Liang Wu is the Co-founding Managing Partner at Eleven26 Capital, an early-stage VC fund investing in diverse founders on the evolving Internet across Web2 and Web3.
Liang is also a Web3 Research Fellow at Harvard Business School where he helps shape the Web3 curriculum by writing case studies on leading Web3 companies, as well as supporting community building and business development for Harvard’s Crypto Lab.
He writes regularly on his Life in Color blog where he explores the “Why” behind Web3. His professional background is a mix of startups, venture capital and management consulting, and Liang is also a mentor for the Techstars Web3 accelerator.
In this episode, Liang riffs with Pete Townsend on his one-year reflections on writing his weekly Life in Color blog, including thoughts on chasing his curiosity, growth and flywheels in content creation, shamelessness as a superpower, and how all of these experiences inform his journey as an investor.
HIGHLIGHTS:
Liang Wu on chasing his curiosity through writing:
“I think that these days, people should ask more questions. In the first part of my career in more traditional jobs like management consulting and venture capital, chasing curiosity was something that people said, but you were always taught to stay in your lane.
“I think chasing curiosity for me now is a way to really explore a bunch of different things because I don’t like the frameworks that exist today that you have to be X or Y. You could be a combination of X and Y and Z and maybe some days you’re X and some days you’re Y.
“I probably have a hundred essays I’m working on, but not actively. Even as we’re talking, I have ideas for things I’m working on, but my action after this isn’t to write an essay, it’s to take down a bullet point in an organization system I have in Notion and Apple Notes.
“So, when I sit down to write about something, I then have a place to go, and I already have 10 or 20 bullet points of content already written and I’m confident enough to now write an essay.
“The writing process becomes less of new idea generation as I already have this box of Lego blocks, and then I start organizing. Am I building a house? Am I building a car? Am I using blue versus red versus yellow? And so that decision becomes a lot less intense because you’re not staring at a blank piece of paper.”
Liang Wu on growth and flywheels in content creation:
“What you often see is BizDev and marketing are not parts of a flywheel. They’re different departments, which means there are very few people who know how to do both because you don’t go into a company and raise your hand for a marketing job and a sales job.
“What happens is that the marketing people are really great at marketing, but they throw their stuff out on the internet and maybe they get a huge following. But the reality is, if a hundred thousand people follow you, you can’t interact with all of them and you’re missing the 1% of people who are super fans who you should engage with.
“The other side of it is business development, which is very targeted and high value. Instead of ‘Hey, I’m sending out a tweet, just please read it,’ it’s ‘Hey, I have this project, would you want to be involved?
“Inevitably, when you reach X number of people, some per cent of them would benefit from a more high touch approach, like ‘Hey, whoever really likes this content, we’ll do a small AMA’ or we’ll do some kind of community activation.
“The way the flywheel works is that you activate certain people who then become diehard fans and they do the marketing for you and so on and so forth. I think the key here is if you come from BizDev or marketing, try to lean into the other and learn the other.”
Liang Wu on shamelessness as a superpower:
“If you’re a little bit more shameless, it’s like, ‘Well, I don’t need to be the best marketer in the world, but maybe I’ll send out three tweets this week.’ Why people don’t do it is this fear that when they do it, nothing happens.
“Shamelessness, to me,...
