Forget Twitter & TikTok. The Real Opportunity is LinkedIn.

Transcription

Daniel: If you're not willing to do this for six months at least, don't do it. What if I leave the walk away with 150,000 LinkedIn followers? That's not good for the business. I don't track impressions nearly as closely anymore as. Look at what's being promoted on the For You tab of Twitter. LinkedIn is better than that. If you have like eight tags at the bottom of the post, that's crap. Easiest way for someone to tune you out is to feel like you're being sold to. Don't do that. That's a kick. That's something that we should totally do. It's not even rejection. It's just like complete silence. Instagram had TikTok and Snap and other competitors. LinkedIn has no competitors. Matt: How do you track the signups? Daniel: I don't at all. And I think that people who do are not really getting the point. My biggest one is actually 15 million. Matt: 15? Daniel: Yeah, that was a while ago. For 2025, that's under 25 million impressions, 90,000 a day. Matt: Oh, good question. Welcome to this episode of Connection Accepted. Today's guest is a really exciting one. We've got Peter Walker, the head of insights at Carta with us. Peter, thanks so much for joining us. Peter: Absolutely, guys. Happy to be here. Matt: Awesome. So Peter, you studied political science and government, if I'm not mistaken, at WashU. Did you ever imagine that you would end up in a very data-driven role as the head of insights at Carta? Walk us through that journey that's led to today. Peter: Yeah, well, I had a sprinkling of economics also in those college days. So yeah, poli-sci, history, government were the main things. But I was starting to get fluent with numbers as well. And I spent two summers at a hedge fund, which I don't recommend to anyone. God, that sucked. But because it sucked, I actually started a company with a couple of friends in college. I'll be completely candid. It was not some mission of profound significance. The goal was not to spend the rest of our summers in Excel at hedge funds. That was what we were trying to explicitly avoid that. But it turned into a really interesting business. It was, you know, the company was around music festivals, but we were doing a lot of import and export. We were doing like a ton of merchandising for big festivals. And it was just an interesting introduction to, you know, we paid sales tax in 26 states for a couple of summers. We were doing all sorts of activations and stuff. But it wasn't a business that was making a ton of sense if you weren't a college kid. So as we were exiting, we sort of sold it off for basically nothing. But it gave me the bug for entrepreneurship. So I was only looking at small startups. Ended up going to a place called Public Relay right out of school and spent a long time there building data and analytics teams, building marketing teams, doing a bunch of stuff. And that's where the first love of what I'm doing now at Carta began, which is, you know, charts and graphs like data vis. Daniel: Didn't really do a lot of data vis in college, but it became a hobby and then an obsession right after school. And then we can talk about some other experiences. But that's where that's where the germ of this stuff I, you know, began with. Charts and graphs is this content marketing motion for if you have a data set that's worthy of it, it can really lend itself to social today for sure. Matt: That's a great story. And I want to get into the more fun stuff about the 2 million impression posts you have later. But at the start, I think not enough people understand on LinkedIn that it really takes a few months or even years to grow your audience. When I was scrolling down, I normally I took the first post of every guest we have. My phone on the LinkedIn app crashed three times doing this for you, Peter. So can you walk us through those early days of you posting on LinkedIn, what it was like, what you were learning and how it felt to sometimes deal with all the rejection? Daniel: Yeah, it's not even rejection. It's just like complete silence, you know, which is maybe worse. It's a slog, guys. I mean, maybe I can talk about this from a couple angles, but the primary most important one is when I got into Carta, I had pitched this job to Carta. I had been like, you need a head of insights to do this specific thing for this data set. And it can be really remunerative to the brand. And it's like all I had all these dreams about what it would be. But I wasn't thinking that it was going to be from my personal account. So for the first six months at Carta, we were building all this data. We were doing this cool stuff. We were putting it out over Carta owned channels. And it was working kind of, but not the way that we thought it should be. Not in the, like, we thought that we had something really special and we weren't, the distribution wasn't matching the content. So I started putting stuff out on my personal social and I wish I could just tell you, you know, overnight things changed. But no, I was probably posting every, you know, every other day, you know, three to four times a week for four months before something really started catching on. And then you start slowly climbing and climbing and maybe you have one or two like really big spike days and those feel really good. But in general, it's a slog and there's going to be, you can, you can try to just like use that time to iterate and experiment with your content and try to find where your voice and nuance lies. Because let's be honest, like not a lot of people are going to read it. So that's a good thing, but it's also, it's a bad thing, of course, but it's also a good thing in that, like you didn't hit very many people. You have, you have another chance to make a first impression. Matt: That's awesome. And Peter, I think one of the things that really stands out about your content is just how, obviously how data-driven it is. I mean, almost every post has an infographic and you're posting pretty frequently. Daniel: Can you tell us a little bit more about what happens behind the scenes? And I know you, you have a team and an insights machine, I think you may have called it before that helps you to generate these high quality, really insightful posts on a regular basis where almost every post is like a mini white paper. So yeah, I would love to just hear more about that process, what happens behind the scenes to make it happen. Matt: Yeah. I mean, to be honest, you don't need a big team for this. The first three years at Carta, I was a solo shop. And even now, everything that I've ever posted on LinkedIn, really, if it's a graphic, I've built. So you can do this with one person. It's just about creating a system. So if you woke up every day and said, I got to make something today, you're never going to do that. It just, you're never going to be inspired on a consistent basis to build something cool and interesting or whatever. So you have to kind of productize the backend content function. So what happens for us is this, we have an incredible data set at Carta, 50,000 startups. We aggregate and anonymize the data from all those companies. And then