A lot of what I will say applies similarly to assessing founders and with senior talent, but for the sake of this blogpost, I’m going to focus primarily on doing diligence on GPs.
Sequoia’s Pat Grady co-wrote a piece on AGI that’s been making its rounds the last few days. FYI, this post has nothing to do with AGI, so don’t get your hopes up. But in it, he shares:
Note the highlights above are all around how to better understand an individual’s internet presence. While not all-encompassing, understanding someone’s brand via their social media is more than just how many followers, likes, comments, and shares. As my good YouTuber friend once told me, “Not all subscribers are created equal. English-speaking personal finance content get paid the most per impression.” Analogously, the same is true for LinkedIn or Twitter/X content.
Just because you have 25K followers, how often are you just resharing your employer’s content? Or your portfolio company’s content? How often do you share your thought leadership? Do people follow you because of your perceived status or do people follow you because of the weight of your ideas? There’s a great Simon Sinek talk about the former Under Secretary of Defense on this, which I won’t bore you with the details, but if you want the full story, it’s here. In summary, if you no longer held the job title you do today, would people engage with you differently?
That’s what I’m trying to figure out.
The first filter is: What is your insight per post ratio? This includes reshares and comments they make on other people’s posts. At a high level, do you recognize what good content looks like?
The second filter is: What is your original insight per post ratio? How much of your activity is original ideas? Is that what people engage with? Or do they engage more with your reshared content? When they do engage, how?
- Level 1 is a like. The least number of clicks to engage with you.
- Level 2 is a reaction other than a like. It takes a second longer to do so, but is more intentional. To be fair, a spam-like content (i.e. “LFG”, “Proud of you”, “Excited”, etc.), I also put in this tier.
- Level 3 is a thoughtful comment that you can’t use on any other post. They’ve read and thoughtfully engaged back. Also on this tier is a quick reshare.
- Level 4 is a thoughtful reshare. Or on Twitter (still not easy to call it X), a “quote retweet.” You’re staking not only your personal brand and reputation with your own followers, but you’re also letting others know how you’ve thought about the content being shared.
It’s not a perfect scorecard, but I do keep a rough mental tally (which goes into my own memo) of what a GP’s social brand is. And at what point was there an inflection in their thinking and/or following. Usually quite correlated with each other.
Other things I find interesting to observe, but cannot be understood in isolation:
- Most frequent commenters and reshare your content
- Reactions-to-follower count ratio
- Connections-to-follower ratio
- How similar/different their content on LinkedIn vs Twitter/X vs Instagram/TikTok vs podcast platform is
- AI-search optimization (AEO): What keywords and/or questions do certain GPs own in search traffic? How does it compare across ChatGPT vs Claude vs Gemini? And in incognito AI search.
- Frequency of getting tagged by others on social media outside of viral periods
- Endurance of content even when little to no engagement, usually for podcasts, blogs and newsletters. And why do they continue doing so even when it’s not producing the results they desire (more of a qualitative understanding on the personality traits of a GP)
- Frequency of guest appearances on others’ content channels and how do those appearances’ views compare to said influencer’s average view-to-subscriber ratio
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The views expressed on this blogpost are for informational purposes only. None of the views expressed herein constitute legal, investment, business, or tax advice. Any allusions or references to funds or companies are for illustrative purposes only, and should not be relied upon as investment recommendations. Consult a professional investment advisor prior to making any investment decisions.