Social Media Secrets: How to Build Your Presence
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Hey everybody, I'm Kai Risdahl, the host of Marketplace, your daily download on the economy. Money influences so much of what we do and how we live. That's why it's essential to understand how this economy works. At Marketplace, we break down everything from inflation and student loans to the future of AI so that you can understand what it all means for you. Marketplace is your secret weapon for understanding this economy. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.

Welcome to Web3 with A16Z. Today we're talking about how to make social media work for you rather than overwhelming you. Whether you're a startup founder, creator, avid doom scroller, or long-time lurker, this show has tips and tactics you can use to attract attention, build a following, and level up your online presence.

In this episode, we cover what to do and what not to do, how much of your authentic self to bring to the table versus merely playing to algorithms, turn your interests and obsessions into viral hits, and what stand-up comedy has to do with the art of posting.

Our guest today is Gautier Lemur, aka GOAT, a meme maker with a cult following who also happens to be the co-founder and chief operating officer of Alongside, a DeFi project that creates investable crypto market indices. Joining him is the man behind our handles, A16Z Crypto social lead Ishvard Dusko, as well as me, your host, Robert Hackett. The first voice you'll hear is mine, then GOAT's, and after that, Ish's.

As a reminder, none of the content should be taken as investment, business, legal, or tax advice. Please see a16z.com/disclosures for more important information, including a link to a list of our investments. My first question is: Why should people spend time on social at all?

There's a few answers, and I think I could make my answer about two hours long. The first one is you'll probably meet people that will help you in your goals. That's probably the first piece. But the second piece is you actually get to know the audience you're trying to reach, build towards that audience, get to tell them things, interact with them. So you're not just building in your own corner. I think that's the underlining of my thesis.

It takes up so much time, though, to be good at social media when you could be doing other things like potentially building your business. To what extent is it a diversion versus something that is fundamentally productive?

A lot of people tend to see it as unproductive. My take is that I have it silently in the background all the time. And that works for me because I don't feel like it's interrupting me too much. I think the easiest way to summarize it is every single day that I've spent some time either posting or spending time online, browsing the timeline and so on, I've gotten more than I've put in from a time perspective. And it hasn't hurt my productivity.

It's almost having a pulse on what's happening in the industry and amongst my peers. Josh Young: Ish, I know that you have thoughts on this as our social lead at A16Z Crypto. Ish Bhandari: Yeah, I think my hot take in general is that building an online presence is one of the highest leverage uses of your time, whether you're a founder, a nine to five employee, just getting started as a creator, an engineer, because it has exponential returns of the time, the creativity, all the content, and like Goat said, the relationship building that you make online.

the parasocial relationships that you build with other people and unbeknownst to you, all of that just compounds day after day. And over the course of months and years, you start to run into opportunities that you don't even know where they came from. I found that in my personal life, my personal career,

People who put in the work in terms of building an online presence, luck seems to gravitate towards them a lot more. I've gotten jobs through social media. The amount of things that have happened in my career, in my life personally, is just crazy. Whenever I tell people that they should be building an online presence, they say that they're scared, they think it's a waste of time, they don't know how, or they think it's too difficult. And so hopefully this conversation and some of the content that we put out demystifies that a bit.

Yeah, on the compounding, I am a huge fan of compound interest. And obviously, in the context of investing, it's even more pronounced. But I think what Ish said around how it compounds magically, and you don't even really notice, that's really the hidden secret to all of this.

I like the compounding interest analogy. The thing about compound interest is you set it and forget it when it comes to investments. You just click the box like, yeah, keep reinvesting whatever dividends and whatever comes off my shares and it snowballs. But the thing about social media is, and correct me if I'm wrong, but my sense of it is it's a

feeding the beast or else you're not going to be top of mind. You're going to get demoted by the algos. And so there is this sort of insatiable appetite that the platform demands and requires for you to get those effects, which seems to me a little bit different from the easier sort of compounding interest people might know in finance. Okay, so here's another angle to think about it.

