Ankit is Cofounder and CEO of A2D Ventures, whose mission is to build Southeast Asia's largest angel investing platform where visionary investors get access to co-invest and back tomorrow's game-changing startup founders.
Ankit has also held a leadership role in Shopee and is ex-McKinsey.
Guest Author: Ankit Upadhyay
Not long ago I was watching this interview on 20VC of Sam Altman. 20VC is one of the most popular Youtube channels in the VC space globally and it is run by Harry Stebbings.
Harry Stebbings is the Founder of 20VC, which is a VC that has raised over $140m. 20VC has invested in some impressive names like BeReal, Sorare, Linktree, Nex Health and more.
He is also the Founder of Stride.VC, which is a seed stage fund focused on the UK that raised over 40 million GBP.
And he is a social media star with over 123k followers on Linkedin, 216k on X, and 50k on his 20VC Youtube channel.
So who is this guy Harry Stebbings?
Well he started out as an unknown Brit interviewing startups on his podcast “The Twenty Minute VC”. The crazy thing… he was only 19 years old.
He didn’t have a fancy Harvard MBA or anything. He wasn’t in Silicon Valley. So how did he do it?
Well, the short answer… hard work and iteration.
He did his research on anyone he interviewed. And he was interesting to watch.
And to be honest… at the outset many of his initial shows were not that good.
But the podcast just kept getting better. And he was applying the learnings he was taking from these interviews to his own business with some impressive results.
So why did “The Twenty Minute VC” show rise so fast where many others had not?
Well a lot of folks talk about the unique format when Harry just started. Each episode lasted just twenty minutes.
Which meant that he needed to get to the point fast. And so this format appealed a lot to busy professionals who wanted insights but in as little time as possible.
Also Henry had an uncanny ability to ask incisive questions without coming off overly direct or rude. Rather he seemed to have a genuine enthusiasm for the subject matter that would set the interviewee at ease and get them to open up.
This began to attract bigger and bigger stars. Who now got curious about this growing young star as they started to see more and more of their peers appear on the show.
Guys like Bill Ackman, the uber-famous hedge fund manager worth north of $4 billion began to appear on his show. Someone who is extremely selective about his public media presence.
All of this resonated a lot with audience… helping his podcast grow quickly through word of mouth and social media.
What can we learn from Harry Stebbings?
- Volume & Consistency: From the outset, Stebbings was incredibly consistent with his podcast releases, ensuring a steady stream of content for his listeners. This reliability helped build a loyal audience.
- Networking: By interviewing venture capitalists and entrepreneurs, Stebbings effectively built a vast network in the tech and VC communities. These connections not only enriched his podcast’s content but also opened doors for collaborations and further opportunities.
- Leveraging Social Media: Stebbings effectively used social media to promote his podcast and engage with his audience. This direct interaction helped foster a community around “The Twenty Minute VC” and increased listener loyalty.
- Credibility: Beyond podcasting, Stebbings ventured into the very field he reported on by founding his own venture capital firm, 20VC. By getting into the ‘game’ himself this deepened his understanding of the industry, thereby enabling him to ask better questions.
A2D Ventures has a pretty similar goal as Harry Stebbings
Similar to Harry we want to meet tons of great startups and decipher the key learnings for our investor audience. We want to be able to weed out who are the truly successful ones vs. who are the ones that are simply good at self-promotion.
How do you do this? Well, you do this by meeting a ton of young startups. And when we talk to them we try to distill as many insights as we can.
Over time this enables us to decipher what the successful ones are doing and what success even looks like. Not just from brief conversations, but rather by receiving and looking at their actual numbers and analyzing them.
All of this quite honestly takes a lot of time and effort. You need to travel around the region and develop your network so that you hear about the top startups and can exchange notes with other investors.
And you need to have a background in building and running businesses yourself to make the most use of the information you get. Which is something that we consider part of the genetic makeup of our firm.
Over time you begin to see patterns. Patterns that you only begin to recognize after a certain amount of volume. And this is part of why we think our model adds tremendous value over just trying to cherry pick startups yourself as an angel investor.
Interested in learning more? Check at our site https://www.a2dventures.com/ and set up a time to chat.
