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Does 👁👄👁 illustrate the power of meme culture in fundraising?

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Image Credits: Bryce Durbin

Fundraising was once a formal process.

A decade ago, founders would make pilgrimages to the stodgy investor offices that line Sand Hill Road. Now, as the coronavirus ravages the world and venture capital grows as an asset class, a first “yes” can come from an investor-matching tool built on Notion, or an entire fund can come together over a Zoom call. In this era, Twitter DMs are better for deal flow than walking around a conference.

As startup-land becomes more informal, a new generation of early-stage founders is searching for ways to make the relaxed new world work in their favor. One way this is happening?

Meme culture as a signaling mechanism.

Before Gefen Skolnick, founder of Couplet Coffee, launched her company and Slack channel for underrepresented and underresourced groups in tech, she established credibility in a unique way.

Skolnick was part of the Eye Mouth Eye ( 👁👄👁) campaign that rocked Silicon Valley in June 2020. The cryptic effort was a statement on how FOMO and hype culture dominate venture capital conversations. Participants in the campaign changed their Twitter names, tweeted cryptically and earned more than 20,000 email subscribers for a product that did not even exist.

Skolnick says Eye Mouth Eye gave her a larger platform, which she’s leveraging by stepping up the pace of posting new content and launching products. She said the stunt gave her “sign-offs” from high-profile individuals, and investors have been blowing up her inbox.

“My fundraising experience has just been angel investors DMing me to tell me they’re investing,” she said.

Meme culture, she says, is the “best way the younger generation can showcase their insights, humor and commentary in a more digestible and shareable format.”

“I wouldn’t consider memes as a true strategy to the first check,” she added. “If you can use memes effectively in content strategy and effectively communicate something about your sector, product or competitors through a meme then you have the potential to have an awesome positioning on social media depending on what audience you’re targeting.”

Clubhouse, an invitation-only beta app that generated buzz purely from word of mouth, defines “awesome positioning on social media,” says Skolnick. The app gives users a place to talk in a radio-show style format. Silicon Valley early users love it (and can’t stop tweeting about it) — the app rose in prominence in a few months, attracting Silicon Valley elites and celebrities like Kevin Hart and Jared Leto.

The app was still in beta when it raised a funding round with $10 million in equity and $2 million in secondary shares at a $100 million valuation, reports Forbes. Now, Clubhouse is worth $100 million after being live just for a handful of months.

In Dagmawi Belay’s case, memes were not the core strategy, but they offered a competitive advantage.

Belay, the London-based co-founder of Curbism, was looking to fundraise for his startup when he thought about messaging his favorite Twitter accounts: @VCBrags and @VCComplaints, parody accounts that have amassed tens of thousands of followers by poking fun at the investor community.

Belay DM’d the parody account with memes, and it worked. More than 50% of introductions to real VCs that the folks behind @VCBrags Twitter account made for his startup resulted in checks, Belay said. In fact, so many investors were interested, Curbism doubled the amount of capital it was raising to a $350,000 total. As icing on the cake, @VCBrags and @VCComplaints each gave Curbism a $10,000 check as an angel investment, their first to date.

“It’s the anonymity [of the accounts] I think provides an added novelty that plays into your hand,” Belay said, reflecting on how the introductions turned into checks. “Or in our case, success. It opened more doors than me randomly cold emailing friends and people.”

Belay’s innovative strategy won the day, but the problem with novelty is that it is a “fleeting trinket,” he noted.

Brianne Kimmel, founding partner behind WorkLife Ventures, said meme culture will grow as more and more operators look to find ways “to demonstrate relevance.” Social signals in a pandemic are hard to come by, and with more optionality than ever, techies are actively seeking ways to break through the noise.

She used herself as an example. On July 31, the early-stage investor tweeted out a tongue-in-cheek joke: “I heard through the venture associate grapevine that design-led founders are hanging out in Silver Lake. I’m currently sitting outside Intelligentsia with an uncapped note and no discount. DM me with your milk preference.”

Beyond WorkLife, Kimmel runs SaaS School, an event for enterprise and blogs occasionally about the future of work. She said she got a better deal flow from a parody tweet than she did from anything else.

Kimmel said she believes this method of meeting founders, through informal mechanisms and quirky tweets, will only grow in necessity in a remote world.

“We’re at the point where a 30-minute Zoom call, you don’t really get to the relationship stuff anymore,” she said. “You almost need to keep demonstrating your own personal values publicly, because you’re not going to have time to have the four-hour dinner to talk about your family.”

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