Cup of Zhou

Our tiny blue marble has spun yet another lap around its closest star. From a job change to starting a podcast, between visiting Japan for the first time (and holy frick is Japan amazing!) and blacksmithing my own santoku chef knife while I was there, and from building the most unlikely friendships that will last for decades to come to realizing life rarely goes according to plan — a good reminder of Mike Tyson’s line: “Everybody has a plan until they get punches in the face.” — and from attempting to convey my year in one sentence to realizing this is the longest run-on sentence I’ve written on my blog to date, it’s been a great year.

While I wasn’t aware of this till recently — courtesy of doom-scrolling on Instagram, this year’s been a year where I’ve “used the difficulty.” To echo the amazing Sir Michael Caine. For those unfamiliar with the phrase, I highly recommend listening to the full 2002 interview, but at least this.

In short, you can’t always control the situation you’ve been given, but you can control how you react to it. If you want your life to play out like a comedy. If you want it play out as a drama. Or if you want it to play out like a feel-good movie. Use the difficulty to your advantage and act accordingly.

By the numbers

Interestingly enough, despite writing whatever I find fascinating on a weekly basis — in other words, not optimized for search engines — just under half of my blog’s views come from search engines. Primarily, and I mean 95% of which from Google. Followed by LinkedIn (which accounts about a third of my views) then Twitter (~7%).

As many other aspects of life, the viewership of my blogposts also have a Pareto distribution, where they seemingly follow the power law. With my top blogpost winning more than twice the views of the second highest. And the second highest with double the audience of the third highest, before the views plateau out across all the rest of my essays. Even for this year alone, my most popular blogpost is eight times more popular than my second most popular.

And every week I feel honored that I have readers like you who tune in to my weekly musings and our family has only grown since.

Something I’ve noticed when looking at the numbers is that I seem to have the most readers arrive at this humble piece of virtual real estate every October, barring 2021. And I wonder if it’s a function of the market’s interest crests then or that I just happen to write better pieces around then.

In addition I’ve started measuring my habits since October, only to realize, holy hell, I am inconsistent with them. While I’d love to blame travel and work, the simple truth is it’s hard to manage what I didn’t measure before. Hopefully in 2024, we’ll see a lot more consistency.

P.S. the last day, aka today, is down, since the day’s just started and I haven’t logged in anything yet. And for those curious, I’m tracking this all on a Notion dashboard.

But my favorite thing that I started measuring, is that little trophy icon in the first column of the “Evening” section. And that little trophy stands for: “Was today truly worth it?” Defined by me learning a new skill. Gaining a brand new insight about the world. Or created a core memory. And I’m happy to say that that box gets checked about two times per week. 🙂

Post publish edit: The last icon is often how I take a cold dunk/shower, as opposed to a hot one. Having friends, former housemates, and my partner exclaim and tell me “I know you shower more often than that” made me realize that icons don’t do some things justice.

2023’s Most Popular

1. The Science of Selling – Early DPI Benchmarks — One of my favorite lines from Jerry Colonna’s book Reboot is: “It’s buy low, sell high. Not buy lowest, sell highest.” In the world of VC, we spend a lot of time talking about when to buy, how to buy, and who to invest in. But rarely about the other side of the playbook, selling. Or exiting positions. And while different investors have shared the what behind selling — in other words, the exact percentage they sold at, how much they sold when they could — this blogpost was one of the first, and maybe first (who knows), to explore the why and how behind selling positions in portfolio companies as a private investor.
2. The Non-Obvious Emerging LP Playbook — The blogpost that set me down the path I am now on. To explore how I can help the next generation of capital allocators is investing into the innovation economy. Simply put, the emerging LPs.
3. Five Tactical Lessons After Hosting 100+ Fireside Chats — In fairness, had no idea this blogpost was going to do as well as it did. And luckily, I am now able to stress-test and get better at asking questions and hosting interviews through not only what I continue to do in the world of venture, but also through my new podcast, Superclusters. Where you’ll see some of my learnings above in action.
4. 10 Letters of Thanks to 10 People who Changed my Life — In all honesty, it still befuddles me to this day how this blogpost consistently ranks this high. I don’t namedrop here, and I don’t use any clever SEO techniques, yet every day this blogpost seems to find organic interest. Nevertheless, I’m glad it has. And if it empowers people to be more grateful to the people around them, I’ll have done my job. There’s also a deficit of content and knowledge here for sure, but I’m still trying to figure out what that something is.
5. How to Think about LP Construction — Not all LPs are created equal. It’s something I’ve known for a while. Both in conversation with other LPs and GPs, but also in learning of the different types of motivations to be an LP. For some, VC is an access class, not an asset class. For others, it’s the exact opposite. The latter is more likely to be a large institution. Nevertheless, that’s one example of many. And it was incredibly rewarding to hear GPs I really respect share what they’ve learned across multiple funds.