I view it at this sort of aggregated layer. And so the steps there are pretty simple. You have this clean and aggregated data content. You pipe it into a data viz tool. I use Tableau. You can use other stuff, but Canva and Flourish is a really great combination, et cetera. But I use Tableau as my main one. You build a chart. This is the hard, this is kind of the where like the creativity comes in. So it's not just what should we visualize, but how should we visualize it? How do I make the charts clear and actionable and easy and engaging and whatever. So there's a lot of thinking that has gone on there. And then you take that graphic, you literally take a snapshot of it, like a copy paste screenshot of this thing. And you drop it into a Figma template. And within that Figma template, I have a header and a footer and it looks and feels like it's coming from Carta. And then that's the graphic. You've built the whole thing. And now you just got to do the writing. And some people find the writing really easy because that's where they live and they, they're good at the hooks and all that kind of stuff. And some people find the writing absolutely torturous. And that's the hard part. I think I'm in the middle there. You know, some days I feel like the writing is simple. Some days I feel like I have nothing to say. But the point is not, my God, today I'm going to spend four hours creating something that's a, you know, work of art and it's so amazing. The point is, I am going to commit to consistent content production on this line. And I'm going to do it every day. For the first year and a half, two years at Carta, I had a meeting on my calendar from 8am to 8:45 that said, make something. Matt: Didn't necessarily have to be to put out that day, but I needed to get in the habit of making things that I would eventually show to other people. And once you do that, you'd be shocked at how quickly you start to get, you know, traction and leverage on, oh, this kind of data, I know exactly how to visualize it. I know kind of what the story is, et cetera, et cetera. Daniel: Then you just, the advantage of posting on a social network is no feedback is some feedback. You know in the conversation around your industry gives you the topics that are most on top of mind for your audience. Matt: That's awesome, Peter. And it sounds like you have quite a bit of creative freedom almost around what you want to post. One thing I've been wanting to ask you about, actually, is you rarely, at least from what I've seen, directly promote Carta's product in the posts. And a lot of your posts are very much just like, let me give away free value or insights and a lot of thought leadership content. Is that intentional or is it just sort of the type of content you like to make? It doesn't happen to promote the product at all. Curious your thought process on that. Daniel: No, it's entirely intentional. I think the easiest way for someone to tune you out is to feel like you're being sold to. Now, I don't begrudge founders and other people who are building content that's about their product. We do a ton of that at Carta, right? It lives on the Carta channels. It can be useful. It can be high conversion, but it's never going to be this brand awareness reach, right? If you're talking about speeds and feeds or like, oh, this feature that we just launched is better than that feature that we just launched. Like, yeah, you might get some pickup on it, but it's really tough to have it like influence the conversation. Whereas I think the advantage of having an insights team is it's not that you don't do that other kind of content, it's that insights gives you the right to talk about the world of your customer, the world of your ICP, in a way where you're not promoting yourself. You're just saying, like the way that I have always talked about insights at Carta is that I wanna build love and affinity for Carta with people who don't even need us yet. So that by the time you become a founder, you're like, of course I'm gonna be on Carta. I've already gotten so much value out of what they've given me and they've never cost me a dollar. Like that's the thing that I wanna build and that applies to founders, it applies to fund managers, it applies to anyone and everyone in the ecosystem. That's usually my North star. And then once people opt into your stuff, then you can start to pitch them more and you earn the right to like move them down the funnel, right? So the social content is one thing. We also have a newsletter, a data newsletter that goes to, you know, 35,000, 40,000 people. Daniel: There, I will promote products or there I will talk about specific events for Carta and other things because you've opted in. It's rather than trying to like force you down a funnel immediately. Matt: When you're posting all this organic content for Carta, I'm sure it's nearly impossible to track the ROI of all your posts. How are you going about justifying your salary, your job, and while you're getting so many impressions, how do you track the signups? Daniel: Yeah, I don't. I don't at all, basically. And I think that people who do are just not really getting the point, to be honest. Now I say that as a very privileged position, right? I'm totally, it's totally valid for if you're coming into this and you're trying to pitch this to your CEO, is like, why should we spend time and headcount and money on this thing? Like, of course you need success metrics. So I realize that. But fundamentally, like trying to track or attribute signups to individual social posts is just not the point. You're missing the forest for the trees. Number one, if you put UTM links on your social posts, congrats, you just cut off your reach. Like the very thing that you wanted is no longer happening, so why are you doing that? Matt: Second is just like more of a philosophical alignment. The goal for every one of my posts is not to have someone sign up to Carta. It's for them to opt into our ecosystem and learn more about Carta and get excited about us as a source of truth. I'm not trying to get you to buy it. We have a whole host of other motions that are trying to get you to buy and are fantastic and useful to the company. That's not me. And so you really got to start at the very beginning and say, is my executive team aligned to this motion? Fundamentally, is it useful for us to be the source of truth in our industry? If the answer is yes, then you act in one way. And if the answer is, well, that would be useful, but only if I can prove it drives leads and I can prove how many leads, you're gonna act differently. You're just gonna, the fundamental incentive structures are different. Daniel: So having said that, the easiest way to do this is put a form at the end of your sign up that says, how did you hear about us? We did that for a little while at Carta. We don't need to do that anymore. Matt: Fascinating. And Peter, so it was really interesting that you primarily are posting on your personal account and we've talked to a few other founders as well. And I think the general consensus right now is posting on the company page versus posting on the founder or whoever the exec is, almost