How to get 30k followers without posting anything authentic

Transcription

Daniel: How did you get the top voice badge on LinkedIn? We had more inbound demand in that next 24 hours than we had in the first three months that I'd been at the company. I show up in the LinkedIn newsfeed more than almost anyone, provide higher value content. I don't get to architect when that happens. Google and Wiz get to architect when that happens. Amazon eventually buying Anthropic. What matters more than audience size or having a special badge or anything else is just like ink. At every job I've gotten is because of LinkedIn. Matt: Welcome to Connection Accepted. Today, I'm super excited. We've got Jason Saltzman, head of insights at CB Insights on the pod. Jason, thanks for coming on. Jason: Yeah. Thanks for having me, Matt, Daniel. I'm excited to be here and excited to see what you guys are building across LinkedIn as a platform. Matt: Awesome. So Jason, first things first for the audience, for people who don't know you, who are you? Where are you from? And what are you working on? Jason: Yeah. So I'm Jason, seems redundant at this point, but I'm the head of insights at CB Insights, which still remains a ridiculous job title to me. My first day was just sending, look at me, I am the captain now meme to the founder, given the title is in the company name. And I joined in March coming from a background running marketing and insights at another data company. Prior to that, I was at a, I guess, content agency, content studio, building content functions for early stage startups, ton of LinkedIn work and founder led work there as well. And then in a previous life, I was a professional cyclist at this point. I sort of just say that I was a formerly gifted child who still rides his bike too much. Based in based in Palo Alto, grew up in the Bay area as well, went to school down in SoCal and now back in the Bay area too. I don't know. I would, I would say it's work, but CB Insights is based in New York. So I make it as much work as possible. And then, you know, there's something in the water here about being at the start of the startup ecosystem. Matt: I think you left out one really important thing, which is that you're also a LinkedIn top voice and you've got almost 30,000 followers on LinkedIn. Such a humble guy. But I want to, I want to talk about that for a second, Jason. When did you start posting on LinkedIn and were you doing it mostly for your job or did that kind of evolve and eventually, you know, you start out personally posting, but then like it changed into like a job thing as well. Talk a little bit about that. Jason: So started, I mean, I think like a lot of us, right. Started really leveraging LinkedIn as a platform when I was first looking for a job coming out of retiring from professional cycling, you know, was trying to figure out, write my resume at that point said bike racer. Daniel: I'd gone and gotten an econ and psychology degree and was trying to figure out who I was going to be, what I was going to do, uh, and who could help me figure out that journey, uh, a little bit and spent a ton of time DMing people, connecting on LinkedIn, trying to have coffee chats, uh, understand, given what I was interested in where the best opportunities were, got connected with the founder of verbatim, which is the content studio content agency that I ended up working for, who at that point had, he's actually, he'd be a great guest for this podcast. He built a lot of that business off of LinkedIn as well. Happy to connect to you guys, but Adrian was basically the guy who was connected to everyone I wanted to talk to, to go and figure out what I wanted to do with my life. And so DM him asking, Hey, would you be happy to, or willing to jump on a call? Chatted with him for a little bit. And basically by the time we walked out of that call, you know, I was doing a little bit of, was going to do a little bit of freelance writing for him as I was figuring out what it was that I was going to go do, you know, long-term. And somewhere in the next week was sort of looking at his LinkedIn presence, looking at the company's social presence and their website and realized that this was a content marketing agency doing none of their own marketing. DM'd him. I was like, Hey, what's up with that? And he said, Well, you're right. Want to come do it for us. And so sort of scrapped a ton of the interview processes. I was in the middle of and joined verbatim to lead growth there, both for the agency and then for all of our clients. And a ton of that growth happened through LinkedIn, right? A lot of it was originally through ghostwriting for Adrian, writing content for the company page and then helping our clients at the agency understand sort of tips, tricks, content, and ways to turn a lot of the longer form content we were building for them or writing for them into social optimized content and stuff that would really sing on LinkedIn. So that was sort of the start of it. Built that out for the firm over eight or nine months and then got a random LinkedIn message one day from the CEO and founder of live data. At the time I was in Santa Barbara, live data is based in Santa Barbara. And Scott messaged me saying, Hey, we raised, raised our series a or about to close our series a and looking to bring on a marketing leadership. I thought, Oh, this is awesome. I'm going to go. I'm going to pitch him on working with verbatim. I'm going to get a nice little commission check. And very quickly became clear that, you know, no, they were looking to hire this as an internal role. And became, it was an interesting space to me working on job change and employment data. It's something that is near and dear to LinkedIn's heart, but you know, it's not something that's really easily surfaced through the LinkedIn platform. Daniel: So joined live data as the founding marketer, thought I was going to come in, run the playbook. I'd sort of learned to love at verbatim, a lot of it based on case studies, a lot of it based on customer testimonials, social proof, and the ability to have all of that fuel things like email campaigns or things like paid creative. And then sort of realized that the stage that live data was at as a company, you know, none of our early customers really wanted to talk about us publicly. And the opportunity, you know, that sort of closed the door on that opportunity to go and really run an early case study and social proof program. And so I sat super frustrated one day, hadn't been posting much on LinkedIn myself, but knew that there was some value to be had there. This was early 2023 and wanted to come up with a creative way to leverage the platform, to go out and sort of generate some buzz fairly organically for what live data was, what you could do with our data, et cetera. And was sat one day super frustrated that none of the case study stuff, none of the playbook I'd learned to love was going to really work, was staring at the one page in our app that we had. That was this constant stream of job changes as we detected them and stare at it for long enough that I started to do a little bit of pattern recognition, seeing that chewy, uh, you know, there were a lot of people joining chewy and I don't have pets. Didn't quite realize at the time just how big