I’ve made a major change in my content strategy.
Some people ask me how I’ve ended up posting so much on this blog and elsewhere (Entrepreneur.com, Forbes, Harvard Business Review, PE Hub, Institutional Investor, Techcrunch, VentureBeat, etc.). I have 5 motivations:
- Education. I think that my core responsibility as a manager and investor is to learn, document, improve, implement, and teach best practices in the areas where I have responsibility. If I can’t articulate and document a process, I don’t think I’ve really mastered it.
- Building in public raises the bar. It forces me to be very thorough and hopefully accurate. Also, I typically share drafts of my research with other domain experts, who take the time to contribute because they know their contribution will be public.
- Efficiency. Effectively, my writings are my “outboard brain”. It allows me to more efficiently work with my portfolio CEOs and other investors, because I can point people to well-organized best practices I’ve already documented.
- Searchability, and consequent lower origination costs. I get 2-5 companies per day approaching me about investing, plus a wide range of other inquiries from limited partners, co-investors, corporates and others. They are coming to me because they can see my strong interest in certain domains.
- High ROI. Much of the content on my blog started as conference presentations, meeting notes, or emails. I then sanitized and published. The cost of publication is low, but the benefit high.
But here’s the problem. Much of what I’ve published historically can now be generated by generative AI, which is trained in part on my own writings. I don’t think it’s a good use of my time to spend time doing something, or even taking responsibility to edit, what a machine can do potentially better.
I still think writing and researching has value, but I have to change my strategy to add value to readers and to myself. So now, I’m moving to only publishing content which is proprietary, experiential, data-privileged, and/or reputationally costly to fake. You can’t get any of this from generative AI:
- AltsTech breakdowns of the tech stack of institution investment managers, as well as of individual investors. For example, see Seth Levine of Foundry VC, who wrote Running My Day From a Terminal Window.
- slides from presentations I’ve given, since I have to prepare the slides anyway
- research based on proprietary data, relationships, and experience, e.g., Deal Origination Best Practices and Portfolio Acceleration Platform: Best Practices of Private Equity Investors in Increasing Portfolio Company Value.
If you’re interested in sharing your workflow and how you’re using modern AI and analytics to generate alpha, please contact me!