- Duration: 35 min
- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01JZNFA1CE3V057RK8X0DNH2SJ (https://app.read.ai/analytics/meetings/01JZNFA1CE3V057RK8X0DNH2SJ)
Transcript
[Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: sort of proactively was like, you guys should meet. I don’t know. [Rashad Assir]: So here we are. [Rashad Assir]: He didn’t run it by he didn’t run it by me. So I assume he didn’t run it by you either. In the B.C. World. But I I have a lot of love for the guy. So I and I was I looked at your profile. You seem awesome. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: So I was very happy to meet. But yeah, same same exact vibe here. I was like, I don’t normally take intros without Some context, but you know, it’s all good man. Yeah How you doing, I guess yeah, what’s um, what are you working on? What’s top of mind for you? I took a look at your profile, but you know, yeah Yeah, same here. [Rashad Assir]: I’ll give you like a two-minute version and then I would love to hear from you, but Basically, I work full-time at a VC called red point. I don’t know if you’re familiar. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah, so we primarily invest in like Software, infrastructure, AI companies have been around for a long time. Last three to four years have made a big push towards a content-first marketing approach. I mean, there’s plenty of VCs doing a lot of content, but we leaned in heavily, basically, on podcasts and short form. Yeah, I’ve seen a ton of your guys’ reels. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: I’ve probably seen you in some of the reels. [Rashad Assir]: Yeah, I’m primarily the creator, director, editor, writer, whatever. But I’ve been able to expand a little bit my team to a few junior producers that do the day-to-day of the podcast stuff. And I’ve got writing partners that help me with the comedy stuff and always looking to bring on more. But that’s primarily how I spend my time. I’m in between the long-form podcast world and the short-form short form video world. And then occasionally, you know, we’ll do stuff to help our portfolio companies as well. Like, you know, we’ll make videos for like a little interview video when we when we invest in a company just to help, you know, promote the fundraise and things like that. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: So yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, more and more founders should do that. I think we try to support founder launches as well. But I know you guys have just done a crazy job of building the content engine. It’s funny Like, um, whenever, whenever I see one of those reels, like show up in my feed, I, I stop and watch it. Like I actually do because other ones I’ve seen have actually been legitimately funny and all that. So yeah, it’s good stuff. [Rashad Assir]: I’m happy to hear that it’s, it’s reaching the right audience. Um, yeah. So, so, so you’re, are you independent? Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: So let’s see, uh, I’ll give you the TLDR. So I did big tech for a while. Uber Eats, and then Airbnb. Peak of COVID founded a company called Launch Houck. We ran co-living residencies for founders all over the world. It was a very press-driven company. We raised an A from Andreessen and had some other high-profile folks involved. And then we raised a fund off the back of it, too. Started investing in the founders who we bring to these programs. And some of those have done, you know, some of those investments have done pretty well. And so the company kind of blew up big PR disaster a few years ago, we had a member who we had to kick out, for, you know, reasons it’s not worth into, but she was very sort of vindictive and took a fake story to the press that got a lot of traction, unfortunately. So when you’re a brand, you’re in company, and you know, you get attacked that way. It’s, it’s tough to recover. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: So yeah, exactly, exactly. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: So we, we folded it into the fund and the fund is the main vehicle there now. Um, and then for the past couple of years, you know, I’ve been focused on helping founders in other ways. So built up a little sort of bootstrapped holding company where we have a, a newsletter that goes out to 75,000 founders a week. Um, off the back of that we sell, um, uh, ghostwriting services. And we also have a creator network of about, I think it’s like 550 creators at this point with like 60 million total followers across LinkedIn and X. And then they also have like newsletters and things like that too. And so we use that to amplify content for founders to, you know, a lot of people use it for fundraising announcements or launches, but some others just use it on a daily basis, sort of build up their brand and get social proof incredibly for people in their niche. So, yeah, basically helping founders out with distribution and all that. It’s been fun. Super cool, man. [Rashad Assir]: So I want to make sure I understand, like, so you still have the fund. It sounds like there’s still some leftover funds that you’re deploying into companies, like basically functioning as a, you know, a strategic or a VC that is getting into the ground. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: Yeah, I mean, we’ve co-invested with a ton of people. Yeah, we don’t, we never led deals, smaller check sizes than that. But these days I do more angel invest in the company that you put a lot into and then, you know, for whatever reason it doesn’t work out, it sort of just feels like your ex girlfriend, you know, that’s just sort of like hanging around. Um, so I do mostly angel investing these days, but you know, I was the first outside money into figure, um, and, uh, and some others as well. So I try to stay in touch with sort of, you know, what’s going on. [Rashad Assir]: Very cool. Uh, okay. And then, so, but the rest of the core business is like a newsletter. So you, uh, are basically like producing content for founders. Is it around like entrepreneurship and like how to find product market fit and stuff like that? Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: I mean, I’m, I’m, I’m a content creator, right? So I, we have a LinkedIn audience, we have a, we’re a newer YouTube audience. And I had a huge Twitter following much where it got suspended actually right now. So hopefully hoping to get that back. [Rashad Assir]: In a post Elon world. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: We were sending too many DMs and hit some like threshold and then they like auto banned us. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: And then I’m working to get it back, but we’ll see how long it takes. But anyway, yeah, so we, the newsletter content is like, advice column for founders. So, you know, fundraising, PMF, growth, all that kind of stuff. We send out two each week and, and yeah, we have some, some other things that we sort of sell through that as well. [Rashad Assir]: How is the, so how does the creator thing work? That’s super interesting. So there’s 500 creators. I’m guessing these are like tech forward, like not even like MKHB, that guy’s like more like consumer tech but you the creators within your network are like you know tech commentators or tech influencers or like I I kind of ran one of these accounts at some point a couple years ago where it was called corporation and it was like making fun of like tech people sketches and stuff like that so like uh most of the followers I gained were like people that worked at you know in startup venture-backed startup companies is it like that kind of stuff yeah Yeah, I mean, we serve a ton of different niches. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: We have everything from people who are into growth marketing, to people who are into AI, to people who are into aviation. And so when a user goes on our platform, shares a post, we have a matching algorithm to match it with the right creators who are online right now. And then they get notified and they go engage with the post. Got it. [Rashad Assir]: And the post will be like, hey, we’ve got a launch coming up. Within a week or two, this is kind of the TLDR on the launch and would love help amplifying or something like that? And do the creators, are they usually getting paid for this? Yeah, so the creators get paid. They all set their own rates and everything like that. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: And the users set a budget for their campaigns and everything. There’s two ways that the users engage the creators. So one is sort of what you’re describing, which is sort of like a forward plan scheduled campaign for the future, where it’s like, hey, we have some big thing coming up. [Rashad Assir]: you to do xyz yeah the other is if they just share the url of a post that like they just took live and they want like instant engagement so commentary things like that yeah yeah so they can whatsapp or telegram and they only have an hour to engage or else they don’t get paid oh that’s very cool sorry by the way you’re it’s it’s cutting a bit like it could be my wi-fi but uh uh I think I got most of that so so Founders can post, uh, they can either do the like forward looking thing, uh, where it might be like a more bespoke engagement where they write some custom copy or they maybe even make like a talking head video about like, Hey, you know, I just found this product. It’s super cool. Or it’s more like an ad hoc. Uh, if you give us a comment or give us a like, we’ll get, you’ll get some sort of like fractional payout, but you know, that can add up over time with the creators. Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I mean, it basically depends what they want, right? Like if you want like a video, if you want like a product testimonial, if you want to be placed in their newsletter, you got to plan ahead. But if you just want them to go comment on social media, like, you know, we have their trust, we have their WhatsApp, we just. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: And by them and they do whatever we sorry, I think we are cutting out a little bit. Yeah. [Rashad Assir]: And so you just have if it keeps going, we can just give you a phone call. But you just have like a platform, it’s basically like a job board or like a timeline board where people can just post to, like, I’m imagining like a Facebook wall kind of thing. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: No, so it’s because it’s paid engagement, we have to make sure that like, you know, we we keep everyone somewhat anonymous on the platform, at least for like the engagement on con. So you actually all you need to do as a user is drop the URL. And then we handle everything else in the back end match it with the right creators. You just give us a budget That’s it. [Rashad Assir]: It’s like ad spend. Oh, oh interesting. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: That’s very cool And then you guys will like you said that’s what the whatsapp thing you’ll send a note to the creator saying hey You know this person and then that starts the clock and you know if they engage within the time then Yeah, and then if they don’t engage within the time we send it to like the next best person basically So it’s sort of like a magical Experience for the user because all they do is set a budget in a couple settings and drop a url and then boom and people they know from their niche are commenting on their stuff. [Rashad Assir]: And are you guys able to do that quasi-algorithmically? Match the creators and stuff? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Oh yeah, it’s totally automated. [Rashad Assir]: There’s no manual work to it at all. That’s so cool. That’s awesome. Because the alternative is the founder goes and emails their VC and they email every influential person in their network and no one wants to be thirsty and so you end up like… [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Well, I mean, yeah, we see a lot of that happening organically, too And so one of the things we’re gonna be launching pretty soon is like private pods within the network So like can get your distribution and your own network system all in all in one place We’ll see. [Rashad Assir]: Yeah Very cool, man. That’s awesome. So that’s called is that called founder? No, sorry. Is that called megaphone? You’re the founder. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, that’s that’s Megaphone. So founding journey is the newsletter. And then Megaphone is sort of the two sided coin because we built this platform with these creators. And that’s how I built my audience. So they were engaging with me. And I was like, well, other founders don’t have those connections. So we built the platform. And a lot of people were using it. And they were like, well, my content isn’t that good. And so that’s why we built the content agency. And then now we’re sort of pivoting away from the human-led content agency and working more with like an AI system that we’ve built to make it more self-serve. So that’s also launching in the next couple of weeks. [Rashad Assir]: Specifically the content agency, that feels like it would be hard to do without like a lot of white glove and hand holding. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, I mean, so we’ve run the agency for a year and it’s done well. We work with everyone from early stage founders billionaire VCs and we do their content. But it’s all human led, right? So it’s linear. But we’ve built an AI system that basically, it’s like 90% of the way to me feeling comfortable totally running my content. And so when we get to that 100%, we’re gonna be probably replacing a lot of our writing team and then increasing margins and making it more scalable and starting to sell that more to and maybe we’ll see where that goes. So that’s what we’re focused on right now. [Rashad Assir]: Do you do you focus on any specific platforms? [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, so X and LinkedIn and also now threads threads is blowing up. I don’t know if you’re as active on there. Yeah. And starting to dip into substack. I have like 200,000 followers on substack. But you know, other people haven’t been as bullish on it. So but we’re starting to see some have been there too. So all the written content platforms basically. [Rashad Assir]: Yeah, very cool, man. Two things that come to mind just in terms of like, where there might be some overlap, but like, one, you know, we’re usually getting a decent heads up, and sometimes even working hand in hand with founders when they are getting ready to launch their thing. Um, and so I feel like this could definitely be a good resource for me to point them to, uh, ahead of time. If, you know, if they want more traction on a launcher, like, Hey, you know, basically anytime they send us that note saying, Hey, will you engage with this? I can sort of respond saying, Hey, you should maybe try out megaphone. And, uh, you know, this is, I’ve heard it all too. So if you have any, I mean, I’ll, I’ll check out the website. Website. Hope I imagine things are pretty clear from there. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, we’re actually right now the agency and the creator network are two separate sites, but we’re launching a combined site. Finally, also next week, so it’ll all be one thing pretty soon. [Rashad Assir]: Yeah, very cool. And yeah, yeah, for sure. The other thing that is interesting to me, and this is a smart for own, for my own sake, because, you know, we’ve gotten, I think, pretty good at, like, Instagram, TikTok, we kind of suck at LinkedIn, but it’s more out of me not wanting to invest the time to learn it, because it’s not as fun as the other platforms. But, yeah, but the point is, like, we’ve had a ton of our founders come to us and say, hey, can you share, you know, social media, best practices, things like that. We have a very limited, I have probably like 30 to minutes to two hours a week to do those types of advisory calls and how helpful they are. It feels to the founder, like it’s a very feel good call for them. They come away feeling like they learned a lot. But at the same time, like I’m like, you would need like six weeks of like a handholding engagement to get anywhere. If you were to go try to act on anything I just said, you just