Competition for the best startups in the venture capital world is increasingly fierce. To get into the best deals, some VC’s are building brands around their firms by offering resourceful content from the lessons they are learning with their own prior experiences and from meeting with thousands of entrepreneurs and founders every year.
This gives them hundreds of data points on technology and startups that can turn into helpful investing insights – in this case, both newsletter and blog content.
Reading the following 10 VC blogs on a daily basis will help you with key skills not only with fundraising, but also on hiring, pricing, scaling, building teams, picking co-founders and so much more.
Tomasz Tunguz
Tom Tunguz is a principal at Red Point Ventures. He blogs daily, and writes data-driven blog posts about key questions startups face including how to raise, startup benchmarks, management best practices and team building.
If you are a SaaS startup founder, you should leave everything you are doing right now and join the thousand of entrepreneurs subscribed to his blog.
Must-read: The Optimal Seed Round Construction To Maximize Series A Success
The Review
The Review is First Round’s attempt at creating a Harvard Business Review for the startup industry. They focus on insightful long form content based on the experiences of individual entrepreneurs and portfolio companies. What’s interesting about this blog is that it’s a collaborative effort from the whole firm instead of a single person expressing their thoughts.
Must-read: 80% of Your Culture Is Your Founder
A VC
Fred Wilson is a legendary VC at Union Square Ventures. He invested in companies like Zynga, Etsy, Tumblr, Twitter and Kickstarter. He’s one of the first VC’s to start blogging daily and covers startups, technology and also personal stuff – it’s a great mix and comes highly recommended.
Must-read: Employee Equity: How Much?
Travis Jamison
Travis Jamison is the owner of the investing community investing.io and the author of the startup and investing newsletter, and is both a serial founder and a venture capitalist. He generally prefers to focus on company sustainability and cashflow vs what he views as “just aiming for the next round”. He writes checks of his own instead of through a fund, so he’s able to keep a more longterm focus in mind, aiming to help build quality companies over the longterm for those who the traditional VC model may not fit. He is the founder of Smash.vc, which just so happens to be the site you’re on right now (gasp!).
Must-read: A real-world example of buying $1 for $.50 (and acquiring 6% of a public company)
Benedict Evans
The first thing you read when you land on Benedict Evans’ blog is ‘I try to work out what’s going on and what will happen next’. Ben is a VC at Andreessen Horowitz. The most useful part of the blog is the Newsletter, a weekly email sent on Sundays with the most interesting stuff on tech and includes Ben’s thoughts on the topics. Over 30,000 founders, investors and entrepreneurs receive the newsletter every week.
Must-read: Ways To Think About Market Size
Hunter Walk
Hunter Walk led consumer product management at YouTube and contextual advertising at Google, and now is the co-founder and partner at Homebrew, a seed stage venture fund. In his blog, he writes about entrepreneurship, life, startups while empowering his readers to think big.
Must-read: Hiring Momentum: Underrated Component of Startup Success
Both Sides of the Table
Mark Suster is a 2x entrepreneur turned VC. He joined Upfront Ventures in 2007 as a General Partner after selling his company to Salesforce.com. Now, he writes about startups at Both Sides of the Table, where Mark offers his viewpoint from both perspectives: founders and investors (as he is both). It’s a great read.
Must-read: How To Present And Answer Questions in a Team Presentation or VC Pitch
Feld Thoughts
Brad Feld is the managing director at Foundry Group, and a Techstars co-founder. He has been an early-stage investor since 1987 and now he blogs about books, education, entrepreneurship, his portfolio investments and more at Feld.com.
Must-read: The Illusion of Product/Market Fit For Saas Companies
Paul Graham’s Essays
Paul Graham is one of the most influential thinkers in tech space. As a founder and former president of Y Combinator, his impact on the startup world is immense. Y Combinator made companies like Airbnb and Dropbox possible, but it also inspired the ‘accelerator’ model replicated all over the world. In addition, Paul writes some of the most helpful essays for entrepreneurs out there. If you have not read any of Paul’s essays yet, we recommend you read them all. Seriously.
Must-read: Do Things That Don’t Scale
Chris Dixon’s Blog
Chris is a NYC entrepreneur turned Silicon Valley VC who likes to invest in ground-breaking technologies that have a shot at changing the world: as a partner in Andreessen Horowitz, Chris has invested in Coinbase, Soylent and Oculus. Chris like thinking, analyzing and writing about the macro trend in the technology world.
Must-read: The Next Big Thing Will Start Out Looking Like A Toy
Above the Crowd
Bill Gurley spent the last 10 years as a General Partner at Benchmark Capital, and invested in companies like Uber, DogVacay, GrubHub and OpenTable. He uses data and deep analysis to write some of the most insightful and brilliant essays out there on technology startups. If you are running any kind of marketplace, Above the Crowd should be your go-to VC blog.
Must-read: How to Miss by a Mile: An Alternative Look At Uber’s Valuation