The same way that you can benefit from compound interest if you invest a small sum every single day, and over the course of 30, 40 years, it becomes a gigantic sum. And even though you've only put maybe a few thousand dollars, at the end of your career, it's like in the hundreds of thousands. I think about it the same way in terms of contribution to socials. And so, yes, it's daunting that every single day you have to basically come up with new content. But if you approach it in a way that you're building that flywheel, everything

every 10 minutes or 30 minutes that you put in is actually going to have that much more impact every single day because each piece of content means potentially new followers, potentially new reach. So for example, taking the time to write one tweet for me today takes the same time that it took for me two years ago. But the amount of people that will be reached by that tweet or that will DM me because of that tweet is exponentially higher.

Yeah.

and have a ton of other responsibilities in my day-to-day job. So the only way to stay sane and actually keep a consistent output for my personal content is every Sunday, I go to a coffee shop and just like for three or four hours, write tweets and write content and just use prompts to ask myself questions or go through DMs, go through my comments and see are there recurring themes that people are asking me? And then I just write out content and I schedule things out. Right now, I have the next three months of content, five days a week scheduled. So on a day-to-day basis, it makes things a lot more fun because you're not looking at a

a blank screen trying to think of like, all right, what banger am I going to come out today? In a weird way, having the content scheduled in advance almost allows you to be more creative and come up with even better content on the fly. And then so what I do is like whenever I come up with that content, I just ship it immediately. And then usually those are my top performing posts, which is kind of ironic. The ones that are unplanned.

Yeah, from the hip, formatting is not perfect. But the creativity is there because I'm not stressed about trying to come up with the best piece of art. Is your process similar? Do you allocate some time out of your week to sit for a few hours and deliberate on what you're going to do? Or are you more of a shoot from the hip kind of guy? I'm much more reactive than ish. But at the same time, I'm not managing 16 different social accounts across 20 different platforms. So that really puts it into perspective. I think

If you are truly managing at scale like that, you have to be planned. And for me, I think as a founder, it's basically the management of the company's brand and then my own account. Obviously, the company is more planned. If we have announcements, any of those kind of social posts are more tailored.

And then from my personal, it's almost always not planned. And I think the reason for that is I found in my personal experience that the harder I try, the worse I do, which is almost what Ish was pointing to. The best content tends to come from a passing thought, a conversation you're having with a friend. You're literally browsing Twitter and someone's talking about something that gives you an idea. You see a meme and it's in the context of what you're thinking about right now, and

and you're able to twist it somehow. There are some days I won't post anything. There are some days I'll post 16 times. It really ebbs and flows. Which is kind of incredible because like your engagement per post is, I would imagine, really, really high. If you like averaged everything out, the ones that go super mega viral that have tens of thousands of likes or engagements, are there any consistencies on the days where you have those hits? Is there anything special that you do, like a routine or something that gets you like into that zone?

So interestingly, the way I see it is I don't have a cult following, if that makes sense. I feel like I still have to start from scratch at every turn. And I don't assume that a certain post is going to do well. And often something that I feel should go viral doesn't. The way I've noticed these algos work is they kind of set the ceiling on your account. And as they begin to trust you, they basically give you more opportunities to connect.

continue displaying that content across more people. So for example, if you're a newer account, no matter how many followers you have, by the way, you'll probably only be able to reach X number of people, even if it's the best post of all time, versus a really big account with milder posts, but the ceiling is much higher. And so the algo will feel more comfortable, quote unquote,

continuously broadcasting that post to more people. So it's almost like a trust building exercise with the algos. I almost see them as people behind a computer choosing, okay, I trust Ish's posts and he's always constantly put him in my people that I want to promote box. So I want to dig into that. Goat, how much time do you put into social? The way I see it is crypto happens on Twitter for the most part. And any new piece of news, anything noteworthy, controversial,

conversations. That's all constantly happening on Twitter, so much so that if you aren't there for half a day, you might miss out. And I don't mean this at all from a trading perspective. I mean this purely from what are people building any given day and what's the next trend. From a time perspective, I really don't count it. And again, I basically have it in a corner of my screen almost always. I'm a big no notifications guy. I'll try to not let it run my day. But I

At the end of the day, it really is the village square where everyone is open to conversations. Anyone's a DM away. I almost see it as a virtual place, a virtual conference that's always happening. I never have to leave my seat and I can always be at an earshot of some interesting conversation or the next protocol I want to work with.

