20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures

Jay Acunzo is NextView Ventures VP of Platform and runs the View from Seed blog. At NextView, he leads the creation of business development and educational resources for startups, from board deck templates to mobile workshops to the popular Hitchhiker's Guide to Boston Tech (bostontechguide.com). Prior to NextView, Jay led content marketing and production teams at HubSpot (IPO) and Dailybreak Media (acquired). A former sports journalist, he began his career in tech at Google. As a result of Jay's tremendous success Jay has been named Top 10 B2B Marketer in Boston, 70 Rising Social Media Stars and 100 Most Influential Content Marketers. Items Mentioned in Today's Show: Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain Jay's Article in TechCrunch a16z GoDaddy Wordpress The Weird Things Business People Do On Twitter The Content Marketing Institute In Today's Episode you will Learn: How Jay made his move into the world of tech with Google and how he then transitioned into the world of venture with NextView? What does VP of Platform really entail? Why has it become an emerging trend in the venture industry? How is the structure of VCs firms changing, with the likes of a16z moving to a much more service orientated venture fund. Are there any individuals or sections of society that should or should not be blogging? How can individuals drive traffic to their blog and what tactics Jay uses to get visitors to his blog? What Jay would suggest to business and startup founders thinking about whether to start blogging? What is the best platform to market your content or startup? Is Twitter really an effective marketing tool? How can individuals and businesses increase engagement on Twitter? What not to do on Twitter? We then finish today's episode with a lightning round where we hear Jay's thoughts on the best and worst aspects as VP of Platform, his best resource for content marketing, his favourite book and why.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Harry Stebbings?

  Hello and welcome to the best podcast on all things venture capital. It is of course the 20 minute VC with your host Harry Stebbings. Now today I'm extremely excited to welcome Jay Acunzo to the show. Jay is slightly different to our previous guests as Jay has the new emerging and trending job as VP of Platform at NextView Ventures. Don't worry, in the interview Jay discusses everything about VP of Platform and what it really entails. Prior to NextView, Jay led content production at HubSpot and was a digital media strategist at Google. As a result of Jay's amazing work, he has been named top 10 B2B marketer in Boston, he's been named 70

• 0:43Harry Stebbings?

  Rising Social Media Stars, and he's been named as one of the most 100 influential content marketers. It's an incredible episode and we can't wait to hear what you think.

• 0:58Speaker 01

  You have now arrived at your destination.

• 1:00Harry Stebbings?

  Jay, welcome to the 20 minute VC. I'm so pleased to have you on the show.

• 1:04Speaker 02

  Harry, thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

• 1:06Harry Stebbings?

  Now, you've enjoyed an immense career, but can you start from the beginning and tell us where it all began and how you made your transition into technology and then venture?

• 1:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, absolutely. So I guess it starts in school. In college, I wanted to be a sports journalist. So I kind of tilted everything I did around that field. I won a scholarship for it, wrote for student papers, you know, wrote for during the summers, wrote for print papers, if you can believe it or not, in our tech-driven world. Interned at ESPN, had a really cool experience there. And then when I graduated, I actually didn't have a job lined up. So I did what the usual English literature major does and looked at journalism, looked at communications departments. And on a whim, I just applied through an online form to Google to be a digital media strategist. It was a nebulous sounding role. And I thought, you know, I'm never going to hear back. And through,

• 1:57Speaker 02

  I think I used up all my luck in my career with my very first job because Google called me back. And so I was at the Boston office for three years, basically advising brands and agencies on how

• 2:10Speaker 02

  To use adwords, so search, display, YouTube, mobile, and then eventually social with Google Plus um for their brands. And so that was like my gateway into tech. And then from there, I stayed in the Boston tech scene. So when I realized I wanted to be at a smaller company and kind of build from scratch, I jumped to a series A startup in town um and then worked at HubSpot as their head of content marketing for a little while. And then finally landed at NextView where I'm VP of Platform.

• 2:36Harry Stebbings?

  Now, let's talk a little about your role as VP of Platform. Can you tell us a little about what that entails?

• 2:42Speaker 02

  Yes, so platform means a million different things to a million different people. And unfortunately, that was the phrase that this new trend in VC kind of took on. Basically, what it boils down to for me is uh scalable or uh horizontal type projects that support an entire portfolio. Or more publicly, an entire startup ecosystem. So for example, we'll create at NextView, you know, we're seed investors, we're very dedicated to just investing in the seed round. And then maybe do follow-ons to later stages with our portfolio. But the first time in for us is during that seed stage and we're really, really focused on it. So as a result, the platform that we're creating is this menu of content

• 3:24Speaker 02

  and resources and templates and workshops and, you know, to a lesser degree, deals for things, access to experts and top talent, that kind of stuff, all in support of getting a company off to the best possible start.

