things moving. [Michelle Kwok]: And what are you thinking about when the content starts? Yeah. [Michael Houck]: So after that meeting, we’ll just get started on the first batch. So like, let’s say we do that on Friday or Monday, I guess. We’d be doing research and we can get you the first batch probably within a week of So next week at some point, and then it would just be weekly batches from, from there on out. [Michelle Kwok]: Um, and what days do you usually post it? Are you, what are you thinking about that type of cadence? [Michael Houck]: Honestly, like people, in my opinion, over indexed on this, I don’t actually think it matters too much what day you post, but we do like to get in sort of a rhythm of like picking the days of the week. They’ll post from Tim’s accounts versus the, um, I don’t know. Honestly, I think we experiment early on. We try like, you know, longer form on the weekend. We try, you know, maybe like shorter, more hooky type posts during the week and see how that goes. Regardless of the day though, it’s more important about the time. I would definitely recommend that we post early in the morning. I mean, you probably know this, but like it’s, you’re in basically an auction competition in terms of how you’re ranking in the algorithm, right? So the more engagement signals you can collect before other people log on for the day, you’re going to be the one up in the top of their feed when they finally do log on at lunch or something like that. So, um, I don’t know, I guess you guys are mostly West coast. So, uh, maybe a little later than like super early in the morning for like East coast people, but, um, definitely like morning for you guys for sure. [Michelle Kwok]: Yeah. I found that like Mondays to Thursdays have kind of been the best days. Okay. Uh, but I don’t know if you have, I’ve actually never posted on the weekend because I feel like you already Are people on LinkedIn on the weekends? [Michael Houck]: Yeah, you’d be surprised. More so Twitter, more so Twitter for sure. Oh, Twitter, yeah, yeah, yeah. The thing is, a lot of people have the same mindset that you do, which is, no one’s on LinkedIn on the weekends, so I’m not going to post. So there’s like an arbitrage opportunity with the people’s attention who are on LinkedIn to get in front of them on the weekends, because there’s not that much good content being posted on the weekend on LinkedIn. So it’s a balance, but we should experiment and see what performs best. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Okay. Okay, cool. [Michelle Kwok]: Sounds good. Just let me know when she’s better. I hope she gets better soon. That sucks. [Michael Houck]: It’s terrible timing, but we will make sure she’s better. We can do the kickoff ASAP. Great. [Michelle Kwok]: And then you said that you and Blake look over everything, or you or Blake look over everything? [Michael Houck]: Yeah. Nothing will get sent to you for review without Blake and or I reviewing it first and editing it first. [Michelle Kwok]: Okay. Fantastic. [Michael Houck]: And then last thing on my agenda, my side was the book. So maybe let’s let you meet Jamie first and then we talk about that after that. Okay. Yeah. Sounds good. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Cool. [Michelle Kwok]: The book is another beast of a thing. [Michael Houck]: I feel like it’s going to be a very fun thing to dive into, but I imagine there’s like a whole bunch of other stuff about that. Yeah. [Michelle Kwok]: And I feel like we need to like get the voice down first before we do the book. [Michael Houck]: I agree. I agree. [Michelle Kwok]: Cause we just want everything to be the same. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Yeah. [Michael Houck]: Let’s, let’s let, let’s let you and Jamie get into a groove and then we’ll, we’ll dive into, to the book from there. [Michelle Kwok]: Great. Great. Okay. Thanks so much. I’ll see you later. [Michael Houck]: Talk soon, Michelle. Bye.