The two of you, you've both referenced these sort of diffuse benefits that you've received from using social media like Twitter, like X. But maybe we could get more specific. How has using these platforms affected you actually in your day-to-day life specifically?

I actually started in tech about 10 years ago. I broke into tech. I like to say that I went through the back door because I was working at a 24 hour fitness, a gym and interviewed for a role at LinkedIn, got the job somehow miraculously as an event coordinator. Keep in mind this entire time I've been obsessed with social media for pretty much my entire life. And I was always just like tinkering with building my personal brand online. And around that time, the company was trying to target college students for hiring.

And I happened to be pretty much fresh out of college. And so I raised my hand. And next thing you know, I was a global social lead at LinkedIn. So I give my obsession with social media almost 100% of the credit for where I am in my career today. And that's just one anecdote. I used to be a DJ. I DJed for 10 years. I used social media to be able to travel the world and DM promoters and build my brand, my DJ presence, and use that as leverage. I did this whole US tour around the entire United States without a promoter, without a manager. All

all by myself, which in the entertainment industry is like really, really difficult to do because it's very relationships driven. Yeah, she really bootstrapped your way into an entire career from not nothing, but from having an extreme social media habit. No, for sure. Yeah. Incredible. I'm interested as a founder, how has social media benefited you in your life?

Yeah, on my side, you can look at it from the personal lens, from the building a company lens, from the career building lens. I've met most of my real life best friends from spending time on social. I bike a lot and someone posted a picture of them in Central Park with their bike. And I had just moved to New York and I replied, hey, it was a great day.

it would be nice to go on a ride together. We went on a ride together. We posted a picture. And one thing led to another. We built this friend group purely from putting out content that no one cared about, seemingly. It's just, why would you post a picture of you in Central Park on Twitter? And maybe you get three likes, but it doesn't matter. Now I've got all my best friends from it. On the career front, both myself

and my wife have gotten jobs from purely DMing someone cold on Twitter. On the founder piece, I basically didn't have a presence before starting a company. And specifically for crypto, and I'm sure this is true also for some other niche like AI, you almost have to be present for

for people to trust that you're building something that they can feel comfortable using. Because even though crypto is an industry highly based on trustless systems, there's so many trust components in terms of protocols integrating with each other, people willing to take your DM, so on and so forth, that you have to be a recurring face, someone that they feel is part of the community that they've seen interact with other people that they trust in order for you to inherit some of that trust over time.

Yeah, social media ends up being sort of the extra consensus layer. It's not the formal one that kind of manages how blockchains operate, but it is the one that we all decide what is the right way to move forward on a particular set of upgrades and whatnot. I attribute my own social media usage to a lot of success I've had in my own career as well. I was a journalist for many years and

I was putting out content every day of all sorts, whether it was like video features, newsletters, et cetera. But Twitter was the place where I would daily show up, tweet about what I was doing, have conversations. And most of the job offers, I think, came from that visibility. Well, if you think about it this way, like posting on a regular basis on social media is one way to remain top of mind, increasing the likelihood that those opportunities are going to come your way. Yeah. And actually, just to reflect on my own experience, I don't know that I've mastered

what my social presence is anymore. I've been in a sort of wayward period trying to figure out what I'm doing. And this also, of course, coincides with Elon Musk taking over what is now X and changing up the algorithms and the way that status is distributed. How have things changed in your opinions over time? What have you seen that's different now than it was? And how should people play to what is new about the algorithm and the ways that platform promotes content?

I think speaking specifically to Elon taking over, he definitely turned the algo on its head a little bit. I think what seemingly has changed is there is more content being pushed when it gets an emotional reaction out of people. Without playing into that, you can still get positive emotions out of people with your content.

All this to say that the algo changing every few weeks can actually be used to your advantage. It just means that you can't just get too comfortable in one specific genre or thing that worked because it probably doesn't work anymore within a few months. Ish, do you have any other thoughts? I have a general piece of advice for all social media.

The moment that it clicked in my head was I realized, oh, there's people behind the algorithm. There's people behind all the decisions that you see when you open up Twitter, when you open up LinkedIn, when you open up Instagram. And so if you just take the hints or use your brain to think of what do they want me to do? What action do they want me to take?