chewy is, but I was a little bit curious that, okay, why is an online pet store hiring so many people? Why are they hiring so many engineers? And why do 70% of those engineers come from Amazon? And little light bulb moment stumbled into I'm like, Oh, if you're going to go and build an e-commerce company, where do you go hire from? Right. The biggest, baddest e-commerce company that there is. Thought that was pretty interesting. Made a little flow chart, threw that up on LinkedIn a little bit as a hail Mary. And in the next 24 hours, we, you know, that post went mini viral, got, you know, I think something on like 60,000, 70,000 likes or impressions. Sorry, impressions, not likes. That'd be a lot for all of us who know our LinkedIn metrics. And we had more inbound demand in that next 24 hours than we'd had in the first three months that I'd been at the company on what else can you know, Hey, can you look at this? How many people from Google are joining Apple? How many people from big banks are joining consulting firms? Right. You know, all of these different questions. I'm like, okay, people are interested. This is the thing. What else can I go and find in this data and recreate this virality on a more consistent basis? And so that, you know, one post, one moment, now that I've rambled for six minutes is the genesis of, you know, really like where I started on LinkedIn and what it's become for me over the last three years. Matt: Amazing. Daniel: Can we talk a little bit about your current role now at CB Insights and also even before we get to that, like what does CB Insights even do for people that are in the uninitiated or have never heard of this company before? Matt: Yep, absolutely. So CB Insights does predictive intelligence on private companies. Basically, we sit on top of data, trillions of data points on 10 million plus companies and can start to look at the companies and technologies defining the future using everything from proprietary data science that looks at company success probability, Determine where that's most applicable and how we now build, especially as we move into predictive intelligence into specific workflows, where we want to focus that. But there's a ton of different use cases and opportunities for how you source and evaluate companies and markets. Daniel: So from my understanding, Jason, and correct me if I'm wrong, but CB Insights essentially is a better Google and ChatGPT on a certain company that can find more information better than those two search engines. And it adds a layer of this predictive intelligence, which says, okay, you're looking at this company. We think that based on historical trends, it's going to reach a billion dollar valuation in the next 18 months. Matt: Yep. I mean, generally defined, right, we are a specific model trained on startup data and private company data. And then a set of tools and tools, agents, workflows layered on top. Daniel: Got it. I think that's just super helpful for the audience too, who might not be as familiar with some of these tools as, as you, me or Matt. Matt: Yep, absolutely. And I mean, I do think it also sets the stage for now what my LinkedIn presence is in the way that I leverage, admittedly leverage our platform out in the world to get to insights that become LinkedIn posts that drive engagement for us at everything from awareness to commercial opportunities to media opportunities and all of the ways that that starts to tie together. Daniel: Let's get into that. Matt: So, yeah, so I mean, a lot of the strategy becomes what are the most interesting stories that I can tell with data about the startup ecosystem and the private company private companies and private markets, right? It's a super broad remit. It's probably broader than would be optimal to target one specific audience on LinkedIn, right? You know, you look at other people you've had on the platform or on the podcast, right? You know, pick on Peter Walker since he and I, he can text me and tell me he didn't like it after with, you know, Carta's data and his role as head of insights at Carta allows him to really specifically target the startup founders, the employees at startups, and then a lot of the investors that Carta wants as customers, right? You know, he gets to specifically have the lens into that data and really target that data at, you know, those specific audiences. Daniel: For us, right, you know, I get to target a very broad audience of corporate strategy or professional services who each person within that may care about slightly different things. And so the content strategy or the insights strategy on my side is really around A, what's just broadly interesting and appealing. What's a little bit provocative or evocative. What are things that no one else has really looked at that either spark new conversations in terms of trends and analyses or add a data-backed layer to conversations already happening out in the world, right? There's like a little bit of news jacking or post jacking that can happen. We can talk about that was one of the big strategies that really worked at live data was there's, there was a human element or a human capital and job change element to almost every news headline, right? You say, okay, some company, you know, projects X amount or X percent of revenue growth next quarter or for the next fiscal year. Well, can I go and look and see that they're staffing up on salespeople or in the CB Insights version of that, you see that, you know, some right, Grammarly earlier this year was a great example of this, right? Grammarly raised a pipe round and then, you know, basically earmarked it for, okay, we're going to go and use this new investment to make acquisitions, right? Who are based on CB Insights data, the best potential acquisition targets for Grammarly, right? So, you know, there's this news jacking element to it, but a lot of, I wish I had a better answer or a cleaner answer other than go and find interesting stories in the data and, you know, see what sticks. Matt: So, Jason, it sounds like the approach that you take is very much top of funnel in terms of you're typically trying to drive a lot of brand awareness to CB Insights and your job is not necessarily, okay, I've got to convert people through my content and actually get customers. Like I'm sure there's other teams at CB Insights that are more focused on that and your job similar to, you know, what Peter does and also even someone like Ara Karazian from Ramp, who's like their economist and posts similar content using their data is really to just find interesting and relevant angles that your company's specific data set can provide a differentiated or unique view into and then create awesome content around it so that, you know, people get excited, they re-share, engage, and then ultimately it benefits CB Insights as a whole, even if it's not necessarily that measurable in terms of like business ROI, if that makes sense. But I think you, I think you articulated it well that you want to find something interesting, maybe even a little bit controversial or contentious, and also find a way to where that intersects with the data and the knowledge that you guys have at CB Insights. Daniel: Yep, absolutely. Matt: And I mean, there are ways in which it ties more closely to commercial opportunities