nine times out of 10, you would want to post on the personal account. And I'm curious, have you ever posted on the company account? And if so, you know, what did you see? And I'm assuming you obviously went with the personal account ultimately. Daniel: Yeah. Company accounts are great for some things, but to build the brand and audience, they're not very good. Matt: And oftentimes at a company of any significant scale, they're also just pulled in a lot of different directions. They're talking about new hires. They're doing employer brand stuff. They're talking about press releases and company announcements and just like all sorts of things. So it's not their fault that they're less focused. It's they're getting pulled in a lot of different directions. And then you just come to the fundamental point, which is that the algorithms tend to favor people over brands, basically always, especially on places like LinkedIn and X. So yeah, I think it should come from people. The question is who? And at smaller startups, there really is no substitute for founder brand. So if you're building an insights team and your company is maybe series A or before, like definitely the person putting this stuff out should be your founder. It's a lot of time and commitment on them, even if they're not writing the stuff of like engaging in the audience or whatever. There's time for them, but I do think it can be incredibly rewarding to the business. At bigger companies, I, you know, I'm an example of someone who's clearly not the founder, but has sort of a public brand for Carta. I think we're going to see more of that. There's already, you know, Ramp hired a chief economist to do this. There's probably four or five other examples I could mention of big tech firms, you know, trying to build this kind of motion. And I think when they do so, the really forward thinking ones will put a person's face behind it, even if that person is not. Daniel: A hundred percent. I love that. And funny aside, but we're actually going to be speaking with Ara, the economist at Ramp, next week. So super excited for that conversation. What would you say to, say, like a CMO or someone at a more established company, not a startup, who wants to either start posting or really step up their LinkedIn game? What are like some of the key principles or key pillars that you would really focus on if they were starting from zero? Matt: Oh, good question. Well, first, you know, a way that we do insights at Carta isn't necessarily the only way to do this. Insights could just be a part of your posting diet, not the whole thing. It doesn't need to consume the whole page the way that ours does. But I think the basics are pretty obvious. One, you need to build a person's brand. So you need to choose who that person is. It should be the founder if you're small. Big debate about whether founder or not founder if you're big. Second, you need to understand who you are posting for. I think a lot of advice around social is you should narrowly target this one person as closely as possible. So narrow it down, narrow it down, narrow it down. So for Carta it would be early stage startup founder in San Francisco, working on an AI company, blah, blah, blah. I don't love that. Daniel: I get why people say it, and it is useful to have a person in mind when you're writing, but that ignores the way that we're influenced by everyone else. Like it's useful for the CFO to also like Carta and to also understand our data because they talk to the founder all the time, right? Those aren't wasted impressions for us, even if they're not the ultimate buyer. So I think being a source of, if you're doing insights, being a source of truth to everyone in the leadership committees of the places that you want to talk to is valuable. So narrow down your ICP, but maybe don't make it too narrow. And then the third thing is establish upfront your cadence and posting schedule. And then just don't, don't stop. Just be consistent. Like there's so many places that will do some sort of motion on social for two to three months, throw up their hands when it's not working and say we failed when really they were about a month away from making it work if they had just stuck with it. So I get the idea. You can't invest into something forever, but if you're not willing to do this for six months, at least don't do it. Matt: Don't do it. I couldn't agree with you more on the consistency front. As a, as someone who makes content on the personal side, not for my day job, but on YouTube for the past two years, uh growing my channel from zero to over a hundred thousand, I hundred percent everything that you're saying Startups, it's not that useful. You're not big enough to have that kind of thing. At Carta, I think it would be. We're big enough now that, you know, our CFO talking to other CFOs, I think it matters. At a C or series A company, like, you just need to know to have people know who you are and what you do at that stage. And so, like, keeping it concentrated, I'd say, makes a lot of sense. You know, we didn't talk about the, let's be honest, the tricky part about building personal brands within your company is, like, what if these people leave? Right? Like, what if I leave Carta? I walk away with 150,000 LinkedIn followers. That's not good for the business. Now, I would posit that it's not as though those are things that would have happened, you know, if someone like me hadn't been here in the first place. So it's like, you either get the value of it while you're going or you don't. But I also think that this points to the idea that insofar as the company has goals relative to content, one of those goals should be increasing the owned audience, the awareness of the owned audience universe for their company. So that's for us, people who read the newsletter, meaning they have opted in and given us their email, all that kind of stuff. People who attend our virtual events, people who attend our company live events based on data, like anyone where it's moved from, oh, I read one LinkedIn post to I've opted in for more of this stuff. Because then the company can own that relationship as well as the front person. Daniel: So you should have ways to transfer things, transfer audience from rented on social to owned channels, and there's a lot of different channels you can choose there. But that's probably part of the day one package when you propose an insights team. That makes a lot of sense. So if I'm understanding correctly, what you're saying is, yes, there's a little bit of key man risk, obviously, associated with the fact that you are the face of Carta, almost on LinkedIn. But at the same time, it's not like you're posting in isolation in a silo. There's, you know, the newsletter, there's this, these other motions that are happening to capture as many people into that owned audience so that hypothetically, if something, a disaster were to happen and you were to disappear tomorrow, you know, Carta would still have that audience. Matt: Yeah, and also my work drives those audiences. So not just that those exist, but, you know, at the bottom of every graphic, there's a URL that says Carta.com slash