It's usually right in front of you. You can usually figure out like what is going to be performing. What are the tools in each platform that they're already giving me to use? And how can I create the content specifically for that platform versus just cookie cutter, copy and paste and publish on all platforms at once? These platforms, their main goal is to keep you on the platform longer and they want you to use the platform longer.

So if you use that as like your end goal, the end target, then how do you create content that makes people view your content longer? And then that results in more reach, which results in more engagement, which results in more following. And then that growth flywheel just continues.

You should have fun with it. That's how it doesn't become exhausting. Make sure that you're posting stuff that feels true to you while also paying attention to the cues. Because, for example, if I notice one specific style of content does really well, but it's not me at all, people are going to notice that and it's not going to feel genuine. It's not going to do well. I'm going to hate it. And so I think starting from, OK, this is who I am and this is the type of content I want to make.

And then, okay, I've seen the different cues and now I'm going to try to plug those two things together. Okay. I definitely want to double click on this because it raises this question of at what point are you changing who you are to adapt to what the algorithm wants versus remaining true to yourself as a person?

There's this concept of audience capture. And this would almost be like algorithm capture. For those that don't know, audience capture is essentially you build an audience and all of a sudden they expect some sort of content out of you. And then now you're stuck. You can't create anything else. I think it's the same thing with the algo capture. People can tell when you're trying too hard. You almost have to disregard or deprioritize the growth and make sure that the content stays true to you.

I think a good rule of thumb is like maybe 20% of your time, efforts and content should be experimental, maybe not super refined or testing a new algorithm feature. And then from that 20% figure out what works, what did my audience, my community online resonated with them, what performed well, maybe you find a new content format that you really like, and then expanding from there.

I think that's pretty good advice. It kind of reminds me of advice that corporations take when they're trying to decide how much time to devote to innovation. You need to devote the bulk of your time to maintaining your existing product lines, making revenue that tried and true. But if you never experiment, if you never leave any of that room for experimentation, you're going to get trapped in your old way of doing things and you're going to get disrupted at some point. Yeah. And the paradox is a great way to grow is to be predictable and for people to know exactly what to expect from you. And so the

You definitely want to build a brand in the sense of what people should expect from you coming to your content every day and almost teaching them or helping them understand that this is the type of person you are. And for me, it's humor with some serious stuff every once in a while. The 80-20, I think, works really well in terms of steering your brand into new directions every once in a while, but also knowing that people want to know what to expect from you.

I think this idea of audience capture is very perceptive. And I'm trying to think of analogies in other domains where I've seen this. One thing that comes to mind is George Lucas and his Star Wars movies. And then he comes out with the prequels and people were like, wait, this is not what I wanted. Or a brand kind of taking a strong departure from their history.

historical roots. So it's dangerous territory to try and pivot, experiment, depart from what you're used to. But if you can adapt to change, then you're a goner as well. It's definitely a balance. Staying in your lane is the easier path. And then experimenting little by little is probably the safest way to go. But at the end of the day, when you're just starting out,

No one's watching. You can do whatever you want and you can define what is the lane you want to play in. And I think that's a

really freeing thought. You're liberated from the constraints of having to appease an audience that you've already amassed. You can use this time to fail fast and to experiment and to hone your craft. Exactly. Let's talk about how you decide where to spend your time. Ish, you've worked at a number of social media companies. So I imagine your professional experience has informed your personal one, but maybe speak to how you decide which platforms to spend your time on and then we can get Goat's answer as well.

On a personal level, I like to play to my strengths and to the format of content that I enjoy creating most. My bread and butter is writing, short form to medium form writing. And that's the content that I enjoy consuming the most. That's the content that I enjoy creating the most. Once I figured out the format that I enjoyed most, and it was like, which platforms can

Can I almost exploit that love for creating that content most? And it was Twitter and LinkedIn. Those are the two that I landed on for my personal brand. And I just try to compound on a year-to-year basis by creating content, reaching out to people, making friends, sending DMs, and then repeat day after day for multiple years. Goat, tell us...

Exactly how? In your experience building alongside, for instance, how has social contributed to the company's success? Obviously, there's the idea that DeFi is composable and there are these protocols you can plug in. And what we're building is things that should be plugged into those different platforms.

