👉Guest article from Bocconi Students Venture Club, written by Maximilian Gebhard
What’s cooking in the startup scene? Who has just raised a fortune? What’s the next hype?
In an intense adventure of finding answers to these questions we stumbled over several different venture capital blogs. While some of them tend to focus on their own deal flow or specific industries, we aimed at creating the ultimative shortlist of blogs to gain a quick and solid overview of what’s going on in VC.
Main selection criteria included website user experience, quality of content, posting frequency and topic diversity. For simplicity purposes we split our final choices into single and multi author. Let’s start with the multi author blogs first:
1. SaaStr
Founded by Harvard graduate and ex-Adobe Vice President Jason Lemkin, SaaStr is one of the largest Cloud and SaaS communities in our hemisphere. Their blog works like a content gathering platform making it a very pleasant experience scrolling through all their articles. We love the filtering function which makes it very easy to navigate through and narrow down on areas of interest. Each post's high media richness shows that the blog is written with dedication. We can also recommend visiting the SaaStr University, where you can attend full online courses to broaden your knowledge about the software business.
2. Underscore VC
Underscore VC has a surprisingly professional blog for a venture capital firm. All their posts are written by their own people, providing pretty deep insights into their deal flow and their different perspectives on ventures. They even justify each of their investments with a “why we invested in…” article. Their whole blog is kept in a very clean, coherent and professional style which makes it not only super engaging but also smooth to browse through. We think with this kind of blog, Underscore VC has a valid chance of building a strong community, thereby attracting more and more potential high yield investments.
3. First Round Review
This one is for Entrepreneurs. First Round Review offers the perfect source for tips, advice, and lessons learnt on how to build new ventures. They structure their article assortment more like departments in a company. Reading their “People & Culture” section before starting a business is definitely of great advantage. First Round Capital’s philosophy is all about the very early days of startups - they don’t see themselves leading a Series A or B. This is also reflected in the content of their blog where they often draw learnings for Entrepreneurs from the most successful companies, such as Amazon.
4. 500.co
With successful investments like Udemy, Canva and GitLab, 500 Startups has been one of the most active early stage investors in recent years. Their blog “500 Insights” publishes new articles several times a week and topics are never the same. We claim this blog to be the best for extremely curious people not only interested in just one area. We especially like their founder series with lots of insightful interviews and personal stories. It might be hard to find another comparable blog like this.
👉 500.co
5. Venture Capital Journal
The name basically says it all. Once on their website you’ll discover that their homepage is structured like a newspaper - but just for VC! From latest news and fresh funds, over deep reads to trend watch. With several articles per day the Venture Capital Journal is definitely one of the best sources to keep you updated. The only heavy downside is that it requires a membership. For a one-year subscription of VCJ they charge over 2.000€ - 6 print issues of their magazine included. We recommend getting a login via your employer or institution.
Now let’s have a look at five single author blogs:
1. Fred Wilson | AVC
Fred Wilson describes himself as “a VC” but also as a “husband, a father of three amazing people, a blogger, a music fan, and a bunch of other things too.” He has been blogging since 2003 with an amazingly high frequency - it feels like reading his diary. Fred seems to be a very grounded person. He frequently sheds light on a large variety of topics such as founding stories, new technologies, cryptocurrencies, but also real estate. Each of his articles has a unique structure, is enjoyable to read and offers high quality content.
👉 AVC
2. Andreesen Horowitz
Andreesen Horowitz has a tremendous standard when it comes to startup investments - same we expected for their blog. Indeed it offers a large resource base from articles over podcasts to videos. They even have industry categories which we didn’t even know existed. Most interestingly, a16z does not focus much on statistics and how to do this or that. Their core builds around visionary posts on how the future could look like. We love that this i s 100% in line with their investment philosophy and history.
👉 a16z
3. David Cohen
David Cohen is a bank in the VC world. As the founder of Techstars there is really not much he doesn’t know about venture capital. Besides investing in skyrocketing startups, he publishes a blog post between two and four times a month. Even though this is not a lot, each article is written with care and dedication. He often catches up on previous posts and peoples’ comments, which makes the whole blog feel super interactive. His entire website is designed to really get in touch with one of the biggest minds in venture capital.
4. Hunter Walk
Even though Hunter Walk only posts one or two times a month, his catchy headlines and amusing writing style made us stay there for longer than expected. With a Stanford MBA and work experience from YouTube and Google, he joined Homebrew - a Silicon Valley VC. They also have their own blog, but it's by far not as entertaining as the one from Hunter Walk himself. In 2021 he puts a lot of focus on how the pandemic has impacted the venture capital industry and which changes we can expect when going back to normal.
5. Seth Levine | VC Adventure
VC Adventure has been established by Seth Levine - a venture capitalist from Boulder, Colorado. His most recent book “The New Builders” has also been recommended by David Cohen. When reading VC Adventure’s articles, we recognize a healthy mix between personal - mostly subjective - contributions and general l earnings based on data. Seth also dares to address hot topics like the recent GME stock rally. Similar to AVC, we have the feeling of reading a highly intellectual diary. We especially enjoyed his posts about behind the scenes of writing a book.
At the end of our investigation we realized that there is not the one and only venture capital blog. It really depends whether you’re more into storytelling, hard facts, personal experiences, or just the latest news. But for sure, you’ll find something suitable in the collection we provided. Each of them is entertaining in its own way and provides enough educational content to keep you up to date on what's going on in the venture capital world. Exclusive hint: most of the blogs have interesting newsletters and/or social media as well.
This article was brought up by the Bocconi Student Venture Club