data. When you go to that URL, the first thing that pops up under the hero is, would you like to subscribe to our newsletter? So there, you know, most of our newsletter subscribers are driven off of my social content. There's a natural path from, I found this person on social. They're interesting. I follow them to, I really like their stuff. I'd like to receive it more often on a basis, et cetera. Like all the subscribers to our data newsletter automatically get all of our big quarterly reports. Like there's values that you can kind of build into these checkpoints so that your content drives owned audience that then the business can use in whatever way is most useful. Daniel: But even then it's, again, I feel really lucky to be at Carta where we take this very long-term view of what a user potentially is. Like if you're a high school student or a college student and you're reading me on LinkedIn and then you read our blog obsessively, et cetera, but you're not ready to found a company, we don't need to be pitching you on founding a company. We're super excited to help you once you've found it, right? We don't need to be, salespeople don't need to be ringing up these non-in-market buyers and saying buy Carta, buy Carta, buy Carta. No, you're going to come to us when you're ready. And we're going to be super excited when you do. So that's, you know, it's just like, you're either bought into the idea of this aligned emotion or you're not. And so, and there, there should be a whole host of other, this cannot be the only kind of content you produce. There should be a whole host of other content. But if you're excited about insights as emotion, then you got to be willing to deal with the long-term nature of it. Matt: That is very insightful. And I kind of want to switch gears now to talking more specifically about LinkedIn. Obviously, it's like your bread and butter. You've been posting on it for a really long time and you've built one of the biggest followings that I've seen on LinkedIn. Daniel: I think it's at what, 140,000 plus followers at this stage. Curious, Peter, if you were, say, the chief product officer or the CEO of LinkedIn, are there any things that you would change about the platform today? I'm sure there's many things I would change, but I got to give credit where credit is due. Like, you know, eight, 10 years ago, no one was talking about LinkedIn as a social graph the way that it is now. It was like a place to post jobs and say you got a new job, which candidly, you know, where does LinkedIn make money, I think is fundamentally different from most social networks. So X makes money on ads. Instagram makes money on ads. LinkedIn makes money on ads from recruiters to put their jobs in front of the right candidates and vice versa. Like LinkedIn makes money on a giant subscription user base and premium. Like they have done a fantastic job. I think people who poo-poo LinkedIn really underrate the fact they're, you know, Instagram had TikTok and Snap and other competitors. LinkedIn has no competitors. There are no competitors that actually matter in the like professional network graph space. They own it, which is pretty, you know, kudos to them. It's pretty impressive. On the feed side, on the creator side, I have a lot of different ideas that might be useful. Ideas around analytics. Like I think that their analytics could be much, much better. Even basic stuff like the ability to do cohort analysis or one thing they don't tell you, which is, hey, yes, I know I'm gaining followers. How about the ones who are leaving? I'd love to know which posts are driving most people to unfollow me. I don't know that today. I can like kind of work backwards by the way some of the numbers flow in from that. That would be really useful. I would love more ideas about like what matters within posting. Reactions, speed of reactions, getting into the right feeds, et cetera. It's very clear that the content algorithm has done what most algorithms will do over time, which is it's moved from a follower graph to an interest graph. So people complain now about LinkedIn where they say, I got all these followers, but only a tiny percentage of them ever see anything that I post. I get that. That is annoying in some ways. But it's also like, that's what TikTok is. That's where the general flow of technology is moving towards interest graphs and interest feeds and just letting the algo present what they think is going to be the most enticing value content to you. And they're generally right. I bet time on LinkedIn is up even though the LinkedIn creators are slightly more annoyed. So it's tough which product metric are you going to optimize for. Would I love, you know, a guarantee that every person who follows me sees each piece of my content? Sure. That would be awesome. But I don't, I don't expect that. Yeah. One of the things that I wish they would add to the analytics is the dwell time on each post. Matt: On YouTube, for example, YouTube has like by far the most robust analytics, I think of any social platform. I can see on every single individual video the retention graph over time. So I know exactly where in the video people maybe clicked off or skipped ahead. It would be really cool to see on each post how long people were dwelling. And, you know, that way I could also look at, okay, video posts versus image posts, image and only text, how those differ. My hypothesis is that with video, people would obviously spend more time if it is a good video. But I also wonder, Peter, it feels as though LinkedIn has been pushing this narrative of video is the next big thing on this platform. But I'm not sure they've quite figured it out yet. And personally, Daniel and I have both tested out posts with a video attached to text as well as just your standard text only or text and image. And I haven't seen a substantial difference in engagement or impressions among those two posts. But have you tried video posts? And if you have, what have you seen compared to your typical infographic posts? Daniel: Yeah, we've definitely tried video. It for a while there, they had, they just had it out of whack where the video, especially if it was formatted to be feed native on a mobile device, was just going like bonkers with impressions, but they're bad. They were bad impressions. Like they were not people who would ever follow me. They were not people who would ever be really that interested in startups. They were just like kind of random people across the graph. So it wasn't very helpful. I think they've dialed that down a lot and they've kind of like narrowed it in. The problem is that comments and reactions on videos, which I still think are driving a lot of the like next level layer of once you pass your own circle of followers, did you get into the next concentric circle of followers? Harder with video. So I think that they'll probably crack that code fairly soon. I expect video to be a bigger part of our diet and my content diet over the next, you know I think they've, you know, they have realized that more is more and that generally speaking, now it's also the case that there are a lot more people creating than there used to be, right? So