Building A Personal Brand

A playbook Kyle presented to the Tidemark team on building a personal brand — becoming known as the person for a specific area, and using that reputation to compound access, deal flow, and credibility.

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Core thesis

Becoming known as THE person for a specific area.

• “Your personal brand is how people talk about you when you’re not in the room” — swyx
• Whether you build that reputation through writing, tweeting, podcasts, dinners, small groups, or even 1x1 thought leadership with founders / operators / investors.
• The key idea is that anytime anyone thinks of [ecommerce / SMB GTM / DevOps] they think of you.

Examples

From my experience

Roam

• Stumbled on a note-taking app that attracted a lot of high-profile people.
• Became proficient in the tool and started having 1x1 product tours.
• My first blog post was about the product with insights taken from my tours.
• Two years later the note-taking app isn’t as buzzy but I still benefit:
  1. The people I met during that time period are advisors, LPs, co-investors, and earlier-stage investors that vouch for me in deals.
  2. Founders often use the app and I bond with them over that shared experience.

Commonstock

• Obsessed with the idea of “Wikipedia for companies” and talked about it to a lot of people (investors, founders, operators).
• Eventually someone stumbled on this idea in a startup and, because I had mentioned it to them, they introduced me to the founder at Commonstock.
• Angel invested and have continued to talk about this obsession with how people can better share information about companies.
• Has continued to benefit me because:
  1. I’m building a research arm at Contrary and many of the people I’ve hired and who are collaborators came from the network of “Wikipedia for companies” nerds.
  2. Even though the company hasn’t been a smash hit, the founder is a reference for me on any deal I’m trying to win.

Investing 101

• Started a newsletter mostly for my own thinking. I had been observing a lot of changes in venture, and I was joining a newer fund, so I wanted to ideate on what the changing landscape meant in venture in terms of opportunities for me and Contrary.
• My brand has become “The Future of Venture,” and it turns out that a lot of good investors are thinking about a lot of the same topics, have respected my views, and now I have investors reach out to me to talk about their portfolio companies because they respect my perspective.

Other people

• Jamin Ball: Public SaaS comps and analysis
• Nina Achadjian: Vertical market SaaS
• Shomik Ghosh: DevOps & Infrastructure
• Mark Goldberg: Fintech

Expertise-first

This won’t be the bulk of our discussion, but it’s a critical idea. Before you can start to build your brand you have to develop substance. You don’t want to be “all sizzle and no steak” when you talk to people. My recommendation is to follow this path:

1. Identify your domain
   • “Connect yourself to something important that you love, that you are also absurdly unsatisfied with.” — swyx
2. Develop your domain
   • Know the companies, build a market map, do customer calls, set up alerts to follow on Feedly, Twitter, etc. so that you hear all the interesting things happening around the relevant companies.
3. Engage with others in your domain
   • Once you’ve done steps 1 and 2 you can follow the “Approaches” below to build connections. It’s okay to start engaging with people before you’re an expert.
   • One important note — understand the risk-reward ratio on each person you reach out to:
     • If you feel like you’re a 2 out of 10 in your understanding, then reaching out to a more junior person at a relevant company is the right risk.
     • If you’re a 2 out of 10 and you’re reaching out to an SVP, you’re taking on significant reputational risk because your understanding probably isn’t adequate.
     • The caliber of the people you’re talking to should increase as the caliber of your understanding of the space increases.

Approaches

Networking (1-on-1)

The simplest way — and one that overlaps with an investor’s typical day-to-day — is to build a high-quality, on-brand rolodex.

For example, Data Infrastructure:

• Identify the companies: Snowflake, Databricks, Confluent, Cockroach Labs, Fivetran, Census, dbt, Airbyte, Imply, Materialize, Clickhouse, Starburst.
• Identify the investors: Altimeter, Coatue, Redpoint, Lightspeed, etc.
  • Also valuable to identify the angel investors that are active in the space.
  • I often use Crunchbase to look at the entire list of investors a company has. Lots of firms (helpful too), but once you get to the early days of a company’s life you’ll often find several angels as well.
• Identify the operators: This doesn’t mean you have to build personal friendships with the CEOs of the biggest data companies. You start where you can. Meeting anyone at any of these companies is powerful.

You should build these relationships organically, not transactionally. You’re not reaching out to say “I’m building a market map, can you answer a few questions.” You’re building a relationship that happens to help you on your journey to developing your own brand.

These 1x1 conversations may feel less helpful in building a public-facing brand, but remember: it’s about how people talk about you. And if you impress these people you meet with your familiarity of a space, they’ll think of you in the future when a need for investors comes up.

Personal CRM: I literally keep a spreadsheet of the people I know and what they care about. I treat them like prospects where I have re-engagement triggers if I haven’t talked with them in a while. I also have a battle card for ways I can engage with them, things I can send, etc. What system you use isn’t as important as the fact that you HAVE a system.

