A look at LinkedIn or Twitter will have you believe that many VCs spend 90% time writing quippy wisdom-nuggets about how to be a good investor — but don’t actually spend time investing. And where there is satire, there is usually truth.
But new analysis of the Forbes Midas List — a ranking of the world’s top 100 VCs — suggests that the most successful VCs aren’t necessarily the ones trumpeting on Twitter.
Communications firm Milltown Partners crunched the numbers and found that 47 of the 100 investors who made the cut in 2023 were not active on Twitter at all — only four in the group tweeted several times a day. Though 90% of the list had a LinkedIn profile, only half posted on the social network on a regular basis.
Only one — Garry Tan, president and CEO of Y Combinator — has a TikTok account. His recent videos include his thoughts on “whether the web’s over” and "how to get rich" (riveting). So if you’re a VC jostling for airtime on social, maybe TikTok is your bet?
Substack-writing VCs haven’t yet turned their subscribed numbers into Midas gold. Though eight of the top 50 tech Substacks are written by VCs (like tech billionaire/former SPAC cheerleader Chamath Palihapitiya’s newsletter or former a16z partner Li Jin’s bulletin), none of those made Forbes’s list.
Finally, not surprisingly, the analysis found that VCs love a podcast. What better platform to deliver your message — free from 280-character shackles! Over half of the Midas list had been on a podcast in the past year — the most popular being Harry Stebbings’s 20 Minute VC (20VC).