when some creators, some content people get annoyed about their impressions going down or whatever, it's like, I don't think there's anything going on there. You're not getting shadow banned. This isn't an algo problem. There's just a lot more content and it's kind of competing for attention. And that's naturally what you would expect in a growing ecosystem where if a meaningful percentage of people now are creators, or more of them are creators than they used to be, it's just going to get harder to stand out on the feed. And that's cool. That means you got to make better content. And that's, you know, so that's fine. Daniel: Like, you know, I'll have days where I'm like, ah, gosh, this, I feel like this kind of post would have done really well six months ago and it didn't do as well this time. That's on me. I got to make better content. Matt: Yeah, I feel like there's definitely been a shift towards focusing on like high value content because, and Peter, you probably noticed this too, the algorithm pushes posts now that maybe three, four weeks ago were posted. And so the shelf life of an average post seems to have increased versus maybe a couple of years ago when it was maybe more similar to a Twitter where a post may only live for a couple of days. And it's curious because yeah, as I think about it, there's more and more people creating and it feels like there's more and more noise, but also I think they're tweaking the algorithm a little bit to now prioritize the higher quality content. Daniel: Yeah, the older stuff sticks around a lot longer. That's why I would love a cohort analysis on impressions, right? If you could say like, what percentage of my impressions come in the first day, the first week, the first month of a post and like see how that relatively changed over time. It would give you a little bit of insight into how the algo is changing. So maybe they don't want that, but yeah, I think that the, and then you get into this idea of good content versus the most watched or the highest impression content. Matt: I have, I mean, I think it's very easy to sit here and say, you know, I'm just getting like the LinkedIn algorithm prioritizes this hypey announcement kind of features. And this is what it means for your business or whatever kind of content. And I don't love that. Daniel: Fine. But like, that's life. Go to any other social network and look at what's being promoted on the for you tab of Twitter. LinkedIn is better than that. Like it, you know, so at least there's some editorial standard, I think, still applied here. And I still think it's a, the advantage that it has is even if you think it's not as good a place to build an audience in terms of the ability to build it quickly as it was four years ago. If you are in B2B software in particular, there is no better place in the world to build an audience. Like this audience is so much more monetizable, easily used in useful ways for your company than any other platform. Maybe Instagram, maybe in certain like CPG or consumer businesses. But like in general, if you're building B2B SaaS, there's no place like LinkedIn in terms of the value of your network. Matt: We couldn't agree more. And I'd even go a step further to say, you know, just the way TikTok started as, you know, young people dancing and quickly expanded the use cases. I think LinkedIn will soon expand their use cases for more than just jobs as well. Daniel: I, I'm curious, as you talk about building an audience, you've tried everything from videos to text to newsletters to LinkedIn events. We haven't touched on some of the events you've done. Matt: How have those gone for you? Those have been interesting experiments. So some of this was like what I feel I'm best at and some of this was kind of driven by content needs. So the LinkedIn lives, so we do a, we do a lot of in-person events at Carta or I'll go and speak at conferences and things like that. So I'm like always kind of around events stuff. But on LinkedIn, LinkedIn Live events have been pretty useful for, you know, we can generate a really solid audience of three to 500 people on those LinkedIn lives pretty consistently. And they don't take much work. You know, you just, oh, we have this slide deck that I've been tinkering on. Let's just go and do it. You know, I'll spin it up on a Friday and we'll, we'll get it going. What I wish they had kept, and I, I'm sad that they don't have it anymore, was their, their clubhouse clone was awesome. I loved the audio LinkedIn Lives. So, like, I used to do probably once every two weeks, I would host one. And again, it's just, here's a link. I'm going to jump on there. And it's basically just like an interactive podcast where I'll have some topics that I want to cover, but then I just allow anyone in the audience to come off mute if they want to. And I can like hit people and say, Hey, you're on stage now. Like, let's have a chat. And those were so much fun. Like so many startup founders and investors would join and we'd have cool, interesting conversations about what the market was and everything. And then they just nerfed it. They killed it six months ago. Now a year ago, because I guess people weren't really using it. The audio one that much. And I'm very sad about it. So I guess back to your question, like one thing I would do is bring back the audio LinkedIn Lives. I thought those were great brand builders. Daniel: Yeah, that's really interesting. So I've only ever attended one LinkedIn live event, and I did find it pretty helpful. It was like a, there was a founder and he was walking through, he basically did a live demo of a LinkedIn prospecting tool. I guess I'll just give it a quick plug. It's called Valley. And it's, it's a very useful tool for a lot of sales reps, BD folks looking to, you know, obviously reach out at scale and it personalizes the messages, things like that. And it was, I personally found it like I, I'd heard about the product, but I'd never seen it in action. And just attending that quick LinkedIn live, you know, instantly in like a 15 to 20 minute presentation, I was already like, Oh, this is, this might actually be very useful for me running the marketing agency that I, I run for founders that are looking to improve their usage of LinkedIn and really incorporate it into their, their go to market strategy. So I, I wish I could have attended one of the audio versions of the LinkedIn Lives as well. I feel like those would have been nice. Matt: They were fun, man. Yeah, they were good. Daniel: But LinkedIn live, I think is a, it's a nice additional sort of content type that you can sort of, you can just kind of layer it into the rest of the content that you're producing. And it's nice to, you know, it's, it's nice to establish a more slightly more personal relationship with these people that have been reading you for a while. It's, you know, one of the things that's kind of odd about having an audience of any real size is that at some point you start either running into these people digitally or getting on Zooms with these people or, or seeing them in person sometimes. And it's just kind of like, here's a parasocial relationship that you've