for us, right? There's a very easy way to just say that by being out in the world and being very present on LinkedIn and being someone that people want to talk to through my audience size or growth or thought leadership or whatever other cliche I can throw at this, you know, it, it affords you a certain currency to go out and do social selling or to have conversations with people out in the world, right? You know, you see executives from Fortune 500 companies engaging with posts, you know, that becomes a very easy way for me to go and start that conversation. I'm like, Hey, you saw you liked this post, saw you commented on this post. Thank you for the engagement. Interested in your take. And then, you know, that sort of move specific targeted conversations into at least a little bit more of a commercial track. Daniel: Have you had people DM you asking about like the product itself? Or is it usually just, Hey, like saw your post or you're reaching out to them and saying, Hey, I saw that you liked my, my recent posts. Matt: It's a combination of all of it. I mean, there are plenty of people who have specific data requests or want to get a demo or want to use the platform. I mean, right. I think one of the interesting splits in my mind is when you think about right, because you brought, I've brought up Peter, you brought up Ara at Ramp. The two of them work at what I'm going to call product companies that have a ton of exhaust data, right? So the, and there's a difference between that and the two companies that I've now run insights functions at, which are data companies that use data to go out and tell stories and show the power of that data, right? Largely Peter and Ara aren't trying to sell you data, right? Data is not the core product. The cap table management or the corporate spend management is the core product. There's a lot of exhaust data that comes from that. And so there's a little bit of a gap between what they're trying to sell you and what they're showing you on my side. There's a little, you know, it's more tightly linked. What I'm trying to show you or what I am showing you is really what I want you to understand that we are capable of, that you are capable of with our data. And I need, you know, the goal is to have you make the association between, okay, if I can know this thing that, I mean, I'll take the post I put up today as an example of if I can look at the new business relationships data between Klarna and Affirm and how the share of those new business relationships is changing over time. Well, if I can look at that for Klarna and Affirm, maybe I care about those two companies specifically, but what if I care about Ramp and Brex or what if I care about, you know, any other set of companies, right? The big pharma companies or whatever it might be. Right. Like it becomes this teaser of what's possible with the data and the platform itself. Matt: You in a way have a different take of insights than Ara and Peter. Yours is more, it's much more salesy and direct in a way, but it's because the product is so cool, it doesn't come across as much of an ad, right? It's one of the things that I struggle, sounds like a harsh word, but you know, like have to balance most tactfully in this whole process is, no, it can't really come off as an ad, right? Like I want to be there so that I'm not trying to shove new features down LinkedIn's throat in a sense, right? Really, what I'm trying to do is like, Hey, you, like if you care about having predictive intelligence on startups, on private markets, it's available to you. I'm going to show you the best ways that I get at it. The most interesting things that I find for it, understanding that maybe, maybe I hit the nail on the head. And this was exactly what you wanted. It was the only thing you were ever going to want to do business with us for was just this like one piece of information or this one graphic. That I happened to put out in front of you. And honestly, if I do that great, happy to have provided that intelligence, happy to have made the world a smarter or more interesting place. But the general idea is that it won't always be one for one. It will, right. What I put out is probably is going to be a snapshot of a competitive dynamic or a changing market or an evolving trend that people are then going to want to track over time. Right. And access to that data over time and access to the changes in that data and the signals that come from for two and a half years. And it was a consistency, it was a continued value add to the platform. If you go and ask someone on the LinkedIn creator partnership team, right, what it takes to be a top voice, they'll send you to this webpage that I'm sure I can go find somewhere of like, hey, these are the requirements, this is how you do it. They're a little bit ambiguous and a little bit opaque. I think I just like showed up, did the work, and put out good content, some of which went more viral, some of which died on the platform. But, you know, it was a little bit never looking for some cheat code or hack, right? I mean, I think there are plenty of hacks where if I wanted to go and post selfies or say, this is what watching a squirrel get run over on the road taught me about B2B sales, right? I probably could have gone and grown an audience much faster, but the reality was like, that was never why I started posting. It's never why I've continued posting, is like strictly for audience growth metrics or some almost like meme style virality. It was like really to deliver this intelligence and these insights out into the world onto the platform, onto where people need this information or are looking for business intelligence and information. So it's just a lot of just banging my head against the wall. And then eventually it worked. Matt: Did it just pop up one day on your profile when you logged in, or did somebody actually reach out and be like, hey, like we're selecting you as a LinkedIn top voice. Congrats. Daniel: So, I mean, I guess there were two distinct moments in this. One was I had someone suggest probably a year ish or a year and a half ish into what I'll call like the consistent posting of insights that I reach out to the woman who runs one of the creator programs for finance and economy at LinkedIn and got to be a part of that program and learn a lot about, you know, sort of how they prioritize content, what works there, some of which I took, some of which was never just going to be my flavor or style of content. And then earlier this year, having been a part of that group for 12 months or so, you know, I had been putting out content, had more of a direct relationship to the LinkedIn team and it sort of just like proven out that it probably made sense to get one of these badges and actually went and asked for it. I was like, look, you know, like I show up in LinkedIn news, the LinkedIn newsfeed more than almost anyone. I provide higher value content to both the platform and then sort of external partners, news sources, other creators, right? I'm just doing the work and I can show you the stats that validate sort of how well it's working, although I'm sure they have better stats than I do should they want to go and look. But, you know, when you can bring metrics on value and metrics on engagement and types of