Why do so many venture capital firms blog? Why is Zetta blogging here? Should I follow this blog?
Why Investment Firms Publish Content
Early stage investment firms have two customers: (1) investors; and (2) investees. Investors in venture capital firms are LPs and investees of venture capital firms are founders. We publish for current and potential LPs so that they can understand how we make decisions about allocating their money to investment opportunities. We publish for current and potential founders so that they can gauge the value of knowledge we can provide to them. There are, of course, many things we can provide besides knowledge but knowledge in the form of strategic, competitive and market intelligence is something that’s very hard to gather when you’re focused, as a founder, on building your business.
What You’ll Find Here
We exclusively invest in intelligent enterprise software. That is, startups building enterprise software that learns from data to analyze, predict and prescribe outcomes. We will publish as much useful content as we can about the technology, business model and market shifts enabling this new wave of intelligent software. You’ll find some combination of information about the following here.
Technology. Investing at our (early) stage requires us to pick technology cycles more than it requires us to pick financial cycles. We’re in the middle of a cycle in which Machine Learning technology is developing at a rapid rate, thanks to drivers such as research in neural networks, abundant data and cheap computing. We hope that, as a focused firm and relatively technical group of partners, our articles written from the frontier of this field will keep founders aware of emerging technologies.
Business. The Intelligence era will yield different types of competitive advantages for businesses building Machine Learning and data analytics technology. We are constantly meeting companies experimenting with different business models to exploit this competitive advantage, and learning what works along the way. Cloud computing investors, founders and analysts generously shared what they learnt about ways to find, acquire, contract and deliver to customers for cloud-based software over the last 10 years. We hope to significantly contribute to the knowledge base of ways to find, acquire, contract and deliver to customers for intelligence-based software over the next 10 years.
Customers. We talk to hundreds of customers every year as they consult with us on how to operate in the intelligence era, or as we ask them about startups’ products they’re buying. We will consolidate the feedback we hear from buyers of intelligence-based products and deliver it back to startups.
Market. Buying, selling and financing companies happens at a rate higher than is possible for a founder focused on building a company to track. We see a high volume of companies for financing, and constantly talk to potential acquirers of companies in this space. We hope to surface some useful information from the thousands of data points on deals done each year.
Portfolio. We will publish through and on behalf of our portfolio companies. We think that they’re doing interesting things in this field and, in any case, we’re always helping our companies market themselves. Sometimes we’ll post pieces on our portfolio companies’ properties and sometimes on our own.
In a way, Zetta represents a new wave of venture capital whereby the ‘investors’ are more like the ‘operators’ in that the ‘investors’ are tightly focused on a particular area.
What You Won’t Find Here
Inside Baseball. There are many, great blogs out there that cover the ins and outs of the business of venture capital. For example, the pros and cons of convertible debt, the economics of venture capital firms, whether we’re in a bubble, etc. Our audience is founders of intelligent enterprise startups so we will focus on writing articles that are useful for them. That said, it’s obviously useful to know certain, specific things about deal structuring and, to that end, we commend the The Venture Hacks Bible and Venture Deals.
Publishing under our own names. We choose to publish as Zetta, not under our individual names. Firstly, we are a small group of people who work hard for the companies and investors with which we partner; we are persons rather than personalities. Everything we do should valuable to a current or potential founder rather than to an individual partner’s reputation. Secondly, we are building a firm to last many generations so it makes sense to compound knowledge over time in this firm, rather than spread it across people who may come and go. This should help founders better understand our firm over time.
Where You’ll Find Us
We’ll be communicating across a variety of media, from this blog to podcasts to events. Different messages work better on different media and some ideas come together only by stringing together multiple concepts. The best way to hear of anything we publish is on Twitter.
