Michael Plocher

👀 for Start-ups & Angel Investors @BirminghamAngels by @CitySideVP I Great Lakes Angels Fund 👇🏼

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

#Startup or #founder on early stage seeking funding from Angel investors? Check this out for a first intro 👇🏼

https://t.co/flPMXPGSQR

[Jil Theo @theo_jil]

I'm 54.

I wasted 24 years learning this the hard way. But I'll teach you in 5 minutes.

If you're soft, stop reading now.

Here are 24 uncomfortable truths I wish I knew earlier:

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

#LP #GP #investors check this likeminded group https://t.co/HttaYA9Cqr

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

Interesting, I was not aware of job postings on X

[X @X]

1 million+ open jobs. just saying

https://t.co/YXLisClgZh

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

@Robinsmdoka @WizLikeWizard Why this is your impression?

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

@WizLikeWizard Great Lakes Angels Fund @CitySideVP - we try to become “the best” in Michigan

[Jenny Fielding @jefielding]

Does it count if you’re ranked by @CrainsNewYork ALMOST above the fold??

[Adam Draper ⏻ @AdamDraper]

It’s hard for me to invest in founders who have not gone full time on the startup.

If you aren’t willing to invest all in on yourself, why should I?

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

@Trace_Cohen Agreed, and necessary to drive efficiency in corporates but this means mind set change and great leadership in these companies to break through. In many companies basic change projects fail and AI is a tremendous change to any organization

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

This is exactly happening, all other verticals are struggling raising money. Lots of companies using the AI buzzword and not really much behind. Challenging for the Angels to identify the right ones as every hype ends with disillusionment

[Trace Cohen @Trace_Cohen]

Billions every month are now being invested in Ai startups by VCs

No idea how to differentiate them all and who eventually will pay for their services…

It will take 6months-1yr now to find out which actually built something worthwhile when they raise significantly more

As an investor my concern would be the fit… can an AI startup IPO in a few years? Possibly

Can they get acquired by a BIG tech? Less likely and at multi billion valuations there are only a few that can pay the price

Either way consumer/business will win bc Ai is being discussed everywhere but will take years to get adoption and in our normal work routine

Right now it’s all sizzle/hype but next year we’ll see where the traction meets the road

Very exciting!

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

@MartinGTobias @SignalRank Great work, this is needed to fill the pipeline for the VCs. This am I have been at a event and again I noticed that no one talks about the real problem of start-up investing which is the focus of early stage money as this is the pipeline for everything coming. There we lack

[Martin Tobias (Pre-Seed VC) @MartinGTobias]

Apparently, according to the @SignalRank database, Incisive Ventures is in the top 10 most capital efficient investors in picking unicorns. Blush.

[andrew chen @andrewchen]

How to break into Silicon Valley.

If you work in tech, you'll never regret spending 3-5 years in the Bay Area.

^^ this is advice I've been giving to people for years, and it's shaped by my own experience -- after all, I moved to the Bay Area in 2007 and it completely changed my life.

How?
- I met tons of incredible people, some of whom went on to create major products and found unicorn companies. Most are still building
- I was introduced to many investors who today run some of the major VC firms and investor networks
- learned so much!
- made life long friends
- formed fundamental aspects of my world view

Because of the recent AI boom, I've been meeting a lot of folks who are new to SF. Many folks very intentionally want to build out their network and get rooted in the Bay Area, and to fully immerse themselves in tech. I learned so much in my first few years and wanted to pass along some of my lessons.

In particular:
- personal viral loop: Asking people for more people
- ask for advice and listen
- why it's helpful to "have a thing"
- know what you bring to the table
- find your cult
- how blogging/tweeting is helpful
- why I avoid conferences/events
- building a network while you sleep

I first moved to the Bay Area as a 25 year old nerd with a light resume and big tech dreams. I knew exactly 2 people, and that was it. But very intentionally, I wanted to build a strong professional network and to learn from people. The first thing I did was to be intentional and methodical about it, by asking the two people I knew to please sit down and suggest 5 to 10 people for me to meet -- an they did a number of email intros for me. The amazing thing about SF tech culture was that this worked! Although the intros were very light on context, people were willing to grab coffee and share what they were working on, and what they've learned over the last couple years.