• 3:37Harry Stebbings?

  So NextView is far more than just a VC firm, it's almost a hub of resources as well.

• 3:42Speaker 02

  It's becoming that way, yeah. And I think kudos to the three founders. They started the firm in 2010, we're on our second fund. And they were doing a lot of this stuff themselves and I think they kind of maxed themselves out doing it. And so I was the, I guess, scaled up version that could extend and do more on the platform side. And you're seeing this across a lot of different firms. NextView was the first to move on it in Boston in the early-stage world.

• 4:05Harry Stebbings?

  And why do you think it has become this emerging trend that is today?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I use this analogy, I wrote, I wrote this article for TechCrunch where I use this analogy. If you're on, if you're all on the same street and you all sell plain bagels, there's only so many ways you can make a plain bagel sound different than your competitor's plain bagel. And I think with the rise of lots of micro firms or, or early-stage firms or seed funds, or whatever you want to call it, and the rise of crowdsourced capital, um, and angel lists and things like that, all of a sudden venture is becoming a lot more crowded and you have more options for capital as an entrepreneur. And so as a result, differentiation is more key than it's ever been. Um, and the best way to differentiate, I think, if you look across that software industry is content marketing or value-add opportunities and projects and things like that.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  So all of a sudden, you have these firms that are vying for the best entrepreneurs or just mindshare generally to improve deal flow. And they can't just say, we're a fund, we offer this type of capital. They have to actually elevate themselves a little bit more to say, here's why we exist and here's why you should work with us. And a large part of, you know, making the plain bagel sound a little bit better is you can sell something different than a plain bagel, right? You can sell a platform of resources, you could sell the partner's reputations, you can sell all these different things when you're kind of pitching your fund to another entrepreneur about why you're the best partner for them. Um, so for me, it's just like actually really interesting trend because it's, you know, the entrepreneur has more of the power, which I think is how it should be, uh, and it's kind of heading in that direction.

• 5:36Harry Stebbings?

  And as VP of Platform, you're not directly involved with the investments, am I right?

• 5:42Speaker 02

  Correct, yeah, that's right.

• 5:43Harry Stebbings?

  Do you have any urge ever to move into that sector or, or just do angel investments on the side?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Um, you know, it's fascinating to me. I'm really interested in it. I love learning about it and assisting where I can with NextView. Um, but in the near term, I'd say no. So I think the reason I love what I do, in addition to just really liking my work with entrepreneurs and really liking the tech sector, um, I, I kind of want three things in my career and that's the ability to create things, creative control over those things, and then an audience that cares. And the platform role at a VC is like the perfect blend of those three for me right now.

• 6:17Harry Stebbings?

  Fantastic. And then talking of emerging trends and changing structures of VC firms, we've seen A16Z obviously have a huge hiring process and really build out their team to offer numerous services. Do you think that will be the next trend, more than just VP of Platform offering extensive legal teams, extensive finance departments to their startups? Do you think that will be the next trend?

• 6:45Speaker 02

  It might be, although I think it's tough to say what the the output would be. I think so, you know, coming from the marketing world, a lot of marketers chase the tech or the tactic or the shiny new trend. And I think the danger is for a firm to just look across the aisle and say, you know, A16Z offers services, or NextView offers a platform of lots of content, so let's just mimic that because we're getting questions from LPs or from entrepreneurs. There's a real danger in that, because it becomes noisier for both the entrepreneur and for the firm. So I think rather than say, we're gonna all head towards services or towards content or whatever, it's more important for a firm to identify themselves uniquely. So what's the mission of that one firm? You know, how does that firm position

• 7:27Speaker 02

  itself differently than other firms? You know, for NextView, when we when we launched, before I arrived back in 2010, it was about seed-stage investments on an institutional level not existing in Boston, and us being the first player in. You know, now it's really getting in the weeds and being low-volume, high-touch, you know, high conviction investments, still focused on seed. And so it's finding the white space that's important first, and then trying to pair a platform offering with that. So for us, it doesn't really make sense for us to do a lot of, you know, sales consulting, because a lot of our companies don't have sales teams yet. They're seed-stage companies. So I think it really does come back to, why does the firm exist? Why are you launching? What's your thesis if you're a thesis-driven firm? And then trying to figure out what's the the extension of that mission into platform.

• 8:13Harry Stebbings?

