Date: 2026-08-19, 11:00 AM EDT Participants: Michael Houck (Rye Valley), John Cowgill (GP at Costanoa; john@costanoa.vc) - connected via Noah (mutual from Uber) Context: Intro sales call for Megaphone GP social content services + angel investing discussion.
Summary
John Cowgill is a GP at Costanoa (Series A, Enterprise AI and data, $325M Fund VI + $150M opportunity fund, $2B+ AUM, SF). Firm is high-conviction / high-concentration (2-3 investments per GP per year, board seats standard). They recognize a gap in external visibility and have no dedicated GP social support currently. In-house marketer Taylor and a PR firm are on retainer. John’s bar: quality over volume, max 1-2 posts per week, strongly allergic to AI slop.
John’s ideal workflow: pipe Granola transcript insights into a shared Slack channel as post-idea seeds (he already runs a Friday Claude prompt extracting blog post ideas from weekly transcripts). Michael proposed the onboarding call + recurring call model with optional NDA access to internal docs for deeper voice alignment.
Pricing discussed: $4K/month, 3-month minimum, then month-to-month with 30-day notice. John’s hesitation: no dedicated marketing budget; management fees go to portfolio support (12 full-time recruiters + ops staff). Agreed to explore a smaller, lower-volume package (one meaty post per week) at a reduced price.
Angel investing: Michael described his approach (sector-agnostic, high-conviction, things that “don’t make a lot of sense yet”) and mentioned Conduit (first check) and Beehiiv. Check size $2K-$25K. Value add: marketing, PR, social, and access to 60K founders via newsletter. John asked to be flagged on any portfolio companies raising seed or Series A in Enterprise AI or deep tech.
Decisions
No formal decisions made. Agreed to continue: Michael sends TLDR and package options (including smaller-scale version); John connects Michael with Taylor (Costanoa in-house marketer); Michael to gather anonymized VC client examples or record a Loom.
Action Items
- Michael: Send John the deal currently being evaluated for potential co-investment
- Michael: Send TLDR and package options including a smaller-scale, lower-volume tier (retain 3-month minimum)
- Michael: Get anonymized VC client examples or record a Loom showing what GP social content looks like
- Michael: Talk to existing VC clients about permission to share (anonymized or otherwise)
- John: Connect Michael with Taylor (Costanoa in-house marketer) as next point of contact
Notable Excerpts
John on the visibility gap: “We tend to be pretty quiet and just sort of focus on doing the work… always asking whether we should be self-promoting more aggressively. Self-promoting is the wrong way to frame it - being more visible with how the conversations and thoughts we’re having behind closed doors.”
John on ideal workflow: “An interesting outcome for me would be like, I could just grant you access to my Granola and you can just see the conversations I’m having with founders all the time and run that through an engine, sort of extract insights… I actually have a prompt I feed into Claude every Friday where I read all of my transcripts from the last week and pull out like five things that would make a good blog post.”
Michael on differentiation: “I think we’re the only content agency that has actually run and operated by somebody who has a multi-hundred-thousand-person audience themselves and also has run a venture fund before.”
John on AI slop concern: “There’s just so much AI slop on LinkedIn… I just feel like I want to feed everything I see on LinkedIn into GPTZero and just call people out on this is all unoriginal AI slop.”
On budget constraint: “4K a month is what I would expect, and it is not currently within a budget that we have available. We spend all of our management fees on basically supporting portfolio.”
John on fit signal: “I think the challenge is a lot of the people that do this kind of work just are not the kind of people that I want to sound like.”
On high-conviction investing: “Writing this blog post about the journey together and the hard parts and when it isn’t working and getting to where it is today - that is really gratifying. And having a founder say you wouldn’t be here without you is what it’s all about.”
Full transcript available in Granola (id: 70667936-2479-418b-956d-9e53e70156e0).