But the reality is, even though they're decentralized, there are still people making decisions. And it might be a few people that you have to convince or many people, but you still have to be known as a trusted actor to those people. It's not fully permissionless in the sense that you can just build something and get it listed across these different platforms. You have to get buy-in from the users of these platforms. And I think social is a really good way to do that.

It's an interesting tension because these networks are designed to be trustless, where you don't have to trust the participants in order for them to operate. And yet at the same time, it very much helps to have this sort of secondary layer, this secondary reputation system outside of that.

And you can think about it, for example, like a lending market might be super trusted and it's been around for years, but getting a new asset listed on there needs to build the trust with that specific lending market and the people that are making decisions

Because what happens is if they list it too freely, then you naturally inherit the trust of that specific platform because people have come to believe, okay, if it's on there, it's a good product. And so it's a lot of making sure there's trust built and due diligence on behalf of those platforms. And then the social layer is important because at the end of the day, everything is still done by people. You don't really see AI agents running around and building stuff quite yet.

for now, it's still very much building relationships. And then the second piece is you still have to make sure that people know that you're building the thing. It's not build it and they will come. You have to get out there. And crypto is unique in that a lot of the traditional ways of getting your product out there are not available to you for one reason or another, maybe regulations or platform restrictions. And for

For example, TikTok content, if you do anything crypto, would get de-boosted or killed instantly. Or like paid marketing. A lot of platforms don't let you do paid marketing if you have crypto, which is huge for so many startups to get their initial users or customers. Exactly. And so you can't just pour gas on those fires like you normally would on a Web2 startup. And so you have to get more creative. And one way to do that is by driving a consistent message online.

on socials that people can gravitate towards and understand bit by bit. And the way it's worked really well for us is through repetition of messages or a specific message that resonates with people. This space is right with tons of people that are traders actively trying to time things. And our whole take is the complete opposite. It's do nothing. It's be the person that just buys and forgets about it for the rest of the year. And you'll outperform the majority of people. And just

Just those two words, do nothing, being repeated time and time again across memes, across serious content. People start to associate that. And then finally, I think the fact that everyone's a DM away and everyone's checking their Twitter DMs pretty consistently is a superpower. I've had my DMs open. Most people have their DMs open. And you can almost always get in touch with somebody just via that.

having a presence already helps with that because then they look at your account and they say, oh, this guy has X number of followers. I have X number of mutuals with him. There's that initial social proof that happens as they look at your account and assess whether they want to answer your DM or not. Full disclosure, Goat, you did not originally answer my email when I invited you on this podcast. I had to resort to Twitter DM. You answered that pretty promptly.

That is a terrible thing to say out loud, but I am definitely very responsive on Twitter DMs and emails tend to fall through a little bit more. I'm the same way.

As you guys come up with ideas for posts, where do good ideas come from? Where should people look to for their own inspiration? Okay, so if you go back to the point of being helpful online, if you can consider yourself from three to five years ago, how can you help that person, that younger, less experienced version of yourself?

I think that's generally a good way of providing advice that doesn't make it seem like you're a know-it-all because you don't. None of us know everything. It also allows you to constantly come up with fresh content because you can always ask yourself new prompts. For example, like what's something you know now that you didn't know three or five years ago? If I was giving my younger, less experienced social media manager advice, what would I give them? Super specific.

Like now I have much more experience. I can give them a very tactical thread on what to do, what not to do. And if you're a founder, what would you give your younger founder self advice on either raising capital or launching a product or building a team or hiring or whatever? And then just sharing that publicly. I think it goes a long way and people appreciate that type of content and they never get tired of it too, which is nice. Ish, do you have a stock list of prompts that you ask yourself regularly? Yeah.

I do, but they're very simple prompts. There are things like, what do you know now that you didn't know three or five years ago? If you were a novice starting all over from scratch, what would you do differently? Very simple questions. Like, imagine that you're being interviewed on a podcast. What are those questions that they would ask you? Now go ahead and write them, cut that in half, and then just refine it for the platform that you're posting on. Maybe we'll put some of those in the show notes for people. I think I wrote a blog post that has like 30 or 40 of them. So I'll go ahead and share. We'll totally link to that.