All-Time Most Popular

1. The Science of Selling – Early DPI Benchmarks — Turns out you all love tactical frameworks, so my goal is to share a lot more with you in 2024. I have a couple in the works as we speak (or as I write this).
2. The Non-Obvious Emerging LP Playbook — Stay tuned for more content on this front!
3. 10 Letters of Thanks to 10 People who Changed my Life — If anything, I hope this inspires people to write one note or letter or record a voice note of thanks to someone who’s helped you become the person you are today.
4. 99 Pieces of Unsolicited, (Possibly) Ungooglable Startup Advice — Don’t worry already in works of many more iterations of this. And while I can’t promise when the next one will come out since it’s I’m really only including what I think are the best pieces and most tactical pieces of advice, I will say it’s a matter of when not if. I’m 20 in for the founder one. And 12 in for the investor one.
5. Five Tactical Lessons After Hosting 100+ Fireside Chats — I’ve a feeling this one won’t age well, but hell, maybe it ends up being like the #3 spot on giving thanks. Time will tell.
6. How to Pitch VCs Without Ever Having to Send the Pitch Deck — Back in 2021, I knew that this blogpost was going to hold an evergreen spot up here. And I’m pretty sure it’ll flirt around here even longer. While it’s only been two years since, and while there’s also a mountain of public resources on how to pitch, strangely, most people still struggle to connect to the people they want to. And it’s true for both founders and VCs. Ya, the latter seems ironic, until you see that founders are pitch judges, juries and executioners as well. For them, from talent. Until you also see that our parents are often the harshest critics of our decisions. Yet some have no experience working in the world in which we do. All that to say, oftentimes it’s easier being the judge than the judged. I can’t claim much of the insight here as original, but rather have to thank the fact I have really smart friends. Smarter than me at least. The flip side to the wild performance of this essay may just be one of the closest titles I have to being clickbait-y.

2023’s Most Memorable

In all honesty, the most memorable each year to me were ones where I was scratching my own itch. Some, by the numbers, perform better than others. But for me, each of the below represent the greatest delta in either knowledge acquisition or insight development. Of course, not mutually exclusive to each other.

• The Science of Re-upping — I enjoyed writing this one in particular not only because I got to work with Arkady and Dave on this — two minds I greatly admire, but it also became the perfect opportunity to learn more about the world of professional sports beyond the players and scores themselves. Two birds with one stone. I’ve always admired folks who are able to pull from various, seemingly disparate topics and analogize them to venture. And while I still have many more miles on my odometer to go, this was one of the amazing opportunities to take a stab at marrying two different worlds through stories.
• How to Think about LP Construction — I will admittedly take any opportunity I can to talk to my favorite people. And this was another one of them. That said, to get them all in the same metaphoric room to talk about the same topic, where the energy of one inspired another, now that’s something special. Funnily enough I did the vast majority of these interviews for this blogpost asynchronously, but upon sharing the final product with the group the week before publication, there was an incredible amount of energy (gratitude, stand up comedy routines, and so on) in the group. And all this was over email.
• The Science of Selling – Early DPI Benchmarks — This, in many ways, was an accidental piece. Not only did it come up in conversation over Friday brunch quite randomly (serendipity at its finest), it also took, at least compared to the above two, the least amount of time to write. The first draft was ready in about an hour. And including all the edits, it came out to about two hours of work. It’s a gentle reminder that sometimes your best pieces are the easiest to write.
• My Ever-Evolving Personal CRM — I wrote this blogpost after some coercion from a small group of friends who’ve been fascinated by how I stay in touch with people. And when they saw how I did it on Airtable, they asked if I would sell them my template (not that I had one at the time). Nor am I selling now. But nevertheless, the web of what we do, who we talk to, who we grow with, and why we do things is increasingly complicated and so far, there hasn’t been a great product out there that tracks this (and yes, I’ve used all the CRM tools out there). And so I created my own.
• #unfiltered #83 There Doesn’t Have to be a First Place — I really enjoyed writing this one. Inspired by a podcast appearance by Simon Coronel, I learned that in the world of magic competitions, first place isn’t always granted. If the judges feel like a magic act isn’t on par with previous years, even if it is the best one that competition, they choose not to award a first place. Similarly, I think the world in a lot of ways has lost itself in the noise. That our definition for quality has fallen in the past decade. And I’m sure the older generations will harken back further. But I do believe a heuristic like this keeps us honest and that as a society, we move forward together, not just optimizing for short-term maximizations.
• #unfiltered #78 The Gravitational Force of Accumulated Knowledge — Another fun piece to write about the power of how knowledge compounds. Not only in isolation, but also collectively. While that is a rather obvious fact, I loved the reframing of how to look at it from Seth Godin and Bill Gurley’s public interviews.
• How to Retain Talent When You Don’t Have the Cash — One of the biggest lessons I learned at On Deck was that the team was amazing — in fact, world-class — at acquiring the best talent, but was shy on retaining the world’s best talent. To this day, I believe I have never worked in a higher concentration of brilliant talent than I did when I was at On Deck. And this blogpost is an homage to my former team, how brilliant they were, but also the lessons we took away from that experience.
• 7 Lessons from My Time at On Deck — And in the theme of On Deck, and how much I treasure the people I work with and the experience I had while I was there, last but not least, the culmination of lessons I took away from an 18-month period that I would never trade for any other experience.

And I started a podcast. Superclusters. (Or here’s on Spotify or Apple Podcasts if you prefer). It’s still too early to tell how Season 1 will do, with only six episodes in (the most recent of which here). But by next year, I should have more than enough to share about my learnings here. But early data seems to suggest that people love true stories more than they do tactics.

Until the next, stay awesome! And see y’all in the new year!

Photo by Polina Kuzovkova on Unsplash

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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.