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Jay Acunzo

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29
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2015-05-11
most recent
2015-05-11
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1
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podcast

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  1. “That's a tough one. I think 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 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 he thinks a lot about storytelling. Seed stage founders have to be great at storytelling. Me personally with being a writer, I think about that a lot. And that's just a great showcase of awesome storytelling.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  2. “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 content marketing and recently have been getting into a lot of their podcasts just to have that learning on the go.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  3. “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 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. It's a weird sales cycle in BC, but I'd say it'd be interesting to see if we can crack that code.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  4. “We do and we try to do it scalably. So we have this great network around NextView, and then our networks network, and then there's probably individuals outside of even a circle that wide that we don't know that would be great fits for our startup or our startups. And so we kind of looked at that problem, and we also talked to lots of founders who told us that 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 our founders can use as part of our platform. It's not public right now, but it's actually just built for the portfolio.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  5. “The best talent is far and away the best thing they could do at the seed stage. And I think 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.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  6. “And he recently told me a story of how they were setting out to start a company together. Oh, I'm sorry, they founded LinkedIn together, a group of them afterwards. So I'm just amazed at 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 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 is we have this proprietary system that we're running for our startups to surface and interview and hire”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  7. “Couple of years ago, yeah, yeah. So I did this infographic comparing the PayPal mafia and 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 the 49ers, whose assistants and their assistants became this really influential, successful group of coaches in the NFL. It was sort of like who wins, who's more successful? We came up with a scorecard, et cetera. It was kind of like a fun little play on the two groups. So I actually work with one of the members of the founding team of PayPal, which is Lee Hower. He's one of the founders of our firm at NextView.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  8. “I love that you found that, by the way, so that was a couple years ago. I wrote this post for HubSpy and worked with a friend of mine who's a designer. Was that that?”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  9. “A glorified press release 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 yes content that you found that aren't yours and you should share your own stuff. So treat 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 etc. 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.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  10. “Yeah, I think a lot of times it's, 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 it like a cocktail party. And 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 should stop. So one of the major things is asking for things way too soon before you actually know the person. So if somebody that I know has a big following 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 get 15 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. So it's like starting too hard and too salesy on Twitter can be a real turnoff because, again, it should be like a cocktail party, but we treat it in like a weird fashion. And the second thing I'd say is it becomes”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  11. “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 output. Again, it comes back to are you trying to solve problems with your content or are you just trying to be me first, which nobody cares about on Twitter?”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  12. “Sharing a post and asking them a question about it, or whatever, but I'm using Twitter as 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.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  13. “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 NextViews 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 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 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”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  14. “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, which is really not what content is geared for.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  15. “Yeah, it's tricky. So 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. 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 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 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. But now they're actually buoying the entire blog. They're driving traffic every single day. They're helpful, tactical things that people are searching for or bookmarking coming back to or that we can share on a recurring basis through social because it's evergreen content. And that kind of stuff is the foundation.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  16. “For a company, it should be matching basically solving the same problem with your content that you do with your product. 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 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.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  17. “The bells and whistles are great. The design can be great. A lot of the founders I work with talk about parallax scrolling and they want to 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 start with is, especially as an entrepreneur, what problem are you trying to solve in the market? 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 content marketing is really buzzy right now. And the problem is it gets really hard to decide how to execute. So rather than go run out of the gate and create some custom, beautiful blog, better is just use out-of-the-box tools, WordPress, Squarespace, whatever, and just really focus on what you're putting out the door.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  18. “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 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. It's this like compounding return idea of content.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  19. “So, one of the things that we did on our blog for NextView is we 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 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 creating pithy statements that make you sound clever or being buzzfeed. 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 sit.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  20. “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 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. 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. 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.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  21. “It's really getting in the weeds and being low volume, high touch, 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 sales consulting because a lot of our companies don't have sales.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  22. “It might be, although I think it's tough to say what the output would be. I think so 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 going to 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? How does that firm position itself differently than other firms? For NextView, 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.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  23. “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. 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, 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.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  24. “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 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 can 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 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 and it's kind of heading in that direction”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  25. “Yeah, so I use this analogy. I wrote this article for TechCrunch where I use this analogy. 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 competitors plain bagel. And I think with the rise of lots of micro firms or early stage firms or seed funds or whatever you want to call it and the rise of crowdsourced capital and angel list and things like that, all of a sudden ventures becoming a lot more crowded. You have more options for capital as an entrepreneur. And so as a result, differentiation is more key than it's ever been. 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. 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 the”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  26. “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. Next few was the first to move on it in Boston in the early stage world.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  27. “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 scalable or horizontal type projects that support an entire portfolio or more publicly an entire startup ecosystem. So for example, we'll create it next few where seed investors were very dedicated to just investing in the seed round and then maybe doing 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 and resources and templates and workshops and 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.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  28. “Display, YouTube, mobile, and then eventually social with Google for their brands. And so that was 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 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.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source

  29. “Yeah, absolutely. So I guess it starts in school, in college. I want to be a sports journalist. So I kind of tilted everything I did around that field, won a scholarship for it, wrote for student papers, wrote for during the summers, wrote for print papers, if you can believe it or not, in our tech-driven world, entered 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 this nebulous sounding role. And I thought, you know, I'm never going to hear back. And through, 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 to use AdWords.”

    2015-05-11 · The Twenty Minute VC · 20 VC 035: The Ultimate Marketing Guide for Startups with Jay Acunzo, VP of Platform @ NextView Ventures · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source