content and all the rest, it became a fairly easy ask after, right? It was like that, that instant over or, you know, that long and drawn out overnight success story in a sense. Matt: Did you see a big spike in impressions after you got the badge or a big spike in... Daniel: No, it went, they went down. It was actually something like it completely perplexed me for the two months after I got the badge earlier this year, impressions went down, reach went down. I was like, what's going on here? I thought this was the cheat code. And it turns out it, I mean, like it helps in some places. You get access to some things, but it still didn't fix whatever algorithm want and will we're all subject to, right? Like whatever it was for those six weeks, two months, whatever it was, algorithm and I did not get along. Matt: I think that also shows us like that the, you know, regardless of your last name or the badge, that doesn't impact the quality of the content. And that should hopefully inspire some people like, like Matt and I that don't have the badge that we can still go viral and hopefully get to some of your level of growth with without the badge. Daniel: Well, and I think actually one of the things I've seen a lot anecdotally or heard a lot anecdotally in the last month or two, is that what matters more than audience size or like, you know, number of followers or having a special badge or anything else is just like engagement density on any given post. Daniel: More people that actually want to click the see more button, more people that like it, more people that save it, more people that comment on it, repost it, DM it to a friend, whatever it is, right. That over, like that, the ratio of those actions over your actual audience size or the number of people that LinkedIn and the algorithm have shown any given post to are then what drives the flywheel of like, okay, I've shown this to a hundred people and some percentage of them that's a standard deviation higher than the out than normal has engaged with it. I'm going to show it to another hundred people. I'm going to like this flywheel that keeps building. And so it actually seems to be almost entirely post dependent at this point and not, you know, there's very little what I'll call like legacy sway or buildup of prestige at this point. And maybe others are having a different experience, but I'll have posted. I mean, I'm not gonna, I was about to use expletives, but that tank and admittedly, you know, like I think they're, you know, of the same or similar quality as any other post, but whatever it is that day, whoever the first hundred people that LinkedIn showed that post to or whatever the algorithm is really doing in the backend, they didn't quite like it and the post went like this and just petered out and died. But the beauty of the platform is you show up and you do it again the next day and you win some, you lose some and getting caught up in the single post metrics or single post whatever, right? Is, is never quite going to be the right approach. Matt: Have you changed your strategy at all after coming to this conclusion? Daniel: I mean, I've learned some more things about what people tend to like and engage with. But in terms of the strategy of what do I post? No, I'm pretty like standard on it, right? Almost every single one of my posts is a graphic that is an insights-based graphic, copy that is associated with that graphic. Sometimes it has a link associated to it or in it. Sometimes it has one of the cheesy comment for free access to the intelligence behind this. Sometimes it has tags for other companies, but really like the two core components are graphic, hard hitting insight, copy to associate with that insight and add more that, you know, like at least tries to get people to like, if they're curious, they've seen the graphic, maybe they just look at the graphic, but if they hit see more, they actually get something out of it, right? It's value add. And like those two components have stayed the same for the last three years. And again, like I could probably go hack my way to figuring out how to change that or optimize it. But it's sort of not the goal for me, right? Like I'd rather continually provide good intelligence and good insights to the world and to the platform and not risk the same as shitification that you see a ton of people end up with. Daniel: Can we dive into that a little bit? What do you, what do you mean when you say that the, I think the and shitification of the platform that you're seeing? Matt: Yeah. Like what do you, what do you mean? It's the same thing that happens across any social media platform, right? Like all content. Someone figures out something that works is generally like, I'm going to like, we'll go to like neuroscience on this, but like it's generally because it's like some weird quick dopaminergic hit. And people figure out how to replicate it. They do like almost a worse and worse job replicating it for however long the trend lasts, right? You know, I mentioned the, what seeing a squirrel get run over taught me about B2B sales, right? Like it's stuff like that, that is funny. I love, I love a meme. I'll laugh at it. But like, it's not in my mind, really what the platform, you know, especially on LinkedIn is for, right? Like, you know, maybe I have this idealistic view of what LinkedIn is, but like, I don't need all of my platforms to converge into memes, right? Like, you know, there's, there's some true value to having a place that remains like, Hey, this is where good content lives. Right. And like by good content, I really mean content that's either engaging, evocative, provocative adds to the intelligence of the internet as opposed to sort of like smooth over the intelligence of the internet. And there's a lot of content on LinkedIn that becomes more and more like selfie and meme sharing or replica. Like there's a replication crisis of the same two or three types of posts for however long the trend lasts, right? Like that's not the point, figures at anyone. It's really just to recognize that like, I like, it's almost like me recognizing where I could have gone with all of this had I wanted to just focus on a number of followers or subscribers as opposed to focusing on like staying a little bit truer to why I started doing it both from like my personal interest and what it unlocks for the companies I've represented. Right. Like, you know. Daniel: A hundred percent. Yeah. Matt: Yeah, no, I, I think you said it well and I think you hit on a really important point, Jason, which is like the reason why you're actually building that audience, because if A business or if you're, you know, trying to appeal to a very specific type of of ICP ideal customer persona. And so what I like about what you've done, Jason, is you've been really intentional about focusing on one what you're personally, of course, interested in, which is like the data, but two, like posting content that is also very relevant and appealing to the type of buyer that at CB insights now, and I'm sure you're doing the same when you're at Verbatim and live data. The type of content that appeals to that kind of a customer, not just like mass broad appeal. Matt: And so I feel like there's some nuance to it because we did talk about earlier in the conversation that, you