kind of built up. It's, it's an interesting side effect of the modern media landscape where you just, there's people who kind of feel like they sort of know you a little. Matt: 100%. But I think that's also the beauty of it almost because you've probably experienced this as well. A lot of opportunities have come my way because of the fact that I have a large following on YouTube. And recently I've been posting more on LinkedIn. It's almost like networking at scale in a way because you're putting your thoughts out there. You're letting, you're laying it bare. People can see how you think, how you sound, and it obviously builds a ton of trust too. And so I'm sure you've had a lot of people message you, email you, approach you in, at events in person, and just obviously be like, wow, your content's amazing. And so insightful. But also like business opportunities that you probably would never have gotten if you weren't out there on the web. Daniel: 100%. There is so much value. And this is another reason why the insights content does better coming from a person is because eventually when you tip into some, you know, minor level of notoriety, the the like opportunities, the, the surface area of your luck has just expanded very greatly. So people come to you with opportunities that you would never have pitched yourself for or known about, but because they know you and they think you might be a good fit for something. It's just like getting onto a conference speaking circuit, you know, something that we've been doing a lot over the last few years. Once you're on a certain level of conference, all the other conferences look around and they go, Oh, that person is credible because they were at this conference. And so you kind of get the stamp and then you just like get invited to go speak at random places. Some of those are not that helpful. Some of them are super, super useful. And then you intro, you meet people in person and they kind of like, you know, they expand the concentric circles of the people that you know. And that wouldn't have happened if you weren't, you know, of a well-known voice in whatever industry. And well brands that are building their own kind of brands. And then, you know, is it weird to have that attached to my personal brand? Yeah, sometimes, but overall, it's awesome. Daniel: It's, you know, I feel so grateful that Carta's let me build this, this kind of stuff, and it's been really useful for the business as well. So it's been, you know, you just kind of, you navigate it as you go along, but in this modern ecosystem, if you don't want to do that, that's fine. You just, your brand won't get as well known as it should be. That's impactful. I want to dive now into some technical LinkedIn analytics and maybe even conspiracies for the audience. So you had a post that you talked about a while ago that I think is your still most viral post to date. It is around 2 million impressions. Have you had a post ever get more impressions than that? Matt: Yeah, I think my biggest one is actually 15 million. Daniel: 15? Matt: Yeah, that was a while ago. It's a couple of algo changes ago, I bet, at this point. Daniel: I'm speechless. Matt: No, I mean, it was, that's a weird, that's kind of a weird thing when that happens. Because then you're like, your phone is just kind of like buzzing for a long time. You're like, oh, I should just not look at it. But yeah, it was like completely innocuous. That was the, that was one of the first ones that went viral. And it was a, it was where, it was after like month four or five of consistently posting stuff. And I had grown my audience a little bit, but then that one went crazy, and it was like, oh, this is kind of a thing. We should do more of this. And then we, you know, kind of leaned in. But yeah, odd, odd day. Daniel: For your post, do you think that, you know, 5 to 10% of them roughly drive 90% of your impressions or do you have some sort of power law you think that your content follows? Matt: That's a great question. I don't know if it's 90/10, but it's definitely 80/20 for sure. So there is a power law here. Actually, one, one of the things I used to track, I don't do it as much anymore, when I was really thinking about, you know, audience growth was one of the key things that I wanted. I don't, you know, it's not something that I focus on as much these days, but if you're just looking at like raw followers or impressions as sort of proxies for audience size, one of the really useful ways to do it is to lop off the top 10% and lop off the bottom 10% of your content, and then say, like, on average, missing the outliers, are you going up month over month? And even like a little bit of growth, we're talking like 1%, 2% a month is fine at that stage because you're right, a lot of the biggest stuff will be, or a lot of your big days are driven off of one post, and you don't really know when that's going to happen. But are you, can you move your baseline up? I think is a better way to judge your content because it, it takes into account your consistency as well. Daniel: What is that baseline roughly around for you right now? And you don't have to share if you don't want to. Matt: I don't actually know. Well, let's see. Well, no, let's see. Matt: For, well, let's do some, let's do some quick math on the podcast, shall we? So in, hold on, I'm just, I'm pulling up this analytics page real quick. So for 2025, I am at, like, 20, just under 25 million impressions. So what is that per day? I don't know. That's crazy. How many days have we passed? It is day number 265 today. So we're talking like 90,000 a day, but that is, um, that's, you know, if you took out the top 20% of posts, that would be much, much lower than that. I think you just kind of like go back and forth between the algo changes. On a typical day, I'm looking for like 50K impressions. That's, that's like, okay, my content is performing generally speaking what it is. But again, I got to be honest, I don't track impressions nearly as closely anymore as inbound DMs. Inbound DMs are my favorite content metric because that suggests that I touched a nerve. If I, if you cared enough about a piece of content to actually write me, sometimes annoyed or sometimes like, hey, you, you got this wrong, or, but a lot of times like, oh my God, thanks for that. Or do you have this, but for this industry or whatever it is. That's how I know that like, I, that means that probably that content is being shared off of LinkedIn somewhere as well. And that's the kind of thing I wish I could track, but you can't. Daniel: Do you think if you posted that same piece of content on your personal page and Carta's company page, it would get the same reaction from the audience and the same engagement overall? Matt: No, definitely not. The algo favors people. It's not a problem with company. Uh, we, we went through this question a little bit, but like people say, people talk about it as though it's a problem with company pages. It's not. The algo favors people over brands. And also those pages are meant to do something else. So like it is valuable for our Carta company page to grow and have a lot more influence and impressions, but