- Platform: meet
- Source: Read.ai 01KGMJ6SS1K3BJEA0TYKBPFQ4T (via Ben Ornstein’s account, imported 2026-08-06)
Transcript
Michael Houck: this always gets missed. So I always go in and do it usually like in the first minute of the call. We’ll look now is, um, we have like the next steps for, or like some parts that are for like social media only or newsletter only, but we, um, don’t delete the other ones. Like if we’re doing like social media for a client, we should delete where it says social media only. And we should delete the whole row for the newsletter ones. You know what I mean? Ben Ornstein: Oh, I see it. Okay. Yeah. Michael Houck: So I think one is like in the process section and then some are in the next step section. I just always, always notice that. Jacob Shipley: Ben, can you also let my note taker in? Michael Houck: I got it. Michael Houck: Is Alpha Mayo, is that like the conference room maybe that he’s in? Should we let that in? There’s like another thing waiting to come I don’t know if it’s like another note taker or a conference room. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, I have no idea. I’m not sure. Michael Houck: Okay, I’m gonna let it in. Let’s see what it is. Hey, there you go. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: What’s up? Hello. Michael Houck: How’s it going? How we doing? Michael Houck: Yeah, doing good. That is a very nice conference room, you guys. You guys got the mushroom lamps, you got the whole vibe going on in there. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, we have a like obnoxiously swanky office because we work out of this like membership club in Noho in like downtown Manhattan. So if you ever come by to New York, we’d love I dig it. Michael Houck: Um, sweet. Um, okay. Well, I’m pumped for this. I think we’ve been looking forward to this for a bit. Um, should we do, um, maybe very quick, um, like context setting and intros and things like that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Michael Houck: Um, so let’s see, Jacob, I guess, Ben, do you want to go first? Ben Ornstein: Sure. Um, I’m Ben, I’m Howick’s Chief of Staff. For you guys, I’ll be handling everything from scheduling to proactive engagements. That may be something we’re not doing. Well, I guess we’ll discuss that today, but really everything other than the actual writing of the content. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Sweet. Jacob Shipley: Awesome, and then how’s it going, Jacob? Yeah, super excited get to work with you in this capacity, I will be handling all the writing and so managing the content side while Ben’s doing all the ops side. Michael Houck: And then I’m Michael Houck, founder of Megaphone and I’ll be primary point of contact for everything like we discussed. So you guys will still run questions, we’ll talk strategy through me and then the rest of the team is there to help out with to day. But this isn’t the kind of relationship I’m going to go hand you guys off to some account manager or something like that. So excited to work with you guys. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Awesome. Likewise. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 2: And I don’t think I’ve introduced myself yet. I’m in there. So we’re very closely with Rashad on our LinkedIn. And then also I produce the podcast. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: I love the podcast. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Awesome. Yeah, and I think I’ve met everyone but I run all of our sort of like media efforts at Redpoint. So podcast, Instagram and TikTok and then on LinkedIn we’re doing a Sweet. Michael Houck: Well, we are very excited to kick things off. So the purpose of this call is basically just to go deep on what we want to start with in terms of strategy, in terms of who we’re talking to. Going deeper, Rashad, on some of the things that we touched on in the first couple of calls that we’ve had. Jacob’s going to lead this from our side. I want it to be sort of conversational. We do have some questions. It’s just sort of keep the conversation going. We also want our totally fine sort of going off script and going deep on whatever you guys want to talk about. This is about context gathering for us. And then at the end, we’ll talk through process on like a weekly basis, sort of going forward, what the relationship will look like and can align on any timelines there that you guys have and things like that. There’s a couple of flexible parts to that as well. I don’t think we’ll need the full hour, but we like to book it just in case we do. So it might get some time back down the second half there. Jacob Shipley: Sweet. Jacob Shipley: Cool. Well, dive right in. Context for me, I know, Rashad, we’ve had a couple of convos in the past, but my day job is I’m the head of social media at Benzinga, and I run a newsletter called Social Studies that’s all things social media marketing. Got about 15-ish thousand subscribers, and then I write to about almost LinkedIn. 50,000 about all things, executive ghostwriting, content, social media strategy for brands. So super, like obviously my day job, my side job, everything I do is in the social media content space. So super excited to be able to work with you guys on that. And then so outcomes for the call, some of it might seem a little bit repetitive, but just wanna make sure we’d rather do our due diligence on the front end just to make sure we’re 100% aligned so that there’s no miscommunication. I’d rather ask the same question twice than not ask it enough so that we understand the full context going forward and can hopefully get that first batch of content as close to ready to go as possible when we hit, you know, so we can hit the ground running there. And then, you know, just run through, again, some of it will seem a little bit repetitive, but run through the content pillars, the audience, voice, all that kind of stuff. So I guess the document you sent was super helpful, went through, looked at I requested access saw you great to be access to that. So I’ll dive into the monthly recaps as well I mean broad strokes What made you guys interested in this partnership? What what are you like if you had a nail down? Like what’s the one objective that you really want to see come out of this partnership? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah So I Think the beginning of last year we identified LinkedIn a opportunity to, you know, I think in like 2022, we went hard on short form and Instagram and TikTok. And I would say, at least my experience was like, those platforms were really like seeing their heyday in terms of the ability to gain big followers. Like there were days where we put on like three, four or 5000 certain point, you know, the platform becomes saturated, tons of creators are coming on, you’ve got the production levels going up, and so while it’s still an important channel for us, Instagram and TikTok, it’s no longer the sort of like goldmine that it was in 2022. Fast forward to 2024, LinkedIn feels like it was shifting from more boring, you know, like pure, whatever, you know what I mean? Types of content to like, maybe they were open to a little bit more creative graphic. They pushed video really hard. And so we felt like we could run back what we did in 2022 on a short form, but really like, charge on LinkedIn and ultimately LinkedIn is a very valuable audience in a way that Instagram doesn’t really provide us because we have insights to who’s actually looking at it. You know, obviously all of our founders are there, our LPs are there, other investors are there. So it feels like something we should be really good at. And there were a lot of like well-hanging fruit. So we did that. And the first thing I think we did was like, do an assessment, and I’ll send you guys this deck that we put together. But like, you know, what are other people doing on LinkedIn? I think we did three companies from media, three companies from tech, three companies in venture, spotlighted a few, tried to find some like inspiration. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: And then we’re like, all right, what what can we do? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: What can our when we really took things seriously towards September of last year, we, I would say we, we identified a bunch of low hanging fruit, and we went and did those things really well. So like, an example of that is like, we weren’t really tagging people in our posts. And that made a big difference. Because when we host an event and tag five of the people, and then they would like it, and then they would show their office, we weren’t even dropping every time we post a LinkedIn post, obviously, you know, Michael, you and your team know this better than anyone else, but like, if a lot of people in tangential networks engage with it, it starts to show more people. So we weren’t even dropping it into the social channel and at Redpoint and getting Redpoint people to engage in it. So like the first hour or two, there’d be no engagement, the post would sort of flop, even if it was good, a good post. We can obviously prefer personal content versus brand content, so you’re fighting an uphill battle in some ways. But we started to identify some of those things. Whenever we would have a portfolio company raise a follow-on round, we would post a graphic with the founder’s face on it. That was like an extra 10,000 to 15,000 impressions that we weren’t capturing before. So you can see all these things, and I shared that graph, You can see, like, the material impact that it had on our reach. But I wouldn’t say there’s anything, like, novel or unique that we’re doing. It’s just, like, the stuff we, the low-hanging fruit that we weren’t really taking advantage of, we are now. And so, to your original question of what our goal is, I think I would love to have some sort of, like, tentpole series or figure out Recurring Type of content that we can post that isn’t purely like hey, we just invested in this company. Yeah And if we can do that in a repeatable way And get some of those sort of like love and brand equity that we built from on Instagram That would be that would be awesome Honestly, I think that there’s a level of almost excellence Expectation from you guys because of the content that you’ve put out for so long on the video first platforms. Michael Houck: Yeah People will recognize. Oh like that doesn’t seem weird to be on LinkedIn because it’s from Red Point. You know what I mean? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, and we’ve been Like when we first started doing the comedy stuff we never posted it to LinkedIn or I would post it to my personal and then I think point last year, we were like, again, when we felt like it was shifting, and LinkedIn was a little bit more friendly towards the stuff, we started posting them and some of these videos like really did break out. So but I don’t want that to be something like I kind of want Instagram and TikTok to be more like vibes based, like top of funnel. You know, we’re funny, we don’t take ourselves too seriously. And then LinkedIn, hopefully to balance that a a little bit with still, I think in all of our touch points with our founders, we’re trying to bring through a level of that like human, authentic, we don’t take ourselves too seriously, but it doesn’t need to be through a community sketch on like that. That can be one pitch that we throw, but I would love to figure out something, a different type of series. Jacob Shipley: Okay, cool. You mentioned that target audience Obviously there’s a lot. You mentioned like four or five that are right off the bat. How would you define kind of who you’re talking to now versus who you want to be talking to holistically? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, to be honest, that’s… I don’t know that we have a great answer that’s specific to LinkedIn. I can tell you like generally who Redpoint cares about. And then at some point during this engagement, it might make sense to make a decision that LinkedIn is actually where we’re just going to cater to LPs, let’s say. And then that becomes our strategy. Now, for a lot of reasons, I don’t think that’s the right strategy, but just to say that I’m sort of open to segmenting it a little bit more. But here are the buckets that we care about. Founders, of course. So, this would be like, founders and anyone who works at the top 200 companies in the world, basically. Companies that are meaningful, important companies. Like, AI researcher at Entropiq, you know, or Sierra, Decagon, these top companies. Google, to the extent that they’re touching cutting-end researchers and big tech in general, but enterprise sales rep at Microsoft, probably not as much. But people that are people that are either in the business of building a company or if you were to run some like predictive analysis on this persona are very likely to quit and go start a company, right? Like how many people from RAM have started their own businesses? That’s like a signal at this point that, you know, if someone was a top person at RAM and they go start a company, they’re probably going to be very sought after from VCs. Those are the people we want to get in front of A couple of anecdotes from this. We invested in a very, what is now one of the fastest growing AI companies called Legora. It’s a legal company. And a 21-year-old founder, just one of those crazy work that McKinsey was getting, front of him, that’s a young founder, we were able to get in front of through our social media. Another one happened recently as well, same vibe. Michael Houck: He would have an impression of you guys that you’re not just somebody who’s going to write a check because you have a personality, you have a point of view, you’re sharing it, you’re in the zeitgeist. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: We’re in the zeitgeist and the reality is with a founder like him coming out of YC with amazing radars so that we’re on the short list of people that they even go out to. The other example I’ll give is an older guy, actually. He was a company that we’re about to announce in a couple of weeks. This company called Jetstream. And keep this obviously confidential. I mean, he does work with other VCs. So this guy ran the go-to-market at SentinelOne, a big public security company. He’s probably 60 years old. Security, go-to-market, like, you know, sort of very much the type of person we would want to be in our ecosystem. And he mentioned And then he was like, Oh, I love your guys content. And he was seeing us more on LinkedIn. And he was like, I know your stuff from LinkedIn. And so you can see how we care about we care about the guy who’s been in security for 20 years and goes and start a security company. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: There’s almost like these two archetypes of founders that you’re seeing right now. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: We invested in this guy who was the co-CEO of AutoCAD, and now he’s building AutoCAD for AI. And so you can see that he’s got 30 years of experience. The former guy I mentioned has four years of experience. We care about both of those audiences. And I think Instagram, TikTok can cater to the younger. LinkedIn, ICS is where we win with some of those more experienced founders and investors. Jacob Shipley: That’s super helpful. Awesome. Okay. So founders, people starting companies, are there other buckets of audience that you can think like are top of mind? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: So the reason I said like LPs, we wouldn’t want to like cater specifically them, though, we do care about them is like, ultimately, our job is to win over the best founders. And by winning the best founders, we get to work with the best LPs, like the best LPs will want to invest in Redpoint. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: If we and everyone’s familiar with how the part like the relationship between a VC and a founder versus a VC and LP, right? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Happy to give a little context there. Michael Houck: No, we’re, we’re, we’re covered there. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: So, so, um, our LPs are on LinkedIn and they’re seeing our stuff, but ultimately what they care about is that we are just sort of associated and, um, you know, had deep connections with the best founders. And, uh, so there’s sort of like a downstream effect. Um, I can think of other, situations, but they all kind of fall into this category. It’s not just founders, it’s people that work at the top 200 companies. For example, a lot of what a VC does to add value to their portfolio is like, hey, we need a head of sales. We need a VP of sale. Who do you guys have in your network that we can hire? And so if we’ve made an impression on a lot of really sought are top executives, then my partners that work on the talent side will have an easier job getting in front of candidates because they’re like, Oh, we want to work with Redpoint. We’ve seen your guys stuff. You know, it’s fun. It’s cool. It’s whatever. So getting in front of these like top executives is also helpful for our portfolio. You can see how that could also help our portfolio. Michael Houck: Yeah. Like when, when my old company went through a crisis and we were backed by Andreessen, you know, they brought in Obama’s PR guy to help us out. And that was like the number one thing that we could have possibly asked them to do. Um, that’s like you want the value add. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Exactly. And Andreessen has scale that we, we will never, I mean, they’re raising 10, $15 funds and we are in our DNA more of a, uh, they call it like a rifle shop firm. Like we raised relatively modest, and we like make various, we make like good bets in less, way less companies, but it's more of like the craft than the scale game that entries in this way. So that's why I think content is really impactful for us. It's one of the few ways that we can really like scale, we can really, I mentioned that like that's part of our ethos and part of our brand is that we're like we make like calculated bets and that are very Like we don't just really we don't we're not really like throwing shit on the wall and seeing stick we're trying to Make very like calculated bets. Jacob Shipley: Okay, I love that As well like that's kind of like antithetical to art. Yeah. Okay. That makes a lot of sense. Um, okay. So the document you already sent kind of outlined the existing content. Where does all of that live? You hyperlinked a bunch of stuff. So obviously like that's kind of where, where my head's going is I'm going to start there with existing content base wanting to wanting to work towards this kind of apex of repeatable content strategies that will be episodic in nature that become kind of what you're known for kind of the Counterpart to what we're doing on on Instagram and tick-tock. We're How are you thinking in terms of like bucket when you're thinking of like where to start to get it? I come a base a base of the content to work with but then we can build on to kind of reach some of these like Episodic series. There's the there were a couple reports you mentioned are there When you're creating content, where are you drawing from to find posts ideas? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, great question and and this to be honest, I think it's like the crux of The this is gonna be the biggest challenge that we try to overcome is like where where do we go? To source like alpha like material like new things that are actually worth talking about. I'll share some stuff that's worked for us. So obviously, people care when we make an investment, like, that's always going to be a core pillar to our feed. Now, how do we tell people about a new investment? And Obviously, there's a lot of different ways to do that. And one thing we're experimenting with is this series where we do a pretty in-depth video. We're actually investing a ton in this, where we interview the founder and put together a five-minute video sharing why we're excited and the founder sharing in their words what they're building. But that's, think of that as like one, you know, steady stream and we'll probably make 15 20 investments a year. Maybe closer to 25 if you count both funds. And these are anywhere from like $2 million follow on investment to, you know, Series A $50 that we're leaving. So that's one place we go to. Yep. Another place is if one of our investors, so our investors, a few of them will get tapped for media spots. So go on TVPN, they'll go on CNBC and Let's say, like, when the Figma IPO happened, Scott Rainey, who's, like, our top guy, who's been in the industry for 30 years, who is very well-respected and known by these reporters on CNBC, like, because he's been going on for 10 years, they'll call Scott and be like, hey, will you comment on this for us? Scott will go on and do, like, a five-minute analysis of what this means. That's obviously very, very good. Like, that is the best thing that can happen. Because it's research that Scott is leading. He's getting perspective, a point of view on it. It's a Zeitgeist-y thing. So we'll use that as well. But it's infrequent and it's not something we can schedule. We can't say, let's do one of those a month because it's not a big amount to go IPO or, you know, whatever. Jacob Shipley: But is that an area where we could serve like, and I say we as in Megaphone side and you ideate together Are there ways if we see something in the news, if he's not being asked to come on to a show, can we still tap into that for, Hey, what are your thoughts on this that we can convert into content? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: So great. And same thing that brings me to another series that we tried last year, uh, which is, let's call it like newsjacking series. Um, this was like, anytime there was an IPO, um, a big, big acquisition, like the member of the Wiz acquisition by Google, $100 million. We would, if it was in an industry or something where we have domain, we would do exactly what you’re talking about. We’d go to Scott, we’d go Logan, we’d go to Eric or whoever, and we’d say, hey, what are your thoughts on this? What does this mean for the future? Is the IPO window open? Does this mean security company is security on the rise? Of types of questions that you would expect a CNBC reporter to ask. A couple, so it works. It actually worked really well. It was a huge pain in the ass operation because we never quite figured out, like we don’t have the insight. We need their perspective. They, I mean the investors. They don’t really have the time. And We don’t really have the influence to be like, you have to do this. You have to contribute to this. And so it’s challenging. If I do think I would love to bring it back. Because, uh, because it’s the exact type of thing that we should be doing, I think, but we have to figure out and I’ll send you the process. A very in-depth process that we would follow to do this. But my sense is, if we’re going to do it, we have to figure out a way to drive it a little bit more. The ones that worked were when we would basically make the post and say, hey, can we attribute this quote to you? And then the investor would be like, actually, can you change this a little bit? Um, you know, I wouldn’t say this, I would say that. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: The annoying thing was sometimes we would do the work. So you have like a 12 hour window to actually comment because no one cares. And we’ve moved the news cycles moved on. And so. Our issue was like, we would sometimes do the heavy lifting of the work and then we wouldn’t get comment until the next day or they wouldn’t respond to their Slack or they would Finally respond to be like, hey, I don’t have time to do this and then we have to go find someone else to comment on it By that time I’ve blown up my whole calendar. Yeah And We don’t even know if the post is gonna work, you know, some did some didn’t so Okay, that makes sense. Jacob Shipley: That’s super helpful context So we’ve got Yeah, yes, we’ve got media spots newsjacking. Where else are you gonna? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 2: Leaning from Yeah Yeah, that’s one where like we try to limit it we have we do you come out and we invest in tons of companies so if it’s a really Big launch coming out of the like a meaningful portfolio company, then that, but that will warrant something. Michael Houck: But Rishad, is there a system that you guys have where like your portcos will submit like requests for support on launches? And if so, should we get plugged into that in some way? Like, how do you, how do you see that? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: It’s sort of up to them to reach out to us. The good ones that are on top of it will always send a note and be like, Hey, we’re going Like they’ll send a note to their investor listserv and we’re on that listserv. And so we’ll get added to a thread. So like two days ago we got added to a thread from this company called Adio that’s launching an AI chat thing. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: We love Adio. Yeah. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: So like we led the A, then like the investor, or sorry, the founder reaches out to the investor and says, Hey, we’re, we’re launching this. And the investor usually copies us in and says, Hey, let me make sure we provide And then Emeris and I sort of think about, okay, what should we do here? Should we just quote tweak them? Should we repost? Should we make a custom post? It’s cool to make, like, it’s not, I would say ranking these in terms of how much people care, it’s very promotional and it’s one step removed from us. So it has to be like, really, you know, I don’t know, it’s, it’s not like a topical list of what I think we should be doing, but it’s probably, you know, good filler content. Michael Houck: Yeah. And also if there’s like just operational stuff where, you know, they’re going to be making posts from their founder’s account or whatever, and you know, you guys just want us to go leave comments to support or something like that. Like we’re happy to take that on too. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah. It’s, it’s honestly, it’s a lot of just like making the founder feel supported. Yeah. We don’t want to get into the routine of random, I don’t mean to say random, but a small check we wrote into a company that isn’t really that relevant is now asking us to make some custom posts about a launch that they have. Michael Houck: I agree we wouldn’t want to do that, but all I’m saying is they’re going to be making posts about it, so we can just comment from the brand account. Michael Houck: Yeah, exactly. Jacob Shipley: Okay. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: That’s super helpful. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, let me think on other… Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 2: Do team announcements. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Oh yeah, team. So that would be like we bring someone on, but we need to do something for Eric. Yeah. Can we put that on the calendar? Yeah. Maybe next week. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 2: Events and what else? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah events like if we if we host an event and there’s like a panel conversation Where the investor will interview like a top founder about you know go to market I don’t know You know those like dinners where you get invited and there’s like an investor and the founder and they have a conversation we’ll like recap the conversation and post some pictures. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 2: Like a fireside chat. Jacob Shipley: Yeah. Yeah. Jacob Shipley: A picture frame just fell off my shelf and I don’t know if you just heard that, but Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: No, I felt like a cat or something. So team announcements would be like, we announce a new person joins the team or someone gets promoted. Also, that’s another example of like, we currently do it, Um, there’s probably like a more fun. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah. Yeah, sure. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Uh, centric way to do this, where it feels like more differentiated than like the check the box. Michael Houck: Yeah. Cause those, those can be, those can be good moments for individual brand building, especially for like partners and things like that. Right. Like we want to get them out there and make founders know who they’re going to be working with. It’s a big moment for personality. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: A hundred percent. Yeah. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 2: And with team announcements, it’s like recognition. For instance, um, auto was placed on like business insiders, rising stars list. And we posted about it yesterday. Yeah. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: And those tend to do pretty well because people, I feel like that’s like LinkedIn’s main ethos is like, you know, promotions and Oh my God. So well-deserved. Michael Houck: Yeah. You’re allowed to be a little cringe on, LinkedIn. Jacob Shipley: What’s been your current process or voice or take on that? Like you mentioned like not wanting to come off as just like you want to be differentiated. So how have you been currently thinking about that to be like, you know, One of our port codes was featured on this list. Like how, what’s been your current approach to that? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Um, I’d say we, at some point last year, we put together this like LinkedIn tone document. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Oh, cool. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Um, so I’ll share that with you, but it’s, but it’s not differentiated. It’s like, I would say. It’s pretty vanilla. And we’ve been sort of hesitant to take risks because without defining what the guardrails are of like, are we funny? Are we cute? Are we whatever? Then it seems like every post we’re kind of having to make a decision like, should we take a risk with this one? Instead of like, this is our voice. We do make jokes. We do, you know, we haven’t really like decided that we do that. So I’ll send you the LinkedIn tone document. I basically asked, like I had this long conversation with Chad and I was like, you know, give me different personas that we could be like, this was like, it was like the journalist perspective, the analyst perspective, the, the like super supportive to founders. And we ended up picking one of those. Jacob Shipley: Okay, cool. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 2: And I think anytime a portfolio company is mentioned, we will send the copy to the lead investors to have them do a final review. And they’ll have some tweaks. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. Almost everything will go through some sort of external, internal review. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 2: Yeah. And I think that adds our voice a little bit, but it could be. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: That’s a great point. So, um, I think that our best foot posts from a voice perspective, or would be like, you know, let’s say we invest in, um, or this company just went, went public that we invested in like 2020. And, and Mary’s got on the call with the investor, the sort of like on the bench cause I retired. And was like, Hey, what did you see in this founder? What made us so excited to invest? So that when we post about their IPO, it felt more true to, you know, how we felt about the founder. And it was a little bit less generic than like, Bingo is a great company. It’s so cool. You know what I mean? We had, I don’t know if you spoke with him on the phone. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 2: Yeah, I just recorded our conversation and then that helped me write the copy. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Um, and then I think it came out a lot more human than the first draft that I reviewed that was like, you know, whatever in marriage could find online about this company, you know? UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Yeah, totally. Okay. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: So, so the repeatable, like the alpha comes from the investors. How do we do that in a way that like, doesn’t just feel like we’re calling in favors all the time. That’s kind of what we need to figure out. And obviously the higher you go, the more interesting their perspective, but the less available they are. So like, you know, our top people have the best point of view and the least. Michael Houck: Yeah. I think one of the things we should do, cause I know that part of this is going to be, I’m interviewing one of the partners each month and we sort of get, you know, 30 minutes or 60 minutes ideally of, of insights from them. Um, part of this Jacob, especially over the next, like I’d say like one to two weeks, should be, we should brainstorm with Rashad and the team if we can come up with these like recurring content series that we can leverage content from the partners specifically for, so that we have like a wide base of things to try out before we go in and do that first interview. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, cool. I’ll point you to a couple more and sorry, one more comment on the investors and engaging with them, I don’t want to give the impression that we get zero time with them. We can always tap them, and I can always, especially there are a few that I have good relationships with, that I can be like, hey, we’re going to run this experiment. It just needs to be framed as like, we’re running an experiment, it’s going to be 30 of your time, this is what we’re going for, and if it works, this is what would determine what good looks like and why we would keep doing it. We just need to be a little bit more thoughtful. It’s the one-off, like, hey, I don’t know how many times you’re going to come to me and you just keep coming to me with these questions, like, that we need to kind of stay away from We do have access to the investors and we should, I think, use it. It just needs to be framed thoughtfully. The other two things I was going to say as experiments that I’ve been thinking about Marius is super involved in this AI podcast we have called Unsupervised Limit. And once every, maybe twice a month, we have an episode. And very relevant to the top, you know, our audience, the top 200 companies and people that work with them. We’re interviewing really, like, world-class researchers. 0.0001% researchers about where AI is going, about reinforcement learning, whatever the current thing is, is usually what our topic is. And so there’s a good amount of content now. It goes stale pretty quickly because AI moves fast and we’re a topical show. But that’s another place we could. It’s just the classic clipping strategy hasn’t really worked for us. We’re running an experiment now on Jacob’s personal account to see if we can do that on Twitter. But let’s say if it worked on Twitter, but it wasn’t working on LinkedIn, we could run the experiment on Reddit points like that. I just want it to be so dominant that it’s most of the content we’re posting. You know one or two posts per episode. Michael Houck: I think it’s totally Ben, let’s let’s look into Jacob’s account and see what’s resonating there and do a little internal analysis and come up with some ideas to feed it to feed Jacob 100 and I was also going to say are you guys doing the clipping in house? Ben Ornstein: Uh, like after the episode goes live Yeah Okay, because one thing I was going to mention is if you were to send me like the the file, um I’m happy to clip and take some like clip opportunities for posts and then can come to you with those. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ll let you and Amaris talk through that. We are in the early stages of this new experiment to clip I think three or four clips every episode and try and get them to the place. We have an editor on retainer, so they do the like So I’m seeing, I’m wondering through, I think I typed up here as an idea, like differentiating between a brand and a company. Jacob Shipley: And I’m wondering if there’s a way to do that. I mean, it’s, it’s a, it’s a, it’s a, it negotiating posts is like versions for, okay, this is going to go on the main LinkedIn account, but how, how would an investor say this, or how would a team member say this to kind of think through, and then cross promoting, right? So like the bootstrapping engagement strategy of sharing from, you know, the brand to the person to the investor, it’s a founder, however, that’s going to work, making sure those are working in conjunction. So that’s really exciting. I think that gives us a lot of opportunity to, around with what levers we can pull to try to make that, make that sing, if you will. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. The investors each have, like, I’d say it’s very much in their interest to build a brand. And a lot of them have, they have anything from like, you know, 5,000 followers. Some have like 15,000 followers that like are actively posting, but we’re trying to build franchise brand equity as opposed to vice versa. And the reason that is, I know it’s preferable from a content reach perspective, like going from the individuals is great, but it just becomes this whole game of like, okay then, who do we give the attention to? Do we really do that to two or three people? So we might as well do it towards a Redpoint account. And we support it with strategic partners like Jacob and others. Jacob, our Jacob. Jacob Shipley: Yeah. Jacob Shipley: Are they, most of the investors open to that playing the amplifier role in the ecosystem? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, totally. Especially if it’s something that’s like, like the AI 64 report, uh, or the infrared report, like these guys worked on. And I think we can, we can give them like guidance. I just don’t want to get into the business of like, it’s where I want to draw the line is like, hey, should I quote tweet this or should I repost this? Like what should I post? Like answering that for one-off investors just becomes very taxing and detracting from our main thing. So like in Fred, when we have a big drop, I want the main thing that we’re pointing everyone to, to be from the Redpoint account. And then you’re free to do whatever you want. As long as you don’t like literally rip the same copy and post it. Just figure out a way to do this in your own voice basically. And we’re not at it right now. At least staffed to go straight for 12 investors. Michael Houck: Well, we are for what it’s worth. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: If that’s where we end up, if they’re like, hey, we get a lot of value out of just handing it off, then we can do that. The other thing is, so these reports, we have one coming up in March. Nailing a plan around the public market summary would be great because this is primary alpha content that we should be posting. Michael Houck: I think, Richard, one thing I’m going to ask from you guys on that is the early you can get us even a drafted version of it, the better. We have some other folks we work with who have, you know, they get it to us 24 hours before and then, you know, it’s like on us to distill the most, you know, it’s just a harder process in that case. The more you can get to us, the better. 100%. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: We’ll get it to you. It’s already being worked on. So I know this is the type of thing though, that you’re usually working up until the last day on it, but we’ll get you, we’ll get you something. May and they also that’s also so these are like big efforts that are like 100 hour plus Efforts led by the investors alpha research like graph graphs like 40 pages of graphs on how the public markets are doing right now and What what the change of series B size last year was versus this year? It’s like so good. So there’s so much we can do with it. Like that should really take us through March pretty much. And then we get another tranche in May if they’re still planning to do the report, which I think they are. And also like with this big infrared report, we built a brand around it. So like Cy, the guy who leads it, will go on TVPN and talk about the report and the list and each of the companies So then that gives us more content to post inside, you know. His job is to basically provide the investors with better data to make better investment decisions. And so he’s built this like internal tool that gives us really good ability to query public data sets as well as internal data sets. And so I shared that Logan post that on Twitter in my document. I pulled that up real quick because I think this is a good. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Was it in here? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah. So if you go down. Yeah. OK. So Eric Wagner and then this tweet where it’s hyperlinked. So here’s an example of something that Andreessen I think is doing pretty well right now where they’re just posting a graph with a little bit of context. And you can see like this got a decent reach. Jacob Shipley: Um, very decent reach. Yeah. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah. And then Logan’s like, I’ve known the person on Twitter and so like, but I think if we could, post one of these every two weeks. That’s like a thoughtful, you know, now the key, the key here that I’m missing is like, he had the insight to be, to analyze job postings from open AI for SaaS tools. Like that’s a, that’s like a smart question to be asking. He’s uniquely able to ask those types of questions, but this is another example where like we can lean on the investors to give us these insights. And then we do the work of getting the data, writing the copy and actually like, you know, making it into postable material. Uh, but you could see how we have like the pieces to do this in a repeatable way. Jacob Shipley: No, that’s great. And then so that was Eric built the tool and then Logan asked the question and it was his insight that led to that post. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah. Eric is the data guy. Okay. He’s increasingly building self-service tools so that anyone could query and get that answer. But in this case, he probably just Slacked them and was like, hey, can you get me X, Y, and Z? And then Eric was like, sure, fired up the query, returned the results, then Logan posted it on Twitter. Michael Houck: Would love to be able to get into, if we want to add Eric into the Slack channel, I think just so we can ping him with things like that. That’d be great because then we can be proactive about on our end too. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Totally. Do you guys, what do you guys see as how do we solve the insight part of that though? Like how do we, how do we get to, how do we operationalize Logan having the insight to ask that question? Michael Houck: Yeah, I mean that’s going to take time for sure because we’re not My hypothesis is two things. One, we would be doing our research every single week, see what we see trend-wise, see what we see. It’s not going to be maybe Logan’s unique perspective, but we will have something to post from the brand account. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Something to react to. Michael Houck: Right, and to react to. And if we have original visualizations to go with that, that obviously adds some weight to the post. Yeah, but the other thing where I really think that this can be useful is, again, after these partner interviews that I’m doing, if I’m collecting some insights from them, we take that back internally, we brainstorm as a team, hey, here’s, I think it could be interesting to look deeper into, then we ping Eric and we see what comes out of it. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, I think that’s great. If we came up with five questions, like a month or something that were like that, and then put them in front of Logan, and said, hey, which of these are It could literally be an email that we send to Logan on the first and the 15th of every month and say, hey, here’s 15 questions we could go get data for and make a post about, pick two. And that would be an example of how we could engage investors in a way that is prescribed. They know the amount of work. They know it’s adding value. And so we could get them to do it. Michael Houck: And it’s lightweight. What do you think about, I mean, they all use email more than Slack primarily, like if we say, hey, be easier, you’d be able to share more if you send a 30 second rambly voice note in a Slack reply rather than typing out something that takes longer to do on email, like what’s their preference going to be there? Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: I think email for people on personal preferences, but email for most. Because most of them create their email as a to-do list, and so they’ll just get to it at some point, and they’ll reply with four words, but it’ll get us over. Jacob Shipley: OK. Sounds good. Jacob Shipley: I’ll start with that. I think similarly to how these reports become a positive feedback loop of it gets on TVPN, to then where there are clips from that, to then there are quotes, and then there are graphs. I think some of these content interviews that Houck is doing, I think, can be really a micro version of that. Because if it leads us to, obviously, that’ll lead us to insights that create posts. And then if it leads us to questions to ask, that that gives us data that then asks, gets graphs that lead to posts. And then in the comments, somebody might say something insightful that I can. So I’m hopeful that once we get this process rolling, that we will see how we can start operationalize some of that process. It’s just going to be, it’ll take a little bit to kind of get the ball rolling and see what activities are driving the most, you know, positive engagement, but yeah, we’ll do something there. Ben, do you want to run through any ops stuff? Ben Ornstein: Yeah. I mean, so the, the, one of the things that we offer clients is what we call like proactive of engagements, commenting on relevant posts to kind of steal audience away from kind of others in your niche. And I wondered if that was something that was interesting to you guys, if that’s something you’d want. Kind of how it would work is initially I’d come to either of you with potential posts to comment on with mock replies, and you of tweak it because then I’d learn the voice a little bit, the kind of things you like to say, and this would be like on a recurring basis. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, I feel more comfortable with that once we figure out what our voice is, because right Right now, litigating each one on an individual basis, that’s the taxing part. I’m totally down for it. I think we should do it. I’m curious if it works. Clearly, it’s built into your strategy. It’s something that you’ve given some thought to, but I’d rather do it when we all are like, okay, this is who we are. Michael Houck: Yeah. I think with an established brand like Redpoint, it makes sense to layer that in a little bit later down the road once we have a handle on and we sort of get the content series up, we know what we’re talking about here. We normally encourage that immediately for founders who are trying to sort of make their mark, build their brand and their niche, and sort of get known within those circles. But when you guys come in, we still have a problem. It’s less urgent, let’s say. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. That makes a lot of sense for us. Michael Houck: Cool. OK. So do you guys have any questions we should run through on your end before we wrap. If not, I can go over sort of next steps and Yeah. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: No, next steps is great. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay. Michael Houck: Cool. So we’re in the Slack channel. Ann Meyers, are you in the Slack channel with us too? Let me, well, I’ll add you after this. Okay, great. But yeah, so basically every week Jacob will come with ideas Early on, we’d love your guys’ engagement on those ideas, the quality of them. Again, leaving rambly voice notes is probably more descriptive and more beneficial for us than just writing something out and typing it. Just be candid, rip them apart. If they suck, tell us they suck. And we’ll iterate quickly on a week-to-week basis to make sure that they reach what we want. We’ll also experiment with some of these content series ideas alongside that. And then every week, by the end of the week, we’ll have a batch of, I guess we’re starting with just the one main post, but if we wanna do like smaller posts alongside that, I’ll figure it out. But yeah, we’ll have the post for you by the end of the week. Early on, again, we want your engagement to review, make sure voice is right, make sure tone is right, structure’s aligned to what you wanna do. Over time, that will scale down and we’ll be able to take on sort of that full process. I work closely with Jacob and also with Blake, who’s our Editor-in-Chief, who doesn’t join these calls, but he’s built a 100,000-person audience himself, too. So I work closely with them, and we’ll get things rolling, and everything happens in Slack and Notion from here. If you guys don’t have access to the Notion, Ben will make sure you get that today. And then, yeah, I guess you can comment directly on the Notion or just leave us feedback, as I mentioned, directly in Slack. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: That’s awesome. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: We do use a Notion instance ourselves to manage our content calendar, and so, well, at some point we should talk about how do we make sure there’s just a smooth process so we’re not duplicating where we have variables and all that stuff. Michael Houck: Yeah, we can integrate into whatever you guys do. We don’t want to rock the boat. I want to make sure it’s easy for you guys. So whether we just do an initial internal review on our end, and then sort of when it passes our internal review, We bring it into your guys’s notion or something like that. We do that with a lot of folks. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Okay. Well, yeah, we can also have like a custom status That’s like, you know, this is Megaphone is working this so like it should it won’t come up on our calendar like notions very But we can we can figure out the all the operation stuff as we get started and then Just last comment. I think like we talked about this having this like hero series like I I think that’s the end state, maybe. But for now, I’ll take any sort of, you know, anything we can do to either level up the existing series or, you know, I’m expecting there to be quite a bit of experimentation before we get to something that’s, like, recurring. So I don’t want that to feel like a lot of pressure of, like, let’s come up with the most amazing repeatable series. Michael Houck: Like, I know that that, our best stuff has always taken a lot of throwing shit on the wall and seeing And so that’s, that’s totally expectation, but this is why we love working with VCs because founders, when we work with founders are like, we need it to be amazing right on day one. I’m like, Hey, so, okay, cool. We’ll, we’ll work with that. And, um, I’ll also follow up separately about setting up the first interview for sometime this month. Um, and we can pick who that’s going to be with and go from there. Conference Room (Alpamayo) - Speaker 1: Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Sounds good, man. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Okay, cool. We’re excited, guys. Talk to you soon. Awesome. UNKNOWN_SPEAKER: Thank you.