Yeah, on my side, I think being observant and being critical of what's happening around you is the best way to come up with content. One way to be really successful on socials is being able to point out what a lot of people are thinking. And not in a way that's, oh, it's a bad thing to say, or no one's willing to say it out loud, but you're putting your finger on the thing that...

everybody's thinking. And that gets a lot of conversation going. Yeah, the creative process is as much as possible staying curious, just read books, go on other platforms, listen intently to conversations, notice what people are kind of saying. And then eventually you put those pieces together. Like a funny example is why are people all of a sudden not wearing cases on their phones anymore? Oh, they're like different levels of rich people. There are people that

Their beds doesn't touch a wall. Their couch doesn't touch a wall. And then there are people without phone cases. And that's just a perfect example of everyone's noticing it, but no one has mentioned it. And once you mention it and put it in a way that's succinct and is funny, then you have an explosion of people engaging with it.

Yeah, encourages you to be observant about the world around you, encouraging you to see things that might be funny or weird or whatever. It sounds like the process for a stand-up comedian almost. It's very much like that. You're commenting on what's happening, being the critical eye on what's happening any given day on any specific topic. To continue the stand-up comedian example, when you're posting on social, you have this megaphone of people that you're always speaking to, right? Constantly try to see...

what kind of vibe am I getting from these people? What are the responses? How quickly are they engaging with content? How quickly are they not similar to like how a comedian would be on stage? They're

They're constantly looking at cues in the crowd of seeing like, oh, people looking down at their phones. Are they unamused? Are they laughing? Oh, they laughed at that. They're going to laugh at the other joke that I have in my back pocket. If I tweak it just a little bit to target this one person in the crowd that fits the demographic that would laugh to it or whatever. So I try to find a lot of inspiration from comedians as well. Like I love Kevin Hart. I know people love him or hate him. But I think if you look at his old standups, they were just so raw, so real and so funny.

Whenever I'm in a funny mood and I want to come up with memes, I try to put myself in that mindset of what's like the real crap that people are not saying that I think would be funny if I can position it in a relatable meme that is trending right now.

What's your best performing tweet of all time and why? It's a pinned tweet on my account. And I took it from Naval Ravikant, the format. It's how to 10x on Twitter, parentheses, without getting lucky. And it just breaks down very simply my philosophy on like building an online presence or social presence. Very simple stuff. Identifying your target audience, creating content, all the stuff that we talked about today and a lot more, but in simple, like almost one liners. I saw that content format work well for him. I was like, I'm taking that and making it work for social. But what about you?

I was just going to add that I think Naval is a great type of example of someone that has completely nailed how to build an audience. And obviously his mind works in a unique way that he writes in a way that resonates with people. And it's very much his style. So it's hard to

try to post like Naval, but he is a very good example of what to follow. My best tweet of all time actually is from June this year. And it's super random, but basically a stack of MacBooks from different generations. And you can see the progression from one generation to the next, how ports are being removed by Apple little by little, all the way to just two USB-C ports. And the caption was, look what they took from us. I think

Only in retrospect, I understood why it did so well. It got reposted across all the platforms you can think of. 44 million views, by the way. 44 million views, 926,000 likes, 41,000 bookmarks, and 95,000 retweets.

It essentially pushes a lot of different emotions in people from different sub-communities. So for example, the nostalgia of look what they took from us, like us versus Apple. And now I have to have all these dongles and everyone hates dongles. No one wants to have 16 different little cables. And I think the second is people cannot help themselves. There's like the PC community that jumps in and that says,

Hey, guys over at Apple, we still have a ton of ports on our computers. That's not our problem. Everybody resonates with that. Everybody has a computer and has had to deal with plugging in like the stupid dongle into your iPhone to get your headphones working and you don't have it. And so I think it's frustration that is just felt across the board. And it's also a topic that's harmless. It's not political. It's just a pretty harmless topic that everyone feels good engaging with online.