it just isn't going to work the same as a personal account. They're not going to, first of all, you're not going to state it the same way. You're not going to write the same way. You're not going to comment the same way. It's just a different, it's a different, totally non-overlapping thing. So I, I wouldn't think it's a fair comparison. Daniel: Peter, curious if you've played around with LinkedIn ads at all, and if so, like, have you, have you noticed certain types of ads doing better than others? Matt: So we, we definitely use LinkedIn ads at Carta. I haven't used them for my own content specifically. I'm pretty interested in them though, not for like a run of the mill, you know, here's an interesting thing about data that I put out usually, but for boosting some of the bigger posts on like, hey, we have this massive new data set on fun performance, and here's the, like a big report went live today. I think that could be really helpful. Matt: So we haven't experimented too much with thought leadership ads, but I bet we start doing that more like targeted to people because I think that they can be really useful. Daniel: Yeah. I mean, if you guys do start investing more in thought leader ads, would be so curious to see how those go. We actually talked to Jason Alvarez-Cohen, who's the CEO of a company named Poppel. They do like digital business cards, in-person go-to-market essentially is their whole, whole thing. And they've tested a number of different ads. They're spending a good amount on LinkedIn ads and by and far, it sounds like the thought leader ads are doing the best for them. And the way they approach it is they'll take a high performing post and let it run its course organically. And then when they see that it's sort of no longer being pushed out as much by the algorithm, they'll put a little bit of ad spend behind it, but they won't just do that. They'll also actually edit the text of the post a little bit. And this is where, if you want to add a link, now it's okay to add a link because the ad spend is, it's still going to push the post out. It's not going to tank engagement. So I would be very curious if you guys did start testing more thought leader ads, what the result would be, but I would imagine it'd be quite similar. Matt: Yeah. I mean, it's definitely something we should be doing. The other, I mean, you brought up a couple of tactics there that I think are good for people. So one, generally speaking, don't put links in your posts because you're going to kill reach. However, if you have a post that's doing well and you wait a couple hours and then you put a link in, generally, it doesn't decrease the reach at that point. So if you're willing to wait two hours and the post is doing well and you can link out, that totally works or usually works, not always. The other part is if you have a post that's not doing well, but you kind of still like it, after about an hour, go in and change the hook, change the first line to something else. I really wish, talk about content features. I wish that you could A-B test a LinkedIn post where you had two different hooks and it gave you like a 15-minute period where just like, you know, not off-platform where the ChatGPT gives you hooks, but actually on-platform. How will these perform? That would be awesome. Because the hook is so, so much of it is, and, and because all my, lots of my stuff is writing and graphic, like the hook is both the first line of the graphic and the first line of the LinkedIn post because people can see both at the same time. But those are two. Those are things that, you know, as the content has gotten more crowded, I've found I sometimes need to go back and just try a different hook with something or maybe the content just didn't hit that day and I need to repost this two weeks later with a different kind of take, you know, there's all sorts of different stuff. Daniel: What about tagging people? Yeah, Yes, for Henry, but for our exec team as well. Probably going to start seeing some more of that from us soon. But like, candidly at a company of our scale, the data is like only one aspect of what we do. And so, like, it does really well on content side, but Henry's got a thousand things to talk about in terms of the vision of the company, all the products that we're building, like the way that we're transforming Carta from just for venture capital and startups to private equity, private credit, etc. So there's a whole host of a ton of interesting things for him to talk about. And it's generally just not a high-value use of his time to be digging into like safe valuations and things. So not to say that we're not going to do any of that, but he doesn't need a ghostwriter. He's got a lot of thoughts of his own. I mean, at the end of the day, LinkedIn post is not what drives sales. It's a good product. Matt: Yeah, exactly. I mean, it helps, but if you have a bad product that's not working, it doesn't matter. It's not going to, you know, it's not going to be the end-all be-all. So the focus on the product and like where we're headed as a, as an industry and as a, as like a capital allocator is, is much more his, his vibe. But of course, Carta is a, Carta's a pretty late stage private company, right? So this is a totally different vibe than if I were at a seed stage company or a Series A. Peter, just on the topic of, of ghostwriters as well. Have you ever considered working with ghostwriters or what are your overall thoughts on just the idea of, say, a busy executive that wants to build an audience? They know they should be doing it, but they just don't have time. They have a ton of ideas, though. Like, what are your thoughts on hiring someone to help you with that? Daniel: I don't think I would ever do it, but if I'm a, if I'm a founder or CEO that like wants to build a content brand, I think that there are good content strategists slash ghostwriters out there. I think there are a lot of bad ones. So it really is highly dependent on like finding something that meets your vision and so much of the value of what, say, a founder or a company exec can post comes from personal experience. So, you know, I think there's this idea that ghostwriting is like, okay, I just hire this person and they go off and they build me a brand. You need to spend a ton of time with that person downloading your thoughts on what's going on in the, it's, it's, it's not some light lift, you know, because all of your best stuff is going to come from your personal experience and your perspective. So you can't, you can't outsource the thinking. You can outsource some of the writing. So, you know, it's tricky. I think it, I think it makes sense for some people, but I also think that if you want to build a founder brand or an executive brand, invest in it with a portion of your time and that's, you know, it's usually worth it. Daniel: Your writing is almost certainly going to be better than a ghostwriter's writing, even if the ghostwriter's good. There's a question of time. Yeah, we do. When we were talking with Jason at Popple, he also mentioned he had worked with a, a ghostwriting firm and they produced good content. But the main thing for