Events (1-on-several)

• Small group get-togethers: Once you’ve met a few people in [data infrastructure], invite them together for dinner, poker, surfing, etc. Treat this as a group of like-minded friends.
• Themed dinners: Almost every firm I’ve been at, we’ve hosted deliberately themed dinners (e.g. Fintech Dinner, CFO Dinner, etc.) where we invite people we know as well as offer the invite to those people to share with others that “fit the theme.” We once invited the CFO of a Series B startup to the dinner, opened the invite, and he invited the CFO of a $40B public company to join.
• Hosted events: Dave’s Customer Acquisition Forum is a perfect example. Find a common question that people within your “theme” often have and build an event around it. Focus here is still on socializing, but it’s meant to be much more practical than a casual get-together or dinner.

Content (1-on-many)

Producing content can be uncomfortable for most people.

“According to most studies, people’s number one fear is public speaking. Number two is death. Death is number two. This means to the average person, if you go to a funeral, you’re better off in the casket than doing the eulogy.” — Jerry Seinfeld

Producing some form of publicly-accessible content is important for the same reason that both marketing AND sales exist. Outbound sales is powerful in building customer relationships, but it’s only so scalable. Even the largest companies still recognize that marketing is an important way to scale their message.

Channels

Tips

• Pick your playing field: The good news is you can pick and choose the channels you most enjoy. But usually it’s best to really lean into one channel. For me, I’m heavily focused on Newsletter + Twitter.
• Where content comes from: The reason the “approaches” above are important is because content comes from conversation. If you’re just googling things, it can feel much more daunting to articulate them.
• Taking notes: There is a special moment when you’ve gotten really familiar with a space and you’re talking with someone about it. You almost feel yourself start to rant. Take notes. The perspective you’re sharing is something your understanding can articulate, so it’s something you should share.
• Build collateral: One of the reasons publicly-shareable content is important is because you can point to it as collateral to support your own clout. For example: I wrote one piece that outlines my firm’s philosophy and one piece that is a key concept in why I reach out to companies — I’m very focused on talent vortexes. Not only have those pieces been some of my more popular writing, but I can literally link to them in my outreach emails to expose much deeper thinking than any cold email could. See Talent Vortex.

Options

• Newsletter: Believe it or not, this is the easiest channel for people who are anxious about what people will think of them. Newsletters are very opt-in, so you can just write the things you’re actively thinking about and put them out into the ether, and only people who actively want to engage with the content will. Starting is the hardest part. I only recently started writing consistently. I’ve written 28 times (every week this year), have grown my subscriber base to several thousand, and haven’t optimized anything. I just write and post.
• Twitter: Using Twitter for work can feel silly because it’s a non-professional social media site. But the reality is Twitter is better equipped than just about any other social site because it almost entirely revolves around the quality of your ideas. A 15-year-old in India can have tens of thousands of followers based simply on the quality of their ideas. 95% of people on Twitter are lurkers. The best way to start engaging on Twitter is to follow the people who are “on brand” for what you’re building and simply comment on their posts. Give more than you take. Don’t be a “reply guy,” but actually add something substantive to the things people are posting.
• LinkedIn: Great tool for sharing professional content. Harder to build a meaningful following on LinkedIn because it’s so noisy. For example, I have 8K followers on LinkedIn and 6K on Twitter, but Twitter is much more valuable because I can DM my connections and they’ll actually engage. LinkedIn is much noisier and therefore harder to build meaningful relationships with people.
• Podcasts: Much more anxiety-inducing when you’re speaking live. But some people really like using apps like Twitter Spaces or Callin to just get a few people on a call, riff live on interesting topics, and then record it / put it out into the world. Other people like to do a lot of editing, though that production can be a difficult burden on you given it’s not your full-time job.
• YouTube: Similar problem in terms of production quality. But many people have built some great success in creating compilation videos of interesting ideas.
• TikTok: Surprisingly, I think this is an underutilized channel because it lends itself to much more casual production. You could effectively do a video journal talking about the things you’re discussing with people every day and just share it without any editing.

Q&A

Buckets

• Know thyself: There is an art to doing customer calls to make sure you’re not just running through the motions but actually crystallizing your understanding.
• Know thy neighbor: You have to focus on those “aha” moments — when you rant, or they rant, or you get rolling checking your understanding.
• Know thy audience.

Come prepared vs. come open

• You need to increase the N of conversations where you can afford to come open-minded.
• That’s much less likely to happen with founders because they have a specific script they run with investors.
• VP / Director-level folks are excited to be heard.

Time allocation

You have to build deliberate structures and KPIs, or else it won’t happen.

Personal vs. professional content

Earlier, you’re really focused on building your own brand.

How do you make sure everything meets your bar?

The worst thing people do is have too high of a bar. People think of networking and producing content as a performance, but it’s a conversation. If you waited to talk until you had the absolute perfect thing to say, you would just be the weirdo who takes super-long pauses in between sentences.