The 10 Best VC Blogs
Every year Venture Capitalists battle to grab the best deals with emerging startups. This incredibly competitive landscape is dominated by well-established names who’ve set themselves apart by building their personal brand. Luckily for us, this inbound marketing strategy births a massive amount of content delving into these VC’s mindsets, how they value startups and what they look for in a founder.
Many of the VCs on this list were founders before they ever invested in their first company, making these blogs a must reads for those not only interested in learning how to raise capital, but also how to build a business, scale, hire, and be a successful leader.
1.) AVC
You’ll be hard pressed to find a VC who isn’t familiar with Fred Wilson’s AVC. With investments including Twitter, Tumblr, Foursquare, Etsy, and Indeed.com, Wilson’s portfolio of success speaks for itself. The minimalist blog features short, infographic filled daily posts discussing anything from market trends to television, sports, and current affairs.
David Skok is the master of SaaS (software as a service). The five-time entrepreneur turned VC has arguably the most popular SaaS metrics breakdown around. For Entrepreneurs shares Skok’s expert knowledge on SaaS challenges such reducing churn and optimizing your funnel as well as broad sales and marketing strategies. For those looking to grow your SaaS business, Skok is a great place to start.
3.)Chris Dixon
Our favorite blog from the Andreessen Horowitz group is not actually from by Marc Andreessen or Ben Horowitz, but instead by General Partner Chris Dixon. Dixon has ample experience, starting SiteAdvisor and later Founder Collective where he invested in the likes of Buzzfeed, Uber, and Venmo. His time as a founder and technical background provides both business acumen and insights into the future of tech. Dixon blogged on his personal site before moving to Medium in 2015.
4.) Tomasz Tunguz
Tunguz is a partner at Redpoint where he backed Looker, Expensify, Dremio, and others. We had the chance to listen to Tunguz at SaaStr 2017 earlier this year and were blown away. He is the epitome of a numbers guy, co-authoring Winning With Data, which details how businesses can leverage their data to it’s full potential. Tunguz writes particularly often on Machine Learning centered businesses but is still quick to point out the fault in relying solely on ML for building a disruptive product.
5.) The Angel VC
Christoph Janz is another SaaS pro who likes to get into the nitty gritty of building businesses. As Managing Partner at 9 Point Capital, Janz has seen significant success with SaaS products like Zendesk, Geckoboard, and FreeAgent Central (big Chartmogul fans — check them out for subscription analytics). Some other great resources you can find on the Angel VC are Janz’s company Growth Calculator, Sales Team Hiring Plan, and Financial Plan outline.
Mark Suster is an entrepreneur before anything else. After founding (and selling) both BuildOnline and Koral, Suster launched his Venture Capital career with Upfront Ventures. Like Dixon, Suster speaks from a unique perspective having seen both the founder and VC side of the story. Where some of the VC’s on this list prefer shorter blogs to up their posting frequency, Suster sticks to detailed writeups at a similar rate.
7.) 500 Hats
Dave McClure runs 500 Startups, an early-stage/seed accelerator program which produced cloud communications giant Twilio amongst others. While 500 Startups has their blog, Dave’s writes personally through 500 Hats, which bluntly addresses the reality of today’s startup market and what makes their program so successful. Not featured on the blog is McClure’s epic deck on the Startup Metrics that will make or break your business titled Startup Metrics for Pirates: AARRR!
8.) Seth Levine
Foundry Group’s Seth Levine covers it all. He’s got great content on pitching, how to increase your productivity, and being an effective CEO. While he only publishes about once a month, Levine’s blogs are high quality and will undoubtedly make you change the way you think about running a business. For some of the best of his content check out his featured pieces for Business Insider.
9.)Ben’s Blog
It’s impossible to not include Ben Horowitz, General Partner of Andreessen Horowitz, on this list. He’s an all-time great with a prolific record that includes Groupon, Instagram, Skype, and now Oculus VR. He still finds time to do a couple of posts a month, including some spots from their a16z podcast.
10.) Jason Lemkin — SaaStr
Jason Lemkin’s blog SaaStr helps readers “get from $0-$100 ARR Faster”. In essence, they have created a playbook for scaling SaaS businesses. The site has aggregated hundreds of blogs and conveniently categorized them based on what stage startup you are, the function you seek, and the popularity of each blog. SaaStr also hosts the largest SaaS conference in the country with over 10,000 in attendance in 2017.
Originally published at twist.io