know, you're trying to be more top of funnel, but at the same time, you're not, you're not just being like anything top of funnel. You're not just trying to go viral for the sake of going viral. There's a there's an intention behind it. No. Daniel: And I actually think being so data and insights centric, like helps stay true to like, again, I'll use your word, right? Like top of funnel is not all top of funnel is created equal, uh, in a sense, you know, you can have, I can have a hundred thousand people all want a free trial. If 99, 100 or 99,000 and 990 of them are random people in that are all store clerks and medical doctors and UPS workers, as I watched the guy deliver mail outside, right? Like none of those are our ICP and none of those are the people that will eventually do business with us. I'm happy to provide interesting content for them, but it's not ultimately who I'm creating content for. 100%. Matt: I want to switch gears again. You've been posting on LinkedIn for a long time. If you're the CEO of LinkedIn, is there anything that you'd change about the platform? Without having to give the answer of I'd promote my content way better, which might ruin my, you want a good top of funnel. Daniel: I think there's a lot that can be done with different media types and the ability to have different types of posts. I mean, one of the most interesting things, one of the things is like a data and visualization nerd that I feel isn't massive opportunity is the ability to embed interactive graphics into posts, right? Like I understand LinkedIn's idea and strategy around keeping content, keeping people on platform, but if I want to create something that has true interactive components to it, that's not just a graphic or a video, right? My only option right now is to push people to an out of platform experience, right? That's hosted on our site that then we know generally that LinkedIn as a platform penalizes outside links. And so I think there's this like gap in where the Venn diagram could overlap in terms of content and like artifact types. And I think you'd get a lot of interesting content. You'd get a lot of interesting engagement. You'd allow for better content ranking through things like dwell time and different types of engagement metrics. Of like, okay, you know, this is a, this person clicked on this interactive chart seven times. I'm going to prioritize that over something that got clicked on twice or whatever it might be. So I think there's a massive opportunity there. I'm sure there are a ton of technical complexities that I do not envy whatever product manager that is going to have to go and try to implement it now that I've spoken and my word is gospel, but the, that would be one. And then I also think just like allowing for slightly better choice of personalization of feed dynamics or content types. Matt: Like if I want to be on LinkedIn just to get memes, I should have a little meme button. If I want on to be on LinkedIn to get insights, there should be some version of an insights button. If I only want job postings and job change announcements, there should be a button for that. Right? And I think allowing people a little bit more to choose their own adventure on the platform in terms of what shows up in their feed and what gets prioritized would be another one. Right? Selfishly, I, I like that idea because in theory, anyone who would choose insights would get more of my own content or more of Peter's content or more of ours content. But I think also thing it would like help people do what they're trying to use the platform for. Daniel: Those are my two takes. I, those, those are some, some interesting takes. I, well, one thing you mentioned was links, putting them in posts. And now I kind of want to get into some LinkedIn conspiracies or not. What are your thoughts and strategy right now around links? Are you avoiding them in posts? Are you putting in your first comment or how do you approach links in posts? Matt: I've tried it all. I've never found anything consistent in terms of patterns between what works versus what doesn't. There's, I mean, again, if I was trying to go and algo hack my way through all of this, I'd probably spend more time late at night trying to look at what everyone was doing and who was getting the most engagement and whether they put the link in the bottom of their graphic and had no blue text in the post or whether they put the link in the post or whether they put seven links in the post or right. Like there, there are all of these conspiracy theories and a little bit like you get lost in the noise. And I'd rather, and like my answer, that's not going to be super helpful for this podcast is like, I'd rather focus on just doing a good job, putting good insights out than hacking around trying to figure out what the right number of links or hashtags to put in a post are. Matt: Daniel and I, we, we agree with you. We actually had a conversation recently about going viral and I feel like anyone who has gone viral on social media before will understand this, which is that a lot of times there's only a few things that you should be focusing on, which is, you know, providing valuable or entertaining content, packaging in a way that like actually is optimized for the platform. And then, you know, being consistent so that you can actually take advantage of the power law of content, which is like, you know, one out of every 80 or whatever, however many posts is going to be the one that goes viral. And so like the best content creators and the ones who've gone viral understand that, so they don't overthink it, but if you haven't, then you're more inclined to be like trying to min max everything and like optimize every little lever to find the perfect formula of what will make something go viral. Matt: When in reality, no one really knows what perfect combination of parameters is going to make something necessarily go viral. And I think that's what you're getting at. I'm trying, I'm trying, I'm trying to look at, I pulled this data for something internal, uh, the other day, what percentage of total impressions over the last year do you think came from my top 10 posts? And I'll tell you that I've done 366 posts in the last year. Daniel: What percentage of impressions? Uh, one second. Is the total? 