I think that's a key thing to remember too, is if you want to reach big audiences, you have to make it approachable so that all sorts of people feel comfortable attaching their name to that conversation. Because oftentimes you might have an opinion on something, you probably won't engage because you don't want to be seen online engaged with that thing. So yeah, that one was unexpected, honestly, but it definitely went pretty far. In my experience, I think my best performing tweets have gotten...

major liftoff from another account that has a ton of followers. Back when I was at Fortune, I think one of my features got retweeted by Edward Snowden. And that was just like, then it just took off like a rocket ship. Breaking News actually has been successful too. And you get tweeted by a massive account like Joe Rogan or something, and you're off to the races. Let me ask this. How do you decide how much of your private life to share?

I default to almost zero and not because my private life is that interesting to hide, but I think I like to separate the persona and the business from my day to day. And I think it just happened naturally. Crypto is a place where that's completely normal. I think if I was in any other industry, it'd probably be different.

but it gives you that freedom to be your true self in how you pose. And people also judge the content for what it is. They can only look at your thoughts. They can't look at the type of person you are, what you look like. And I think that's pretty powerful. But I do try to share things that show my personality. You'll see me posting about my interests and me going on a run or bike rides and stuff like that. And so that's not at all off limits.

And this goes to you even using a PFP image online and not defaulting to sharing your face. You want to maintain some separation. Yeah, that's what I was going to ask too. So how and when did you decide to go that route? Yeah, it almost happened naturally because I noticed that being recognizable is very powerful. And I think a really good way to do that is even if it's a picture of you, probably never want to change that PFP or not change it very often. And if you look at...

at some of the most successful accounts, they've never changed it. And I think for me, it happened randomly in the sense that I just wanted to create a drawing version of myself and I thought it'd be funny. So I had literally had someone draw me and then I made it as my profile picture and then it stayed forever. And now it's attached to me. But the good news is it looks a lot like me. I don't feel too far away from the fictional character. And also people, when they meet me for the first time, they say, oh, you look exactly like your profile picture. And then I say, yeah, it's me.

So you just had a friend create this image for you? An artist I found on Twitter. So perfect example of just yet another connection. But yeah, someone that was making cool drawings on Twitter. And I said, hey, it'd be cool if you made a version of me. I sent a selfie and that's it. And I was wearing company hat that day.

And that sweater and the rest is history. I get like an Ash Ketchum from Pokemon vibe from your PFP. All right, Ish, on you. Yeah, I share almost everything online, honestly. If you follow me across Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, across those three. We can just reconstruct your life. Yeah, you can pretty much like use the AI to reconstruct my life.

The reason why is because I think social media is like a superpower and to be able to like influence, teach, pave the way to other people who don't even know that they consider you as a mentor. And so when I think about the ability to teach people and show them a life that they could live or things that you've learned along the way, just opens up their eyes. And there's a really good blog post that Tim Ferriss wrote a while ago around niche fame. And you don't want to be like super famous because...

You end up less happy than you could be if you would have just had everything private to yourself like Goat is. But I think on the other side of the spectrum, there's more upside to being able to like impact people's lives by sharing fitness routines and things that you've learned in your job and career hacks and all that stuff. So I kind of default to just build a public all around.

I think it's great to be able to broadcast your message and to reach a lot of people. I'm of the opinion that you shouldn't want to be famous, that being broadly recognizable is actually something that takes away from your day-to-day life and also impacts other people in your life. And so it's nice to reach millions of people, but ideally without them having to see your face. So I want to ask, what should people...

not do? What is off bounds? What would you recommend people don't do if they're going to try to build a following for themselves? I'm going to iterate that question a little bit for a go because I'm genuinely curious. When you were early on in your content creation career, what didn't work for you? Or what did you feel like was cringe and then you iterated until you got to where you are now?

What worked really well is not trying to go too broad too quickly and becoming like micro famous into a specific small niche, or there's a small community that likes your content and you tailor it to that community. So for me, it was like crypto memes and crypto humor. And it's not like it wasn't intellectual content about crypto, but it was jokes that people within the community understood.

And then if you've showed it to like 99.9% of people, they'd be like, huh, what does that mean? That worked really well for me at the very beginning. In terms of what not to do, rule number one is to remember that the internet never forgets. And so whatever you put online will come back to haunt you if it's something that should haunt you. You have to be completely aware of that, especially also with personal content. And so that's something I've kept in mind always.