  And then getting back into the bare roots of the marketing side, for potential business owners and individuals and even startups contemplating whether to start a blog, what would you suggest? Are there any people or sects of society that it's great for and some it's not so good for?

• 8:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I mean, I'm sure there's something out there that exists that I just can't think up right now that it doesn't make sense to blog for. You know, if you're reaching an offline audience, maybe a digital blog isn't the best approach. Maybe if you're betting on content as your marketing horse, then maybe you do write, but publish it in print and mail it to them, right? There's always going to be exceptions, and I think no one should get wedded to the tactic. It should be about serving your audience and really knowing how they consume content. But in terms of getting started, a lot of times I'll work with our startups. When I do consult one-to-one, even though most of my work is supposed to be scalable, my power alley is really content marketing. So I'm able to spend time one-to-one with a lot of these startups that are adopting that as their marketing strategy.

• 9:13Speaker 02

  And what I tell them is, you know, it's really, really easy to just sprint out of the gate and create stuff. But the problem with that is you're spending precious time and energy and resources creating things that don't ever drive any results for the business. So one of the things that we did on our blog for NextView is we wrote, I wrote this essay using data from HubSpot to show the right approach to business blogging. And it's really about solving some kind of need or problem that your audience faces and doing that over time, being really tactical about it to make sure that you're creating this like clutch of evergreen content that actually builds this guaranteed influx of traffic day after day. And it's about focusing on your audience, not trying to be a thought leader or, you know, creating piffy statements that make you sound clever or be a buzzfeed.

• 9:58Speaker 02

  You know, it's really about serving your audience, number one, and then creating this grouping of content that in aggregate drives results. So to bring it home in a more concrete way, at HubSpot, 70% of our traffic in our leads came from posts that were older than 30 days old. And so literally, our whole team could have quit for a month and we would have gotten 70% of the results. So for a startup, it's really great to look ahead and think, okay, I'm going to publish this stuff now so that over time I can scale my marketing more efficiently and maybe use some, you know, paid marketing right now to get my first few customers or users. That's how I'd look at it. It's not really immediate demand gen for startups. It's more like looking ahead and saying, I want to scale more efficiently with my marketing and I want to have a better ROI.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  It's this like compounding return idea of content.

• 10:44Harry Stebbings?

  And is it simply enough to buy a domain off GoDaddy and set up a WordPress blog? Is it that simple or should you make it look very creative and artistic and design it yourself?

• 10:57Speaker 02

  Uh, the, the bells and whistles are great. The design can be great. A lot of the founders I work with talk about like parallax scrolling and they wanna look like Pinterest and all these other things, but all of that is just noise, or it could incrementally help your blog eventually if it is up and running. The thing I'd start with is, especially as an entrepreneur, you know, what problem are you trying to solve in the market? And, and a lot of big companies that I used to work with struggled with this because they've been around for so long, but founders have a really easy time saying, this is the problem. And this is the product that we're using to solve that problem, or eventually will. And then all you do is match the content you put out with that same idea. So the, so content marketing is really buzzy right now. And the problem is it gets really hard to decide how to execute.

• 11:40Speaker 02

  So rather than go run out of the gate and create some custom beautiful blog, better is just use out of the box tools. You know, WordPress, Squarespace, whatever, and just really focus on what you're putting out the door. And for a, for a company, it should be matching, basically solving the same problem with your content that you do with your product. You know, you solve it less well with content and that's great because you can drive towards the product. And you also might have a little bit of like a mission over the content, uh, that you can use to market your product, but they have to align. So they can't ever just be, it's a blog, publish a bunch of stuff, make it look nice, but the substance isn't there. It's about problem and solution matching.

• 12:18Harry Stebbings?

  And I think a lot of starting bloggers get quite disincentivized when not many visitors go to their site. What would you say to them and how would you encourage them to find more visitors?

• 12:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's tricky. So, uh, very rarely should you look, especially in the early stages, at the results of your blog posts today or even this week. And so one example is when I started at NextView, all the partners had individual blogs, but we didn't have a NextView branded blog. So I launched it in July of 2014. Uh, if you look at the report from last month, so we're recording this in May, so if you look at April of 2015, of the top 10 hi- most highly trafficked blog posts. About six or seven of them, I think it was seven of them, were published last year. Meaning if I had looked at those posts when they went out last year and they didn't go quote unquote viral or get tons of views, I would have deemed them a failure.