him and why he stopped working with them was actually the fact that the amount of time it took to get them up to speed on everything that was happening at the company. Matt: And as you know, at startups, things are moving so quick. It just took more time than it would have taken him to just write the post himself. So I do think there is a certain profile of executive or founder that can definitely get a lot of value from ghostwriting, but it's not for everyone and it's very dependent on the personal situation and also who the ghostwriter is. Daniel: Exactly. Yeah. It's a, it is not a light lift, no matter how you do it, right? But especially because it compounds over time, you don't just get to do it once. You have to, you have to consistently download to this person. So it's, it's a, it's a lift for sure. Matt: Yeah. Also, just on that topic, I don't know if you've been seeing some of these posts about how PayPal, for example, had a head of CEO content role that they posted recently. And there's a little bit of buzz around this because they're paying this person $200,000 to manage the CEO of PayPal, Alex Chris, his content. What are your thoughts on in the future, as we see, and we're continuing to see more actually, roles pop up at tech companies where an executive wants to bring on someone whose sole job seems to be managing content for that one individual. Daniel: Not surprised by it. You know, I think if you abstract away some of what the value is on this, it's just like, it's candidly distribution and in a world where more and more of the value is going to be driven by personal brand and personal thoughts, like makes a ton of sense that that kind of thing would be hired for. We've, we've invested tons of money in paid and SEO and all these different content channels. So I think that's just a maturing content channel is, is social content and then like thought leadership. We'll be interested to see which companies do really well at this and which don't. Matt: It would be, I think it's much easier. You know, we have this debate a lot about insights. Is it easier to hire someone who has never built a chart or graph before, but is super well-versed in startups? Or should we hire someone who's really great at like data analysis, but doesn't really care about startups at all? Daniel: And to me, like I'd always rather hire the first person. I need you to love startups. So like for these, I hope that whoever joins as the PayPal in that position at PayPal, absolutely loves what PayPal does, loves FinTech, loves embedded payments, loves everything about it because that's where the gold is going to come from. Matt: It's not like you got to just be incredibly curious about this stuff or else the content's not really going to sing that well. Daniel: Couldn't agree more. Peter, we have a fun segment at the end called good idea, bad idea. But before we do it, hold on. Puppy just went crazy. All good. Do you have anything else you want to add that we didn't cover either about LinkedIn or anything else you want to share? Matt: No, I think that about covers it. I don't really have any good conspiracies for y'all. It's mostly, it's mostly straightforward. And I think people are really, I don't know about what you think on your side, but like, I think people have kind of gotten it, you know, whatever happened over the last two or three years, like people kind of get it now as a, this, this is something that we should be at least thinking about, if not deeply investing into. And so in that case, it just, you know, what it does is it means that every individual content creator will need to be better, which is good. You know, you just gotta like, there's no such thing as an audience that you just earned and then continued to talk to, like, you have to continually re-earn it, which I think is fine. You're not guaranteed any sort of impressions or audience. Daniel: You're preaching to the choir here. Idea number one, idea number one is the Carta companies. And the thought here is that everybody loves an award. So what if you just created an award out of thin air for private market companies that are the top 30 of any metric you want? Is that a good idea or a bad idea? Matt: It's a great idea, except for it tramples on customer privacy, so we'll never do it. Daniel: Okay. Good to know. That was another thing that we were talking about with Mitchell. Have you ever used Kondo, the DM for LinkedIn? Matt: No. You honestly might like it if you have a lot of LinkedIn DMs, and Mitchell, was on the previous podcast. It's essentially superhuman. Have you ever used Superhuman before? Daniel: Yeah, totally. Matt: It's superhuman for your LinkedIn inbox, so it's pretty easy and it's much easier to accept connection requests, invites too through it. You'll have to check it out and we can send you it and also put you in touch with Mitchell, if you want. It's trihondo.com. Anyways, okay. So idea number two is predictive cap table simulations. So when I was applying to college, my high school had a chart of who got into, you know, the school, say Brown University with the ACT and GPA. It was totally anonymized. So I was thinking that you could make this, but with fundraising scenarios. So if you raise a $20 million Series A, have $5 million in revenue, aren't profitable, it tells you what the likelihood is of being a unicorn or something else like that on the chart. Daniel: Yeah. Good idea. It's an interesting idea. Privacy? Privacy wouldn't be the issue here because you could aggregate it and anonymize it. Matt: The issue would be like the input stats, you know, what are, what are VCs actually judging your valuation on? A lot of that data we don't actually have. So I can't tell you what the ARR of companies on Carta are, generally speaking. In some cases, yes, but that's on a narrow basis. So a lot of the actual inputs and like the earlier you are, I would be worried about misleading founders and saying, Hey, if you have this much revenue, like this is the kind of valuation you're going to get. Cause we all know something similar to what we've started doing. Daniel: We've started doing something kind of similar to this on the fund side. So usually if you're a VC fund, you have what's called an annual general meeting, an AGM, where you just bring all your LPs together and you tell them how the year went. And obviously Carta data gets used a lot in those AGMs. So we've kind of built a little deck creator thing that we're testing out where funds can come on and ask for specific data in that deck format. And we just kind of give them slides. But kind of a similar thing. It would be really cool to have that on the founder cap table side and see if people would, you know, use benchmarks from Carta or whatever branded templates. That's an interesting idea. I've got to take that back to the content team. Matt: Well, thank you, Peter, so much for coming on the show. We really appreciate it and hope the audience could, you know, learn from a lot of the actionable insights you gave us to grow on LinkedIn and learn a lot about doing it. Daniel: Yeah, cheers, guys. Appreciate you having me on. Matt: Thanks, Peter. Appreciate the time.