12, 12 million. Matt: I feel like 10% or maybe less than that. Maybe it's like. Daniel: Like 10 posts? Yeah, top, top 10. I think they did 60% because I think each of them have at least 500,000 impressions. Matt: 30%. Daniel: Oh. Matt: But it's just one of those, sorry, I, I don't know, there wasn't a right way to play this pop quiz game. The really, I think, to Matt's point on power laws, like, that's 30%, right? If I could figure out how to replicate that every time, then all of a sudden I'd have, now I can't do that mental math, but, you know, it'd be 30, 30 million impressions over the course of a year. And that'd be great, but I don't know who, like, I can go and look at those posts, but a lot of what drove that massive impressions was like, I hit, I like, I just hit the right thing on the right day, right? The top post, uh, from that was around Google's acquisition of Wiz, right? I don't get to architect when that happens. Google, Google and Wiz get to architect when that happens or, you know, Amazon eventually buying Anthropic or whatever other wild thing is going to happen. But the fact that I can then throw data and a super engaging graphic on top of it, and that gets to sort of like feed this flywheel and buzz. I mean, you just have to keep showing up and like be prepared enough to get lucky. Daniel: So when you're writing LinkedIn posts every day, are you pretty much just waking up and seeing, okay, what am I, what am I going to post about today? Or do you tend to schedule more stuff out? Matt: It's probably 50-50. I mean, really, I am basically every day I wake up open to the idea that there's going to be something that happens in the world that's worth scrapping whatever I had scheduled for. And, you know, that's sort of just the nature of the type of content I put out and a lot of the opportunity that comes from sitting on data on so many comparisons and so many head-to-heads and so many markets and so many trends is when something changes, you then have the ability to go and jump into that conversation with something intelligent to say, with something to add. Again, like the same underlying principles of what drives all of the content. It just happens that, like, okay, that's the conversation for the day. Capitalizing on it is the right thing to do. Daniel: What's your day like as a head of insights? Like, are you spending the first three hours writing posts? You know, of course, things happen like a big acquisition or, you know, meetings, of our platform. Matt: The, right, I know where to go look, I know how I want to turn it into a graphic generally, and I can do all of that process faster than anyone else can. And beyond that, right, there's a ton of it where whatever I had slated, and I can't remember what it was, but like I had something that was slated for Tuesday when that announcement went out of Brex's or of Rand's funding round. I was like, okay, cool, that moves to at some point later in the week. And that, you know, like you can sort of reschedule or restructure things a little bit. So that's, I mean, all of that work, right, generating insights, generating content, generating things that will live both out on LinkedIn, will live as research on CB Insights platform, will fuel direct client or customer work and engagement, lever up to things that go into speaking engagements or presentations or whatever else I do with my time. Right, it's probably about half the time. And then the other half of the time is trying to win what I'm going to call an ecosystem approach to getting our content out into the world. Right, and that's everything from working with major media outlets, to going and speaking at events and conferences, to finding good event and conference partnerships, to figuring out what we can do as joint content collaborations with our clients and customers or people out in the world. And then there's a huge part of my job that's sort of an internal, almost like chief of staff-esque function. I think again, because I'm a power user of our platform and very visible out in the world, I touch a lot of different things across research, product, sales, marketing, and a lot of the ways that we drive innovation for us as a company in terms of historically, the company was really just a big database of company data. And now AI unlocks a lot of opportunities to get people closer and closer to what they're actually trying to find out of that data with tools, agents, better search, LLMs, whatever it might be. And so figuring out the ways that as we productize a lot of the work that I would do on insights or a lot of the work that the research team would do on their research work, what do you have to do to make that repeatable and just like, how do I automate myself out of a lot of the work that I would do anyways? Because we know it's good content and we know it's sort of what people are trying to use us for anyways. Daniel: But before we move on, I'm just curious too, for CB Insights, are you also writing for the company page and your CEO? And how are you thinking about that content versus yours if you're doing that? Matt: I don't write what I'll call is like our strictly marketing content and copy, right? You know, I don't really touch product releases or things like that. I have some involvement in some of the other content types like press release stuff and partnership announcements and things in that regard. Daniel: I do write some of the content for our CEO and really again, because I'm going to say that there's a different flavor to it. There's a different voice to it, but because everything we're trying to do as a company hinges on this idea of predictive intelligence on private companies, it's very easy to recreate a lot of the same content types, a lot of the same structure across different people who share that content. Matt: Final question before we move into good idea, bad idea is, are there any LinkedIn conspiracies you have, whether it's posting at 9 a.m. or commenting within the first hour on everybody who commented on your post or anything like that? Daniel: The comment one is probably up there. I mean, I'm trying to think if there's anything else. I mean, one of the interesting, I don't know if this is so much of a conspiracy and I've seen other people talk about this, but one of the interesting things is that engagement on other people's posts and engagement on sort of like-minded individuals stuff, generally in the form of comments, does do a pretty good job of having a halo effect on the reach of posts to a similar audience. And it also, I mean, now that LinkedIn will give you statistics on the number of impressions that a comment got, it is interesting to see how much you can just like juice some numbers on impressions by commenting on a post that's already going viral. And that's an interesting place to, and I'm not saying this because I want everyone to spam useless links. It's one of the most atrocious things that people can do. I do not need to join your Discord channel on Facebook PMs based on a post I did on hiring for meta. But the idea of like being able to drop, like, especially for me, being able to drop intelligence into the comment section of other people's posts. Like, look, I do it with Peter again, to keep picking on him as a friendly, right? Like I do it with Peter somewhat frequently of like, okay, he put data out on XYZ startup trend. Well, we have a new way to look at that trend or intelligence to add to that trend beyond the funding data or the equity share data or the vesting schedule data or whatever it might be that he posted. Like I can add to that conversation in a way that uses some already published research or some link to our platform that will get a ton of impressions at least and then drive more people towards that link and towards that ultimate, you know, like conversion for as much as we can call it that. I love comments. And it honestly just made me think of one more thing. And I have two posts that, like one post I just had last week or not last week, a few days ago, I roasted Matt's personal title because it says his founder and CEO at Forge Media. And, you know, the post is pretty much saying nobody knows what Forge Media is, and you should change it. And I changed mine to LinkedIn is the next TikTok. And I think I've gotten a lot