• 13:09Speaker 02

  But now they're actually buoying the entire blog, they're driving traffic every single day, you know, they're helpful tactical things that people are searching for. Or bookmarking and coming back to, you know, or that we can share on a recurring basis through social because it's evergreen content. And that kind of stuff is the foundation that you can do other really big hit things on the top of. So to someone listening to this, who's looking at a blog post and saying it's not really getting a lot of traffic, it's just trickling it in. That's fine, that's great if it's evergreen content that addresses a problem facing your market. Because you can use that over time, it can build the floor of traffic to buoy other stuff. You can send it either through sales channels or marketing channels, you can send that repeatedly. All this good stuff happens if we just stop focusing on the shiny object and kind of like near term immediate results.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Which is really not what content is geared for.

• 13:57Harry Stebbings?

  And Twitter's obviously a huge platform, but how effective do you really feel it is for content marketing? And do you notice any platforms produce better returns?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, so Twitter's great, I mean, I use it all the time personally, it helped me in my network. And I think it's, for me, I use it in two ways, so one is I'm building a following with NextView's handle, at NextView VC. And so people can discover content there and share it. But the action I really want, in addition to positive brand sentiment, is for people to click through. And actually read our content, subscribe to our email list, et cetera. And that email list is really the biggest kind of asset that I could grow for the firm. And I think that extends to product driven companies as well, not just VCs. So it's one, it's really good for traffic if you can kind of tilt it that way. The other thing I'm using it for is, and this might be more my personal handle, but actual offline relationships.

• 14:49Speaker 02

  Or even just like taking it over to email from social and building relationships with influential people. In our industry that could help amplify our message. So that could be, you know, I met somebody on Twitter by thanking them for sharing a post and asking them a question about it or whatever. But I'm using Twitter as like the handshake moment. And then I can actually follow up with content and requests for sharing that content or feedback or speaking at an event we throw, et cetera. So it's really good for influencer building.

• 15:16Harry Stebbings?

  And do you have any tips for people to increase their engagement on Twitter?

• 15:21Speaker 02

  I, you know, I don't think it's about focusing on Twitter engagement, really, and trying to say that's the end goal. Let's increase the, you know, the output. Again, it comes back to, are you trying to solve problems with your content? Or are you just trying to be me, me first, which nobody cares about on Twitter?

• 15:39Harry Stebbings?

  Are there any common mistakes that people make on Twitter?

• 15:43Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think a lot of times it's, it's, um. I wrote, I wrote this blog post once that was like all the weird things business people do on Twitter. Because a lot of times in marketing, people say, oh, it's like a cocktail party. Just treat, treat it like a cocktail party. And that's, that's a good sentiment, but in reality, nobody does that. Like, we do a lot of weird shit on Twitter that we wouldn't do in person. But that's, that should stop. So one of the major things is like asking for things way too soon before you actually know the person. So if somebody that I know has a big following in, in venture, shares one of our blog posts, I'll thank them. But I'm not going to say, hey, it'd be great if you can email this to all your followers. Or, hey, it'd be great if I could, you know, get fifteen minutes of your time to talk about X, Y, Z, or interview you for our blog. Because I don't know them, I don't have that context.

• 16:26Speaker 02

  So it's like starting too hard and too salesy on Twitter can be a real turn off. Because it, again, it should be like a cocktail party, but we, we treat it in like a weird fashion.

• 16:36Speaker 02

  You know, and the second thing I'd say is it becomes a glorified, like, press release, like, uh, distribution hub for a lot of companies. Where in reality, you should share other people's content and mention them by name. You should share interesting things like quotes and, and yes, content that you found that aren't yours. And you should share your own stuff. So treat that like a little microcosm of a media outlet and how they have like a hive of different types of content to appeal to different people and different times of the day, et cetera. It's not just me, me, me, me, me. So I think those are the two things. It's asking for things way too soon before you actually have a real relationship. And just making it like this brute force message distribution hub of like you pushing your stuff on everybody else.

• 17:20Harry Stebbings?

  And then talking of your writing, you wrote an incredible article on the PayPal mafia, comparing them to Bill Walsh's coaching tree. But I'm fascinated, what do you think it was about PayPal that created this revolutionary, world-changing group of individuals? It can't be mere coincidence. What do you think?

• 17:38Speaker 02

  I love that you found that, by the way, because that was a couple of years ago. I wrote this post for HubSpot and worked with a friend of mine who's a designer.

• 17:45Harry Stebbings?

  Was that a couple of years ago?