After each meeting, I would follow up with a few bullet points on what I learned from the conversation, and then ask for two or three more people to meet. This was like building my own personal viral loop, where every chat turned into a few more chats. For my first six months in the Bay Area, I ended up meeting 3 to 5 new people every day. I learned an incredible amount. I can confirm this is still possible, as others I know have done it in recent years.

You might ask, what do you end up talking about? What value can you add as someone who's just moved to the area and is starting in tech? The answer is, you simply ask for advice. People move to the Bay Area from all over the world because they're incredibly passionate about what they're building. They love talking about that. and if you have something that you're passionate about too, and ask for advice, you were sure to get a lot of it. The culture in the SF tech community is very open and the intro culture makes it easy to chat with a variety of new people.

For me, I was coming from Seattle, and I asked people about various mysteries of the tech industry I didn't understand as an outsider. Why were there so many consumer successes in the Bay Area but not elsewhere? How does angel investing and VC work? Why don't they build more houses/offices in the Peninsula? And so on.

That said, the conversations are more productive when you have "a thing." What I mean by that is that all of these conversations and networking are more useful when you are starting a company, creating a new podcast, are working on a new project or book, or something else. When you have a directed goal in mind, then the conversations often are more valuable for all parties involved, because you were making yourself an expert in a particular area and your questions are more relevant. Otherwise you will surely encounter very busy people who simply refuse to "grab coffee" to "catch up" because it's a poor use of time. I encourage you to be on a quest of your own, and even better a particularly interesting quest, so that your conversations with people can be as productive as possible.

In my case, I was very interested in the state of the art on growing users, metrics, network effects, and marketing. I asked everyone about this topic, and began to develop my own ideas that I would share freely. Eventually, it became clear that a few small communities orienting the PayPal mafia were the furthest along in their thinking. And that's how I ended up being exposed first to concepts like retention curves, DAU/MAU, viral loops, and so on.

These ideas were interest to me, because my professional experience leading up to that point was actually an adtech. I had previously worked in online ads, with customers from WSJ, CBS, MySpace, etc, and had even gotten a patent filed on ad targeting (yes, US7747676B1). I had a superpower in my domain knowledge of CAC, A/B testing, funnel optimization, lead gen, etc, and began to merge all of this thinking with consumer products. In 2007 this was cutting edge at a time when product success was often measured by vanity metrics such as the total registrations for a product. This bit of specialized knowledge was what I brought to the table, and I talked about some of those learnings and ideas, and how they might apply to products. Sometimes I'd get intros to interesting people simply because of this expertise, which I appreciated.

I sometimes joke that the Bay Area is ruled by cults. Back in 2007, there was a cult surrounding quantified self, which intersected with lots of folks kicking off Crossfit, keto, Soylent, and other health trends. There were people building robots and hardware. The PayPal mafia was a thing, but look a little closer, and there was a huge network of Stanford CS people and even Canadian mafias. And Burning Man people. In 2007, YCombinator was just getting off the ground, and I was lucky to meet many of the early folks back when they were living in North Beach on strictly ramen diets. Today, those cults have evolved but they still exist -- there is a huge advantage in finding one that suits you, or even better, starting one. Years later I joined Uber and had the idea one day there would be an ex-Uber cult. I think that's happened, and there's been countless founders, investors, and builders from that network.

In the first year, I learned the importance of writing things down. The other thing I started to do right away was to write down everything that I was learning. I started a real/professional blog at the beginning of 2007 on the Blogger platform and initially, I got writers block because I was trying to come up with amazing and grandiose ideas that I would share with the world. My first month, I had 20 email subscribers, from friends and family I forcibly subscribed. But eventually, I created a more successful strategy for myself, where I would simply document what I was learning. It turned out that if one person told you a unique idea I would treat it like it was a secret (or at least, I would ask permission). It was often the case that a dozen people would talk about the same idea, and there was simply consensus memes floating around in the ether, and I focused on writing those down. I find that a lot of my blogging has been less about inventing brand new ideas, but instead simply collecting and expanding on the current tech zeitgeist. A few months in, Robert Scoble linked to my blog from his, and that helped a ton. (Thank you!)