more clicks, especially in the comment section because of this. Daniel: So I'm curious, Jason, as someone with much more LinkedIn experience than us, would you be open to changing your headline because most people probably don't know what CB Insights is. Now it also could get them more willing to look into CB Insights, but I'm curious your take on changing your personal title to a spicy take, whether it's on startups or data or AI. Matt: Again, I'm going to, my initial reaction is to say that top of funnel does not have to be broad funnel, right? Like I sort of want people who have some appreciation, right? Maybe it should say head of predictive intelligence on private companies or predictive intelligence on private companies backslash CB Insights. I'd be open to that. Maybe I'll go do it now or whatever else the three of us can come up with in the next few minutes. But I do think there is, again, to just like, I'm not trying to gamify the platform quite so much and maybe I should, but to start it's like, no, like this is what it's here. Like in my mind, this is a platform that has a little bit of like sanctity left to it. Trying to not fuck with that would be my preference and try to get other people to stop fucking with it would also be my preference. Daniel: Not to tell you to change yours. Matt: No, that makes sense. And that's a very wholesome, wholesome answer. And I think it's a great time to transition to good idea, bad idea, where I was saying earlier, I think I have five ideas prepared. Daniel: All right, I'm going to give the previous idea on changing my personal title. I'll give it like beige idea if we're on like a green flag, red flag, and we can go from there. Okay, so the first one I'm actually stealing from our previous guest, Akil, and that is a universal salary history ledger. And I don't know if CB Insights tracks this, which is a minor detail, but if they do, it would give you a ledger, a history of how much each person at a company has gotten paid in their lifetime. So if I've worked at three companies, you can track how much I've made over my life or maybe how much a company has made in their life in revenue. Matt: The company one is super interesting. The personal one, I mean, as a data nerd, super interesting. The amount of anonymization and like need to not do things that have malintent to them that comes with that great power would have to be a little bit interesting. But I mean, I'll give you the answer from my perspective and CB Insights perspective on why we're building our revenue data set and why we're building it transparently. It's to do exactly the company version of this. And so that's a great idea. Daniel: And if you want it, right, we're getting closer and closer to it all the time. Matt: You'll have to send it to us when it's out. Daniel: And hopefully by the time that's out, you'll see millions of dollars under the connection accepted podcast as well. Matt: Exactly. Matt: I mean, actually, can I turn it around and ask how excited would you be to have someone or a lot of someones have access to your like effectively your net worth itemized out annually? And what do you think? What do you think they could do with it that would make you happy for them to have it? And what do you think they would do with it that would like pros and cons it for me? Daniel: For me, the way I was originally thinking of this is that it would just be something that I would have, which is, would probably be really hard for CB Insights to do because I think it would be fascinating for me to learn how much money I've made since birth. What I want the whole world knowing it. Honestly, no. So it might be tough for CB Insights to do. Matt: What's the difference between that and just aggregating every deposit into your bank account? Like how hard would it be for you to go some of the retirement stuff has increased, so it's tough to get like a... Daniel: So you want the proverbial single pane of glass that every fintech company wants to be. Matt: Yeah, exactly. I actually got this idea from, I was talking to someone in the UK and all of... So if a company in the UK hires you, they can see how much money you make from their company and from all other income sources. So they can see if you work for another company or not. So, I mean, obviously the US government doesn't do this, but it was just an interesting thought I had from that information. Daniel: Interesting. The next idea is a tech buzzword. And the thought with this is you can filter companies by putting AI native or full stack founder or, you know, democratizing or the Airbnb of, and you can have some goofy filters there. Matt: Where this is on LinkedIn? Daniel: No, no, no, NCB Insights. My answer is like a little bit coming soon. We're working on tags and I will happily advocate for meme tags or buzzword tags right now. Right now you could probably do it with keywords a little bit, at least across company descriptions and things like news snippets or press releases, earnings calls, whatever it might be. But the global version of it, and the meme version of it, I'm into it. That'd make good content. Matt: I'll post those insights. Love it. I was writing these on the plane, so my handwriting is not totally legible. It's a bad idea, I guess. This one I had, I'm just going to throw it at you and see if we can come up with a better idea for this or not. I think what would be really cool with some CB Insights stuff is some sort of Mad Libs type where, you know, I don't know how we could do it, but like, you know, state of the office stock market or a Mad Lib of an industry. Like Ramp just raised the most money, but Brax has the most cards and you can kind of like fill in the company with different stuff. Daniel: I like it. There's something there with Mad Libs. It's Mad Libs. It's like dynamic head-to-heads. We just launched. I mean, again, I'm going to go to things we're working on now. Matt: No, I love it. I'm now bullish on CB Insights. Daniel: Awesome. Matt: Not that I wasn't before, but like I'm... CB Insights, good idea. You can make that the intro snippet to this whole thing. I think you get to a lot of it, right? And like that's where the nuance and the power of having so much data is. Is like, okay, no, like I can go look at today's was Klarna versus a firm and their business relationships. And you look at the public filings for, right, both of them are public at this point and you can look at merchant count and things like GMV and whatever else. And you can start to compare those, but then CB Insights can start to layer in elements like new business relationships and partnerships and look at where, you know, the two companies are generating almost identical, right? Like 97% or a firm is like 97% of Klarna's quarterly revenue, but with wildly different merchant numbers. It's like, how do you go and do that? And you start to look at, you know, where they're processing, look at their fee structure, look at things like where their business relationships are and the fact that they have better distribution through major, or like the mega merchants as opposed to really like quality versus quantity game. And so figuring out the ways to start to like, okay, in a competitive dynamic in something that's a fairly close head to head, right? What are the different