“Chief Meme Officer” was as soon as Turner Novak’s tongue-in-cheek job title, and his 161,300 X followers in all probability know why. But, he has it clear: “If you consider elevating a enterprise fund and it is advisable increase $50 million, someone’s not going to say: ‘Wow, that’s a terrific meme, right here’s $10 million.”
Why all of the memes, then? As a result of “it’s a great way to refill the pipeline and possibly meet somebody,” Banana Capital’s founder mentioned at TechCrunch Disrupt.
Novak was sharing the Builders Stage with fellow rising fund managers Noramay Cadena and Mac Conwell. The three of them have one factor in widespread: They’re constructing their enterprise companies in public.
“Constructing in public” means various things to completely different individuals. “I don’t follow absolute transparency in any side of my life,” Cadena mentioned, eliciting laughs. Her agency, Provide Change Capital, additionally leans extra towards running a blog and LinkedIn posts than memes and tweets. However she, Novak and Conwell agreed that creating content material is a pipeline technique.
When launching his agency RareBreed Ventures whereas being very lively on social media, Conwell observed firsthand that it wasn’t a panacea. “In my first 90 days of fundraising doing the Twitter technique, I did over 1,100 conferences; that solely soft-circled $3 million as a result of on the finish of the day, . . . they nonetheless must need to spend money on you or make investments your fund as a result of you have got a thesis, as a result of you have got a viewpoint, as a result of you have got a product.”