It was with this attitude that I began to write about viral loops, growth, hacking, measuring retention, and product/market fit, and all the other concepts that came to defined my writing.

There is a virtuous cycle in talking to interesting people, writing down expanded versions of ideas that come up, thus being exposed, to more interesting people, and rinsing and repeating. This core loop helped power the growth of my professional network over the first few years. In later years, I added a dash of advising and investing.

15+ years later it's weird to think that accidentally developing a habit of writing and blocking would still be with me today. In fact, this habit is so powerful that I recommend doing it above and beyond almost any other professional "networking" activity. Of course today you might be making videos or podcasts instead of writing. Or if you're an engineer, publishing your code on GitHub. It's all the same concept. Putting your work into the world, whether it's text or video or code, and letting that engage the world.

In this way, you are building your network while you sleep. People find you and your work and your ideas, so that you don't have to put in time for 1 million coffee meetings.

And in particular, I find writing to be much more powerful than going to conferences. One thing you'll notice about the SF tech industry is that there are endless events and conferences. Whereas a secondary startup hub might have a major tech event once every month or two, SF has them every day. There's office warmings, product launches, new AI meetups, hangouts at Dolores, big splashy conferences, hackathons, and so on. There are endless varieties.

However over time, I've found them to be less scalable than writing. They are fun, and it's much easier to have a one on one conversation than it is to create a content. When you really think through how much time you spend getting to a conference, all the time between sessions, and when you speak how few people are actually in the audience listening. Contrast to any kind of digital platform where you can write a blurb and 1000s of people see your ideas.

Going back to my original assertion, I think it is hard to regret 3-5 years working in SF. Many people say it's not a great place to live -- and sometimes that seems true. Other folks hate the monoculture. However you can always move home, and when you do, you'll always be the person with Silicon Valley tech experience. And furthermore, the learning curve is so strong, particularly for startup founders, as is the network of capital and peers. It's a one of a kind place, and I highly recommend founders spend a few years even if they don't intend to stay in the long run.

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

I started 20VC with $50. Today I sat down to interview the CEO of the largest Sovereign Wealth Fund in the world.

$1.5TRN of assets, owning 1.6% of all public companies.

9 years of work, 2,753 episodes, 100M downloads.

There is no such thing as an overnight success.

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

Interesting where this former startups are today

[Martin Tobias (Pre-Seed VC) @MartinGTobias]

interesting data from private secondary venture market. These are the top 30 private companies in order of volume of secondary sales. No data on transaction prices (discount to last round) but it is 40-80% off from other sources. SpaceX remains most highly traded. Three of my portcos in here hehe...

[Harry Stebbings @HarryStebbings]

To every founder questioning whether all the sacrifice is worth it.

Tomorrow’s episode is for you.

Procore is a 21 year epic journey.

It took 13 years to scale to $9.6M.

They were laughed out of VCs offices in 2008.

Today, they are an $8.6BN company.

The sacrifice 👇

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

@jasonlk Problem these days is that we throw around with titles almost inflationary - VP here and there. In a startup these title’s are not needed early on. More important is to have a plan how to grow the organization and with this have opportunities to let people grow into.

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

@euniceajim Exactly, essential to win. Every successful person has and has mentors. Needed for each stage of your career no matter what. Then more important, do the same and give back to younger generations as they are able to do the same as you

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

@euniceajim Africa is more digital than people think - growth and consumption will be tremendous.

[Michael Plocher @michaplocher]

@jasonlk Does this really matter if someone went to college? I see people go crazy about which college they have been or which MBA they have. In real life out there achievers are usually not have been to the prestigious colleges or having multiple degrees