elements that are driving that competitive dynamic and where is each company placing their strategic bets for the next wave of growth? And so I like, I love the Mad Libs idea. It's actually something like at a certain really, or whatever equivalent head to head, like tear sheet scorecard, almost like the way I think of it is like player stats almost, right? Like we've all played FIFA or whatever it is. And like, okay, partnership strength, funding strength, management team strength, whatever it is, and starting to get those head to heads are, that's a ton of fun and super insightful. I, I would love to read that. Daniel: My final question before we wrap up is if the laws didn't exist over privacy and other stuff like that, is there something in CB insights that you would build that you can't build right now because of regulations? Matt: My general answer to that is I think there's a ton of stuff that we could do with like customer search data or query data of like, what are, what are the smartest, brightest, most innovative companies looking at searching for et cetera. And obviously every legal and compliance red flag goes up for all of that. Daniel: Why? Because you can't get their search data? Matt: Because we can't share it. I mean, right. Like that's a complete violation of sort of their engagement with us and all of our terms and conditions. Daniel: Oh, I see. Searching on the platform. Okay. Okay. Sorry. I, I misunderstood. Matt: Okay. Now, now I get it. Yeah. No, I mean, right. You know, pick, pick your big fortune 500 company. Matt: Doesn't want me sharing out in the world, you know, Hey, they just ran a chat CBI, which is our internal LLM query for, would company XYZ make a good acquisition target for us? Probably something they would like to hold closer to the chest. And we certainly, I mean, like we, we don't even get to look at it. Daniel: Last question. I should have brought this up earlier, Jason, but what has professional cycling taught you about LinkedIn and content? Jason: I'm going to go back to something I said earlier. Like it's just about putting in the reps or putting in the work and putting yourself in a position to like, show up day in day out. Right? Like I come, like it's an, cycling is an endurance sport, right? Like you learn, I learned from a very young age that there's no magic workout. There's no, or like, there's no magic singular workout. There's no perfect meal. There's no this, that, like all of the, like, I could just put a bandaid or take a pill things. None of that exists. Like you show up, you do the work and you put yourself in the right position to take advantage of the opportunities where you get lucky. Matt: Jason, is there anything else we didn't ask you that we should have or that you want to share with the audience? Jason: No, I actually think this, this is, this was pretty complete. This was awesome. Uh, I mean, I'd, I'd love to hear from you guys, but I'd almost turn it around. Right. I did a ton of talking. I'd love to know in the first, it sounds like almost 20 episodes now. What are the most consistent themes, right? Like whether it's how people build their audience, what's working, what's not working, what people's like wishlist of LinkedIn should go fix this, fix this. Like I'll, I'll turn it around and I'd love to hear at least 60 seconds from each of you on, like, what 20 episodes has taught you. Daniel: Yeah, I can go first really quickly. I'll share one thing that we've heard is working and then one thing that a lot of people have said they want to see on the platform. So in terms of what people have seen as working, uh, you know, this, this is maybe we talked about the, uh, sort of like following the trends and everything, but like authenticity right now seems to be very much working on LinkedIn, especially in terms of engagement. If you want to, you know, if your goal is to engagement farm, like slap a, slap a selfie and like type up a very raw and storytelling driven post. And nine times out of 10, it will perform quite well. So, you know, we've talked to quite a few people that have done a lot of personal story type content before. And then in terms of something that people want to see, I think that better creator monetize, well, actually they don't even have creator monetization. So that's one thing that we've heard people want and just like more incentives for people to create on this platform because if you compare it to like YouTube or Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn doesn't really do a great job of getting people to actually want to create here. Matt: I mean, you know, they have an awesome platform, but certainly you get, the ways you get rewarded are generally from either like long-term or maybe some short-term opportunities and career growth, right? Like I will throw out that every job, job I've gotten is because of LinkedIn, whether it was a DM to someone, a DM to myself that was probably based somewhat off of my presence on the platform or both. And so like, it still serves its core purpose very well and being present again to like just being someone that people want to talk to and having thought leadership out in the world is a massive boon for that. But the, how do you incent people to put content out, especially people who aren't always like primed to do so is interesting. Daniel: I agree. And one thing just, I think, Jason, you're proof of this, that isn't working on or that, you know, people are, or creators aren't so bullish on right now on LinkedIn and Noah Greenberger, a previous guest is proof of this. And I think also even people that we haven't had on like David Center are, is that video Isn't working right now for a lot of creators, even though LinkedIn tends to be pushing it a lot, which has been an interesting thing to see for us. And one thing that seems to be working really well for everyone is using emotion in their post. And I know super interesting format. I just, like, there's a ton of stuff where trying to think about what the most appropriate version of that is, that's not just someone replicating it, right? Like, he does a good job of it. I'm assuming he's, he continues to do it because it drives good, like, commercial juice or funnel. He just hit 10 million ARR. Matt: Yeah, but it's also something that, like, gets replicated really poorly because people see a number of impressions or comments or engagements or his, him sharing then the like great wins that come from doing it. And people are like, okay, cool, red pill or whatever color pill it is when you just, like, accept that something is going to be dissolved. And then they do a bad job of it. Like, why are you posting 17 engineering jobs? You're not selling anything to engineers, right? Like, you're at a company that sells, like, bio tools or whatever. Like, you know, just because something works doesn't mean it works for you. And like, just because you can doesn't mean you should. But amazing. My takes. Daniel: Jason, thanks so much for coming on. Jason: Yeah, thanks. Thank you to both of you for having me and excited to watch where you guys go. You guys are gonna learn way more about the platform than I will ever know from having a ton of smart people. I'll listen and learn and then see how much of it I want to ruin my very wholesome approach with.