• 17:46Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, so I did this infographic comparing the PayPal mafia and like all the legendary success that came out of that one company and one clutch of talent. I compared that to Bill Walsh, who's an NFL coach, originally of the 49ers, whose assistants and their assistants became this really influential, successful group of coaches in the NFL. And it was sort of like, who wins, who's more successful? We came up with a scorecard, etc. It was kind of like a fun little play on the two groups. So I actually worked with one of the members of the founding team of PayPal, which is Lee Howar. He's one of the founders of our firm at NextView. And he recently told me a story of how, you know, they were setting out to start a company together.

• 18:29Speaker 02

  Oh, I'm sorry, they founded LinkedIn together, a group of them afterwards. So I'm just amazed at like how many known companies came out of PayPal. So LinkedIn, YouTube, and the list goes on. I don't know that necessarily it's like, there's causation correlation to be had here. So I think it's just like a few founders who were able to attract a lot of talented people together, and those people were going to be doing very successful things anyway. And they just followed the best talent initially. And so, yes, they were all going to be doing things separately if they hadn't met each other, but because they just found their way together, ended up being even greater. So I think it starts with the founders, really, and their ability to recruit talent. And that's one of the initiatives that we're focused on at NextView right now with Platform

• 19:11Speaker 02

  is we have this proprietary system that we're running for our startups to surface and interview and hire the best talent. It's far and away the best thing they could do at the seed stage. And I think, you know, you had Peter Thiel and Elon Musk and this founding team of the two companies that joined to create PayPal, that really found all this great talent and recruited them and convinced them that they were heading places. So I think that's where the magic is, if there was any, it's recruiting top talent.

• 19:37Harry Stebbings?

  So you at NextView provide great recruiting support for your startups?

• 19:41Speaker 02

  We do and we try to do it scalably. So we have this great network around NextView and then our network's network. And then there's probably individuals outside of even a circle that wide that that we don't know that would be great fits for our startup.

• 19:54Speaker 02

  Or our startups, rather. And so we kind of looked at that problem and we also talked to lots of founders who told us that, you know, hiring operators is really difficult in particular because their networks tilt more senior. And we just found ways to start putting process around referrals and eventually creating an actual program that that our founders can use as part of our platform. It's it's not public right now, but it's actually just built for the portfolio.

• 20:18Harry Stebbings?

  Now, if it's okay with you, we're going to move into a lightning round.

• 20:21Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 20:22Harry Stebbings?

  The best and the worst aspect of your job as VP of Platform?

• 20:27Speaker 02

  Best aspect is I get to tell really interesting stories and create really interesting media, whether blogging or podcasting around who I think are the most interesting people in our industry. Just people that are willing to put themselves out there and found companies and have tremendous respect for. The worst part is I came from lots of data-driven companies and there's really not an analytics report that could say VC platform is leading to this many deals. And that's fine. I I get a lot of value and we get a lot of value out of platform in general without having that report. But I think at some point, if platform becomes this massive industry where lots of people are inhabiting it, it'd be great to start looking at the analytics if there are any. You know, it's a weird sales cycle in VC,

• 21:09Speaker 02

  but I'd say it'd be interesting to see if we can crack that code.

• 21:13Harry Stebbings?

  Absolutely. And then your best resource for content marketing?

• 21:18Speaker 02

  There's a great organization called the Content Marketing Institute. I'm pretty involved with them, writing for them and speaking at their events. And they're kind of the trade organization with events and content and resources and trainings if you're interested in in content marketing. And recently I've been getting into a lot of their podcasts just to have that learning on the go.

• 21:34Harry Stebbings?

  And then finally, your favorite book and why?

• 21:38Speaker 02

  That's a tough one. Um, I think of of my favorites way up there is Kitchen Confidential. It's an older book by Anthony Bourdain, and I think it's great on face value. People just love, I I love to read it. I think people would just love to read it for its own sake, but it's also just the showcasing of how great a storyteller Anthony Bourdain is. And next you thinks a lot about storytelling. Seeds stage founders have to be great at storytelling. And me personally, with being a writer, I think about that a lot, and that's just a great showcase of of awesome storytelling.

• 22:07Harry Stebbings?

  Well, Jay, thank you so much for coming on the show. It's been a huge amount of fun, and I look forward to having you on again soon.

• 22:12Speaker 02

  Yeah, my pleasure. Thanks again for having me.

• 22:14Harry Stebbings?

  Now, for all the incredible resources mentioned on today's show, head on over to the blog at www dot the twenty minute V C dot com. And likewise, if you'd like to see Jay's blog, head on over to sorry for marketing dot com. And we would love to hear what you think of the show, any guests that you'd like in the future, or any questions that you'd like to be asked. So do email those over to Harry at the twenty minute V C dot com. Thank you so much, and we can't wait to see you in the next episode.