I have strict red lines on specific topics and I never get political. I basically avoid anything that has a huge rift between two different sides. And so I try to just stay like general public. I want to be not universally loved, but I don't want to create enemies. And so that's my rule number one. And also I try to never dunk on one specific person. That might be funny in the moment, but actually it reflects pretty poorly on you over time. And I don't think there's a net positive

out of doing that. Even if it's like a broadly hated person, it's really easy to dunk from the sidelines, much harder to try and do things. It is hard when that is such an effective strategy that you see some people take, you know, quote tweeting somebody, dunking on them, explaining why you're dunking on them. At A16Z, we adopt this sort of philosophy of all being happy warriors. We're definitely not out there to criticize any founder or company.

We'd love your thoughts as well, Ish. What are things that you shouldn't do when building an audience? What are your boundaries? And you'd recommend for other people as well. I'll get super tactical because I talked to a lot of founders and people that are starting from scratch. At the very beginning, I think it's important to like super niche down two or three niches. But when you're talking about like six different topics at once, that's a super no. There's no predictability out of the account. So there's less of a reason for them to follow you.

And when you're at the very beginning of your content creation career and you're trying to get a following from scratch, you want to like have every advantage on your end. The number one rule I get people is niching down as much as you can while still allowing flexibility to like be creative, have fun, show your personality. The best niche is a niche of one, and it's usually made up of two or three unique interests or characteristics.

levels of expertise that you have that other people don't. And then just like one pure obsession that you have. If you mix those three things, then you have an account worth following. If you just create content on a consistent basis, tactical advice that anybody can go ahead and take and start implementing today.

There's one very important piece that a lot of people, they overlook when trying to grow an account or build an online presence and it's community management. I think that's probably about half of what it takes to grow an online presence. And for the people who may not know what community management is, is spending time on a daily basis to engage with people who are engaging with your content, reaching out to people, replying, engaging with other accounts that are within your sphere, within your ecosystem or your network.

every single day on a regular basis for long periods of time. It makes you more recognized person and more well-known and will increase your chances of luck happening. Because even if you don't create a ton of content on a regular basis, because you popped up and you've said nice things or helpful things under other people's accounts, or just generally been like a nice person to people when communicating, it'll increase the likelihood that they become a customer, an investor, a friend, maybe even a partner down the line.

A lot of my friends have found their partners on social media, which is fun. What B2B SaaS has taught me about romance. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Community management, don't overlook it. Aside from content creation and finding your niche, I think it's probably one of the most important things you could do.

I definitely agree with that insight. Don't just broadcast, be part of the community yourself. I think one lesson, I forget who says this, but people don't remember what you said to them, but they remember how you made them feel. And that's really true for socials, being able to give back and help people when they're trying to promote their content, reply to them, engage with them. Sounds like you both are saying to consistently pay it forward and that will reap dividends. Or consistently make people feel seen. People

People are spending their time and energy consuming your content, sharing it with friends, engaging with it online, maybe even replying. The least you could do is give them a quick response saying, thanks so much for sharing. How are you doing on your goals for A16Z Crypto? Where are we at in terms of follower count? Where do you want to be? I think now one of my main goals is building personal brands within the company because my thesis is personal brands are going to become more and more powerful, influential. They're going to get more reach, more engagement, and

As AI makes content creation easier to produce, the personal brand, the individual account, the person behind content is going to become more valuable because people want to follow people. They don't want to follow brands. We've all been told this over and over again. So one of my goals is to help build your account, Robert, build different quote unquote thought leaders or experts within the company, because I think there's more potential upside there. Yeah, I think Ish loves to harp on this because it's true that people prefer

prefer hearing from people than they prefer hearing from brands. But the nice thing is they can build on top of each other. You can basically use one to grow the other, use one to promote the other account. And so they're really complimentary. And at the end of the day, over the course of a company's lifecycle, and then especially over the course of a career, you know, you get to take those audiences with you, especially if you're working for another brand that you might one day leave, because then you don't get to take those followers with you.

Amazing. Thank you all. We'll post your handles in the show notes so that people can follow you and you guys can all reply and interact. Maybe go biking in Central Park. And follow Goat for banger memes. They crack me up every day. Thank you. But if you actually want to learn how to grow an account, you want to follow Ish. Yeah, I got you guys. Thanks guys for joining. Thanks so much for the time. All right. Take care.