2024 Scheming

What I'm working on / exploring at the moment professionally

I announced a career update today, that I’ve transitioned onto a venture partner role at Village Global and I am starting something new.

While I’m still figuring out what shape it will take, I imagine I’m going to spend the next 10 years similar to how I spent the last ten years at Product Hunt and then On Deck and Village Global: building communities and products for the startup ecosystem that solve for distribution, talent, capital, and expertise.

The first company I’ve started is Turpentine, a tech media company that will also serve as a distribution asset for my investments and other incubations. Like Product Hunt was a distribution asset, Turpentine will be one, hopefully an even better business on its own too. It’s currently at 400k+ downloads a month and did $250k revenue in both November and December. Media companies are tremendously underrated—they’re not only distribution machines, they are also data-aggregators and reputation-generators.

The second will be a recruiting company / set of talent initiatives. I’ve seen how accretive Product Hunt (distribution) and On Deck (talent) were to investing, and I want to build more assets that both produce a ton of cash flow and are also very strategic to the next few decades of building. In a crowded venture environment, I think having these kind of assets is the price of entry to compete with the best.

Other products (or companies) I’d like to start include a GLG/Tegus-style expert marketplace, a set of professional networks, and something in the reputation space (reputation of products, companies, and people), including an investor rating system, service provider/SaaS rating system, and a bookface-style social network for founders (from pre-company to exited entrepreneurs). 

For now, I’m mostly focused on building products and communities where I believe I have an unfair advantage. Those include areas where the customer is the startup ecosystem (founders, VCs) and I can take it 0->1 on my own. More on the different ideas below:

Turpentine:

As a refresher, think of Turpentine as Lenny Rachitsky or Harry Stebbings for X - where X is every exec position that’s a buyer (e.g. our CFO show and CPO show), or every sector that matters. In other words, niche business media.

First Turpentine is starting with podcasts, but aims to go into newsletters, conferences, and lists — ie on top of our CPO show we’ll have a CPO conference and a “50 best CPOs” list, as an example.

Today we have 13 shows and we’re inspired by media companies such as Industry Dive, Workweek, Tech Crunch, and Forbes (conferences, lists, coverage). Industry Dive built a $500M business just creating a couple dozen niche pubs.

Here’s a deep dive on what we’ve done this year and where we’re going next.

Recruiting:

I’m working on a couple different assets here. One is an outsourced engineering company with a very talented CEO (early look here). Reach out if you’re hiring engineers and open to remote ones.  

The other is a recruiting company for designers and engineers. Fill this out if you’re hiring and would work with a recruiting firm.

Reputation:

I’m excited to finally build something that aims to put reputation on the internet — of people, companies, and products. 

Reporters and recruiters are effectively reputation gatherers, so a media business and recruiting business would be very strategic to a reputation company. I’ve also been obsessed with how to compete with Linkedin for a very long time, and I think reputation is one of the wedges in since Linkedin doesn’t have that.

I’ve launched a couple of beta reputations sites last month, like this one for investor ratings and this one for SaaS tool and service provider ratings (please add any reviews if you have them!). You can gain full access to them through submitting a rating yourself. I’m also interested in references as a service and the original vision of Cosign (a social network where people ask questions lke “who’s the best at Y that you know?”).

The amount of valuable information in peoples heads that is not on the internet that would influence buying decisions, investment decisions, and hiring/joining decisions is massive—and I’m thrilled to unlock it.

Expert Marketplaces

I think a media company could be a great wedge into a data company — particularly an expert network / Tegus style business.

Tegus is a GLG-like expert marketplace that records the calls and then publishes the transcripts for investors to read. Investors pay for Tegus to get insights on trends, companies, and other info that’d help them determine whether to invest in a company.

OK so how’s a media company a good wedge? Consider this piece Forbes did on Stability AI: The reporter interviewed 30 people for that piece! If the reporter published notes of those calls with their permission, and anonymously to protect them, that’d be much more info than Tegus has on the company. And people pay $25K per seat for their service. So media is a way to get paid to build a data asset. Podcast and articles can be freemium for a paid transcript product. Lists would also be helpful (best companies per sector, best investors per sector, best execs at certain position). And using these lists to go reference a ton of companies, investors, and people.

Each podcast, each article, each list can be constructed with the end in mind (valuable transcript to the data set that investors pay for).

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I’d love to put together a group chat to discuss and brainstorm around incubations I’m excited about. If you’re interested in joining, fill this out here and I’ll add if a mutual fit!

FAQ:

Will you still invest?

Yes, of course. I’ll expand this practice appropriately when the time is right, first I’m building the infrastructure.

Why incubate instead of just pick one idea and run with it?

My super power is going 0->1 and building things that “work in practice, but wouldn’t work in theory.” You couldn’t plan Product Hunt, On Deck, or VG — they just had to emerge, bottoms up, for one to think that it was feasible. To that end, launching experiments is how I find the right thing to work on. Either I’ll go all in on an idea, or I’ll go all in on serially incubating. We’ll see what happens. 

Don’t incubations not work?

A reason incubations often don’t work is because there’s adverse selection, but also as soon as a company works, the incubator breaks down since everyone focuses on the company that’s working. On the adverse selection side, I’m mostly working on ideas that I have unfair advantage and can derisk significantly. On the other concern, well, you only need one massive win for incubating to be worth it! So I’m OK with that outcome. I’m married to success, not the structure.

What’s my style of incubation?

When I incubate a business I start as CEO or active cofounder and do a sprint until there is PMF. My default plan (though who knows) is to try incubating until achieving PMF and then bringing on a new CEO to scale . Ideally I’d have that CEO as a cofounder from day one though I’m not married to it (Turpentine as one example where I’m open to bringing someone externally)

What other ideas are you curious about?

I’ve built a match-making dating ring with a friend that I’ll share more about soon. I’m also interested in fitness ideas (though I don’t have an unfair advantage in either of these :)). Most of my incubations as such will be serving the startup ecosystem.

What are you hiring for?

• Chief of Staff

• EA

• Head of Network

• Analyst/Associate (for research and investing)

The best candidates to work with me are ones that have founder-work ethic and mentality and also want to learn about a lot of different things, build a strong network, and gain investment and operational experience. I also love working with people I’ve worked with before but I’m known to also hire people who’ve written legendary cold emails and were “no-brainer” great hires.

What communities are you currently organizing?

• Exited Entrepreneurs/early employees

• Active Founders, from pre-company to decacorn.

Click the links above to apply to join any of them!

Reach out if you think there’s something I might be interested in, I’ll let you know if so. Separately, if we’re friends or navigating similar interests I’d like to hear what you’re up to in 2024!

Thank you for reading and supporting—we’ll be back to our usual regularly scheduled writing soon.

Erik