Date: 2026-09-04 2:00 PM EDT Attendees: Michael Houck (Rye Valley), Blake Stewart (Megaphone), Taylor Bernal (Costanoa Ventures)
Note: Two Granola captures exist for this meeting (c75f30ca by Michael, c98738c1 by Blake). Both IDs are in frontmatter.
Summary
Sales call with Taylor Bernal, who oversees marketing at Costanoa Ventures (events, content, community, PR). Taylor came from Sequoia and helped push them toward more active social presence — she understands the value but has experienced the consistency and calendar challenge firsthand. John (unnamed partner, extremely calendar-constrained) is the starting point. Costanoa has 6 investment partners and 3 builder/ops partners.
Michael walked through Rye Valley’s written content process (onboarding call, voice profile, agent-surfaced trending topics, weekly embedded syncs with Blake Stewart, optional Granola ingestion under NDA), video content process (format/trend spotting, scripting, batch filming block 30-45 min/week, Rye Valley handles everything else), tooling (Typefully for X + LinkedIn, TikTok manual), and the client portal. Expansion path discussed: start with one partner, add firm account, then other partners (current reference client went from ~2K to 10-15K LinkedIn followers on company account; partner went from 200 to 550-600 X followers in ~1 year). Taylor also manages Costanoa’s portco newsletter — flagged as a referral channel.
Timeline is TBD (Taylor’s manager is on vacation). Taylor and John both expressed enthusiasm.
Decisions
- Michael to send formal proposal for John, including pricing for his account, expansion roadmap to other partners and firm account, and anonymized case studies.
Action items
- Michael: draft and send formal Costanoa proposal for John as the starting point; include expansion path and anonymized examples (no names without permission)
Notable transcript excerpts
Taylor on the internal challenge: “You probably know better than anyone that a lot of times, VCs want to put themselves out there and have a point of view, but it’s like, they’re so busy. And it’s like, it’s often falls by the wayside. Carving out the time and hunting people down to make sure that they’re doing their work. And it has been candidly kind of a challenge for us.”
Taylor on Sequoia: “When I first joined there, I was like, I came from the startup world where we were doing lots of social media experimentation. And everyone was like, we don’t do any of that here. We are leaning into this level of mystique. So I got them to really think about how do we really put ourselves out there.”
Michael on Granola ingestion: “We talked on the last call about even just hooking up Granola — we’d sign some NDA. But we just are ingesting all of the granola notes. The more we get fed into our system from you, the better we’re going to be able to sound like whoever we’re writing for.”
Taylor on John’s calendar: “I look at his calendar, and I’m like, when do you go to the bathroom? I could barely get things from him because he’s so busy.”
Michael on company accounts: “A firm we work with for over a year — they had, I want to say, a couple thousand followers when we started. Now they have 10 or 15,000 on the company LinkedIn. But we need a perspective. We need things going on to talk about that are more than just portco announcements.”