Zachary White on the value of distribution for startups

Transcript

My name is Zachary White. I run a fund called Exits Capital. Exits Capital is a seed-focused venture capital fund, $20 million, and we help companies with their distribution. 

I think that distribution in broad strokes is pretty applicable across like a few different disparate parts of starting a startup. I think hiring, you know, getting people to care about the product that you're working on such that you're attracting great talent to want to come work for you. Fundraising, you know, putting a story out there that people can sort of digest, especially investors that make them want to participate in what you're building with capital or otherwise. And then, just like product adoption generally. I think that getting people to care about what you're building is sometimes really, even if you have an amazing product, getting over that hump to get people to really try what you're working on can be difficult. And so those are the sort of core things that I feel like are easily helped, you know, focusing on distribution. 

I think distribution for startups across a variety of different sorts of pillars is pretty limited and not something that is often focused on. You know, if you're starting a startup, especially in the technology space, high chances are you're very technical, but getting your product out there and getting people to care and pay attention to what you're doing is not necessarily a core competency. And I found that you know, a lot of the big multi-stage funds, you know, they help with distribution, but isn't necessarily one of the things that they're best at. And so what I think is becoming increasingly important, and especially in this generation, is being able to tell a good story, whether that be about the thing you're building, whether it be about the people that you're building with. I think that that's a really interesting way to captivate people into what you're doing. 

In 2020, I helped launch a media fund through a family office, and it kind of exists at the intersection of like Vice or Barstool Sports, but also on the technology and early-stage investing side. Joe Lansdale at 8VC was kind enough to lead that around. And yeah, that's, that's something that I feel like dovetails really nicely into the distribution angle of the fund. 

It’s basically $100 million, and the goal was to find interesting IP, produce it out, and then sell it to the large DSPs at the time. I focused on that and helped basically do a couple of movies, a couple of documentaries. And what I found in that is that the power of good content can really capture people's imaginations. And I think that tech and investing broadly is pretty devoid of like quality content. I think if you look at the way that the tech ecosystem currently sits, it's sort of bifurcated between two different sides, one being like mainstream media, which is generally pretty pessimistic towards technology and very like failure porn-esque looking for the next Theranos or the next WeWork or whatever and just like holding on to that. And then you have the other side of it, which is like quantitative. So you know, like TechCrunch, Axios information, whatever they're basically focused on. This is how much money was raised by this company, how many people work there. It's all very quantitative. And I think what's really lost and what I think is something that I'm passionate about is like the story and narrative that underlie a lot of these amazing businesses. You know, overlaying that onto early-stage tech companies seemed like an interesting white space that wasn't very capitalized on yet. 

It's really about creating a higher level of relatability. I think that the problem with technology and technology media generally, where it stands, is it's like it's very much an us versus them kind of thing. And I think that if you're able to start to develop the character around some of the people that, you know, are building these amazing companies, it becomes much less of an us versus them thing. And so I really think it's about telling these amazing stories of how, you know, these people, these young people who had nothing and just had an idea like came and built something that's really enduring. And I think that it just really speaks to, in many ways, the modern American dream and like really pushing that idea that like, you know, whoever is watching this type of content, it's just as easy for you to go out and do this as it is anybody else. And a lot of the people that have built the things that you see around you are very much more like you than you might think. And so really getting to the point of, by and large, most of it is, you know, hard work and dedication and interesting ideas that create these enduring and interesting companies.