like be spinning your wheels and waste your time, and that would actually be a huge distraction. So most of my advice is actually just avoid social media and focus on your product until that stuff gets good. And then when you’re ready to resource appropriately, go find someone who’s good at making content and actually hire them. But we’ve gone back and forth on this idea of setting up a boot camp for top, top, let’s say, you know, two companies get access to five hours a week with me, you know, and it helps, you know, one of our, let’s say we have a legal AI platform that we invested in. They think there’s an opportunity on TikTok because there’s like all these lawyers on TikTok and stuff like that. So like maybe we could spend time there, you know, working with them to try to figure out how to tap into that. So that’s like just an idea we’ve had that we never, I feel like we should just pull the trigger and experiment with it and see how it goes for a quarter or two. But based on your experience with the agency stuff, it seems like you’re scaling back on the human side. Do you feel like you’ve been able to materially help your clients? Is it really moving the needle for them? And what’s your setup there? Yeah. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: So first of all, that sounds interesting. I have some thoughts. But just to quickly answer your question first, I know we’re over, so I’ll I’ll try to be quick. [Rashad Assir]: Also, I don’t, if you don’t have a hard stop, I don’t. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: No, I don’t have a hard stop either. Okay, cool. Well, yeah, so I mean, we’ve seen good results. So my partner on the agency who handles all of our editing and everything like that, he is this guy, Blakey Mall. He has an even bigger, he has like 100,000 almost on Twitter and has a good size LinkedIn audience too. And as I said, we’ve been running the agency for a year. I’ll just pick one kind of recent client. So we had this one CEO become a client in February, January, February. And she had about 1000 followers, maybe 1100 followers at the time. And now she’s at 18,000. And she’s like getting invited to speak at conferences. And she’s actually been able to launch a second vertical of her business. As a result, it’s already over 100k ARR. So And a lot of that is inbound from from social because you’re a buildup or niche. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: So we’ve seen good results. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: And you know, we know what we’re doing. We built we’ve done this ourselves. Like I’m actually in the weeds operating the business. It’s not like I just send it over to an account manager. And that’s kind of the end of the end of the road. We have thought a lot about basically as part of this push into the AI system. The reason we’re doing that is because we see the market kind of stratifying between people who just want sort of self-serve AI, they give it some guidance, they tweak it, they add their voice, writing samples, pick a persona, et cetera, and then they roll with it. That’s low end of the market that we see. High end of the market that we see is like, you know, fractional chief content officer, strategic advice, build and manage a team for them, things like that. What we see kind of getting hollowed out is that middle of the market of the traditional agency where you have like, you know, a writing partner, at some agency and things like that. So we’re bullish on that kind of stratified setup. And so as part of that, you know, we’d offer this AI thing to people. But the idea would be that Blake, myself, Jacob, and maybe one or two other folks from the team would be more strategically involved. Yeah. So one chart because I can actually partner with fun, do workshops and boot camps at that for building relationships that way with them and seeing who it’s actually helpful for and who actually wants to go deep and all that. So you bring that up, I think that could actually be pretty cool. Yeah. [Rashad Assir]: Sorry, I lost you at the very, very end when you said on the… So the low end I got, the high end, they bring in one of you and then… [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, so it’s just more like a thing about a fractional chief content officer, more strategic work, like either we would manage a content team for them or we would set up an omni-channel strategy or something like that. And so that’s kind of how we see it, and we think that actually workshops would be a pretty cool way to do that. [Rashad Assir]: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you find that CEOs actually prioritize this or when you work with this individual with the 18,000 followers, are they like, hey, I’m serious. I’m going to set aside an hour and a half a week and do writing. And so if you tell me the formats that work and the best practices and stuff like that, they’ll go follow it? Or how often are you working with a VP of marketing or something like that, someone from their team? No, we’re working with the founders. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I think there’s probably out of our 30 something clients, I think there’s two or three where we’re not working directly with founders or if it’s a fund, the So, you know, part of what we offer is basically you don’t need to do that yourself. You don’t need to spend a couple hours a week batching content. You know, we will be the ones who are doing that for you too, whether that’s with our human writers now or with our sort of AI system that we’re starting to roll out. So, you know, there are definitely some clients who they sign up and they’re really bullish on it and then they don’t have any time and it just ends up not being a fit. And, you know, we kind of mutually agree to go our separate ways. Ways, but, um, others are just like, you know, the, the client I mentioned, for example, she’s been totally hands off and she just put a lot of trust in us because she works with Jacob and me and Blake. And she’s like, you guys know what you’re doing. So, yeah, it’s, um, it, it depends on the client. I’d create a screen for that when we first sort of meet them to not waste either person’s time. I said, man, 30, so 30 clients, there’s five of you and then five of you, like, you know, the, the, The top folks that are like yourself uh content creators, and then you have a bunch of ai like, uh, I assume like ghost writers as well Yeah, so it’s it’s blake and I are sort of the quote-unquote like exec team And then jacob is sort of moving himself into that role a little bit more I would say um, he started out just doing some some writing for us and you know, he’s just been He’s been great. And you know, we hire both. Uh christians, so we bonded over that. Uh, tech world, I feel like most people like we’re the minority. So it was nice to bring him on. Yeah, in tech. [Rashad Assir]: Absolutely, man. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: Really? [Rashad Assir]: You feel like it’s a lot of Jewish and Muslim? No, I feel like it’s a lot of people who either agnostic or agnostic. Yeah, you mean like, right by by trade versus by practice, I guess. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Exactly. So yeah, so we bond over that. And then there’s, yeah, as you mentioned, there’s a few other than writers who sort of have individual clients and specialties and things like that. [Rashad Assir]: Yeah, yeah. [Rashad Assir]: Awesome, man. You, it was a super cool story. That’s very cool. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah. Well, look, I’d love to, I’d love to help out any way we can. If you guys end up doing some kind of workshop or bootcamp for, you know, So you think in or in the portfolio who could get value for something like this? Um You know would love to come in and talk to them about LinkedIn x and also we we do a lot of uh newsletters, uh to be hype and sub stack Yeah, yeah, absolutely. [Rashad Assir]: And and if not, you know regardless I think you know, we’ll get the occasional Hey You know, we we’re looking to go all in on linkedin. Do you guys know anyone and and currently not staffed up to actually accommodate that kind of thing. So I’ll definitely keep you in mind for those types of inquiries. Yeah, please do. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I’m happy to toss you a referral sort of fee or bonus or whatever you want to call it. We’re pretty generous with those. [Rashad Assir]: I appreciate that. Yeah. I mean, helping our companies is more than enough, but that would be awesome. You get to dip on both ends. [UNKNOWN_SPEAKER]: You get the upside and the downside. [Rashad Assir]: I’m not going to say no to that. Cool, man. All right, well, I’ll follow you on socials and keep an eye out for all the good stuff. You guys, sounds like it’s in the pipeline right now. And also your partners, sounds like you guys have a really good thing going on. And I’ll also shoot Jacob a note and say thanks for connecting us. But yeah, if I can do anything or if you have any tech VC things, feel free to reach out. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Yeah, man, same here. Happy to help in any way. What are you guys most interested in? What are the main theses right now? [Rashad Assir]: Because as I’m looking at companies, I can always send them your way too. Yeah, I feel like our biggest areas, we’re historically like, we’ve had a consumer company return every fund since inception. So it’s not like we don’t do consumer, but a large majority of our biggest well what we’re most known for is probably infrastructure. So in the 2010s, we did Stripe, Twilio, HashiCorp, and Snowflake. And in the past five years, I think we’ve focused a lot on like AI apps. So that AI company I mentioned, the legal company is called Legora, a bridge, the healthcare AI app. And Sierra, the cybersecurity We do a lot of infrastructure cyber security open source like dev like the nerdy Stuff I would say and then AI apps like vertical AI apps Okay, I’ll let you know if I hear anything anything interesting The team is awesome. Like it really really smart deep People that like pride ourselves on you know, not being assholes and try to you know That’s primarily my job is to showcase that through content. So Check out, you know, yeah. Yeah, man. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I absolutely, I think you do. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 2]: You do a good job of showing that you guys have some personality and some sense of humor. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: Empty suits, right? [Rashad Assir]: And some checks. That is the message. So I’m glad it’s landing. All right. Well, we’ll talk more, but good to meet. [Conference Room (Michael Houck) - Speaker 1]: I’m glad Jacob connected us and I’ll shoot him a note and say thanks to. [Rashad Assir]: Cool. Thanks, Michael. See you then. Bye bye.