Gen Z is using Slack, TikTok, Clubhouse to break into venture capital

Gen Z is using Slack, TikTok, Clubhouse to break into venture capital(businessinsider.com)

34 points by replicatorblog 5 years ago | 18 comments

Barrin92 5 years ago |

>This summer, three of the TikTok's most popular stars, Josh Richards, Bryce Hall, and Griffin Johnson, decided to become angel investors.

The three influencers are part of a broader group of TikTok celebrities called the Sway House and have attracted a fair share of scandal and controversy, including for throwing a large, unmasked party during the pandemic. But tech founders have mostly welcomed them with open arms.

Honestly what this reminded me of is the paper on Veblerian entrepreneurship[1]. People like this might have their finger on the pulse when it comes to entertainment content, or social media, but I have no idea how they're supposed to make informed technological decisions in the more narrow sense of the term. Venture capital seems to be more and more invested in entertainment, lifestyle, and content creation rather than deep technological and material innovation.

[1]https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=3479042

hardwaresofton 5 years ago | |

> Honestly what this reminded me of is the paper on Veblerian entrepreneurship[1]. People like this might have their finger on the pulse when it comes to entertainment content, or social media, but I have no idea how they're supposed to make informed technological decisions in the more narrow sense of the term. Venture capital seems to be more and more invested in entertainment, lifestyle, and content creation rather than deep technological and material innovation.

The same way I imagine random VCs and new funds do it -- hire experts and consultants until they get a feel for the field and more importantly connections to more private placements.

Money is capital because it allows you to do these things -- you don't have to be an expert in a field if you can just hire one.

Also, do we know how much alpha is actually generated by VCs as opposed to random scattershot (especially in a certain niche) and getting lucky?

lawrenceyan 5 years ago | |

That's mostly just because you don't hear about the deep technological and material innovation investments. If you're generally in the loop though, you'll know.

mywittyname 5 years ago | |

> Venture capital seems to be more and more invested in entertainment, lifestyle, and content creation rather than deep technological and material innovation.

We've reached the maturity point in technology where innovation isn't really necessary for a successful business. It is possible to build a successful, scalable site/platform using commodity engineers. A team of three or four competent engineers should be able to put together a backend platform in AWS to support a site and a few mobile apps in six months.

The difficult part today is the actual business. These people are smart to get into VC, since they understand the hard part and can afford to pay for the easy part.

PragmaticPulp 5 years ago |

I joined one of these Slack groups out of curiosity. They had 700 members, and as far as I could tell not a single one of the people active in the discussions was involved with a VC.

A lot of hustle, but it felt like activity was dominated by people with more free time than actual VC work.

Unfortunately, I worry that eager VC firms are going to use this to their advantage. Plenty of young people hoping to get rich quick in the VC world will do a lot of free work in the hopes of securing a job later.

smabie 5 years ago | |

that's how all forums are. For example I frequent r/quant and the vast majority of people aren't quants and instead high school students asking how to become a quant. it's pretty annoying

If someone made a reddit like site where you had to prove qualifications to get into certain forums, I think it would have the potential to do really well.

enos_feedler 5 years ago | | |

And you can take this pattern even further back than Reddit. This is no different than the early 90s when everyone hung out in #warez on EFnet, even though very few people were actually involved in the warez scene. That being said, there were always a few true stars lurking in there. I got recruited from there to join private servers as a cracker in serious warez groups of the day. My point is, the social internet hasn't changed in 30 years and we shouldn't be surprised :)

Something1234 5 years ago | | |

Expertsexchange?

hardwaresofton 5 years ago |

Where did Clubhouse come from? People have railed against JIRA and some other antiquated project management software for as long as I remember, but it feels like the choices were Trello, Basecamp, and recently I know Asana is very large (though I didn't see it's rise) -- is Clubhouse the Slack to the other companies' HipChats?

grzm 5 years ago | |

There are two Clubhouses I'm aware of:

One is a project management app: https://clubhouse.io

The other is an audio app: https://www.joinclubhouse.com

The article is referring to the latter. I think you might be alluding to the former.

hardwaresofton 5 years ago | | |

I definitely was -- appreciate the clarification!

mason55 5 years ago | |

This is Clubhouse the video platform, not Clubhouse the ticket tracking system

hardwaresofton 5 years ago | | |

Ah thahks, I thought surely this was about the ticketing system, and was paywalled.

smcleod 5 years ago |

Seems to be paywalled.

ffpip 5 years ago | |

Disable javascript for that particular page, or open in incognito, clear cookies, etc. Basically any method works.

taariqlewis 5 years ago | |

https://archive.is/4gC64