Want to invest in creators? You're not alone.
Why MrBeast might be onto something, and why all but six of the top 100 Y Combinator startups in the US are headquartered in the West.
Welcome to Silicon Valley Outsider, a newsletter for aspiring startup founders and investors who live outside of the SF Bay Area. If you’re not yet a subscriber, join over 100 of my closest friends by entering your email here:
💯 After ten weeks and ten editions of Silicon Valley Outsider, we’ve passed the 100 subscriber mark! My initial newsletter was sent to five people — this one will go out to 108. In the grand scheme of the internet, that isn’t a huge number. But it still feels pretty dang cool to imagine all 108 of you listening to me ramble for a few minutes every Monday. Thank you!
🕑 If you only have time to click one link, try this one: Midwest Arbitrage,
an exploration of the innovation gap between the Midwest and West. I’ll publish my interview with the authors, Lea Boreland and Kyla Scanlon, later this week!
✨ What’s (not-so) new in the Valley
Narrative Violation: Facebook appears to be getting better at preventing hate speech and other misuses of its platform. Last month, a nationalist, anti-Muslim preacher in Myanmar turned himself into the police as a publicity stunt, and was met with crickets due to Facebook’s new, country-specific community standards:
“He didn’t get anything like the megaphone that he had hoped to get,” says Victoire Rio, a Yangon-based researcher and advisor to the Myanmar Tech Accountability Network, a consortium of nonprofit groups working on disinformation and hate speech. “The whole thing got fairly well contained, and that’s in big part because Facebook was able to take action.”
Investing Early: This week, venture capitalists Blake Robbins and Mike Mazzeo jammed on creating a Y Combinator for Creators: an accelerator program that takes a small piece of equity in a channel in exchange for guiding them through the early days and getting to scale faster. Why? Because creators like Jimmy Donaldson — better known as MrBeast, the YouTuber who currently averages one billion views per month — run businesses that look a lot like startups. Donaldson started his YouTube eight years ago, and today, he reaches more people than any U.S. TV network. Finding, funding, and training the next MrBeast may be just as lucrative as funding the next tech unicorn.
Rising and Falling: In last week’s Silicon Valley Outsider, I highlighted Tony Hsieh, the happiness-loving CEO of Zappos who tragically passed away two weeks ago. This week, it was revealed that the last months of his life were spent in a tragic free fall: Hsieh grew addicted to drugs and was increasingly erratic through the months he quarantined. It’s a tragic coda to an otherwise glowing life, and I think it’s important to note that this revelation negates none of the incredible work he did through the vast majority of his life. I was wrong to hold him up as true, flawless hero, true, but his story is a reminder that everyone, even the billionaires with the biggest smiles, can be fighting their own demons behind the scenes.
🌏 The Outside: Innovation in the Midwest
As a result of this slow start to the tech boom, very little VC funding is making its way to the Midwest… But there is a ton of potential to reorient the applied industrial knowledge from the Midwest’s heyday toward high-tech pursuits.
Lea Boreland and Kyla Scanlon wrote a great article this week on the innovation gap that exists between regions of the United States. Charts like the above show that the disparity is massive, and clearly something structural is to blame.
I sat down with Lea and Kyla to learn more, and I’ll publish that interview later this week — just in time for next week’s edition of Silicon Valley Outsider. As a quick teaser, here’s a bomb quote from my conversation with Kyla:
The Midwest and the South are culturally compatible with entrepreneurship — building is an inherently human thing. Entrepreneurship gave us fire, gave us tools, gave us the Renaissance. Anyone can do this, it just is the function of connection and understanding.
👩🏽 Someone to know: Caroline Clark
Caroline was one of the first product marketers for Jira, a super-popular ticketing tool by billion-dollar startup Atlassian. (We use it to help build satellites at Astranis!)
After getting her MBA from Stanford and holding roles at both Lightspeed and Sequoia, two top-tier venture capital firms, Caroline is now off building something new — and she’s taking us all along with her.
This week, Caroline released Go To Market Nirvana, a how-to guide for figuring out how to sell a product to businesses. It has practical strategies for everything from identifying buyers to marketing to scaling metrics; it’s a dense, helpful guide for anyone who wants to know how folks in Silicon Valley think about B2B marketing.
You can follow Caroline on Twitter to track her progress and see what she’s building next!
Catch you on the outside,
Christian