Buckets and Lightning Rods
My friend Brad Holtz used to run an event called COFES, and for a few years I helped out. One very cool part of the event was a series of five minute talks where the speakers presented an innovation that was the result of some unexpected combination of technologies and ideas.
We would all work hard to find, select, and coach people to give these five minute presentations, but Brad was unusually good at finding the most interesting technology innovations to bring to the conference. So one time I asked him about how he did it. He said he had a list of “buckets” and he would go “diving” into the buckets on a regular basis to see what he would find. A bucket might be another conference, or a magazine, or even a prodigiously interesting friend who he would call to catch up with.
This concept has stuck with me, and I’ve carried it into my work as a VC. I frequently go “bucket diving” to find the most interesting new technological innovations and hopefully meet the people who are bringing them to life. It’s an energizing practice and one that I think good VCs need to do in order to make sure they’re not just looking at the same opportunities as everyone else.
But funding entrepreneurs is a hard matching problem, and no amount of bucket diving will reveal everything I should know about. The other half of the equation is a “lightning rod” — something that you stick out there to attract the kind of things you want to see.
Blogging is the classic VC lightning rod, which has worked well for about as long as blogs have been around. But there are other lightning rods, too: speaking frequently at conferences in the field where you’d like to invest, contributing opinion pieces to publications in your industry like The Information, growing a TikTok channel with a Gen-Z take on VC, and hosting your own iconic retreats are other effective ways to put yourself out there.
The advantage of a lightning rod is that it can attract people you’d never find in a million years if you were looking. Put together with a regular practice of bucket diving, I think it makes a good strategy for staying plugged in to the most interesting technology and the most ambitious people.
I know the metaphors make little sense, and they make no sense whatsoever when you put them together. But this is how I think about it and for better or worse I find it useful.