What is Venture5?
We get a lot of love for what we’ve built over the years: the VC jobs content, newsletters, our VC salary survey, GoingVC, the V5 Summit, and more.
But ask someone what it is we did, or I did, you’d get different answers. A blog? A newsletter? “The VC jobs guy”? Even I had a hard time explaining it clearly.
Here’s the thing: I just didn’t realize what I was building while I was building it. And I don’t think the venture ecosystem did, either.
Let’s rewind …
Accidental Beginning (November 2006-July 2008)
I get asked this question all the time. And I’ve never really shared a complete answer–until now.
“How did you get started?”
It all started the week I was accepted to Columbia Business School.
I remember meeting people at networking events and somehow the blog would come up. They’d tell me they read it. Or I’d get comments from applicants and current students. Once that started happening, I was hooked.
As happy as I was about the blog, I wasn’t as happy about my VC job search. I still remember being at Columbia’s graduation and seeing a graduating dentist waving an enormous toothbrush in celebration – while I was getting a call telling me that I didn’t make the cut on a recent interview.
My wife was about to give birth to our twins. Student loan payments were about to kick in. And I had precisely zero offers.
This would be a really short blog post if the story ended here.
But lucky for me, it had just begun.
“Hey Look Ma, I Made It” (July 2008-September 2008)
Just a couple of weeks before my kids were born, things started to break my way. I got two VC job offers in the span of a week–where I learned the best way to get a VC job offer is to get another VC job offer.
I settled on the firm that was an “emerging manager,” before that term was even a thing. Our office was on the umpteenth floor of some big building in midtown Manhattan with views of the entire city.
And I started blogging again – in a different place that you might be familiar with.
Becoming an Operator (September 2008-July 2016)
If you don’t remember this or weren’t around for it, I’ll give you a quick summary: The global financial system just about melted down in late 2008.
Everything related to the economy was a mess, including the VC world. This is where I learned first hand about things like cramdowns, pay-to-plays, full ratchets, and all the other stuff you get to see in a down market.
Like a lot of smaller, emerging funds during that time, it was pretty clear to me that we were not going to make it out of the other side of the nuclear winter. I needed to find something new. I sent out a lot of emails and ended up talking to a lot of people. And I ended up leaving VC for an operating role – 1st business hire – with 5 PhD co-founders steering the ship. That “ship” was backed by 2 top Boston VC firms and would eventually become a company known as Turbonomic.
Over the next ~6 years I built up my operating experience. I launched an angel-backed startup in the recruiting tech space. And kicked off a side project that turned into a company and community that is still going strong today – GoingVC – all while writing my weekly newsletter and creating lots of VC content.
But the next step in the journey to Venture5 came from a failure, not a success. I wasn’t able to raise any more money for that recruiting startup, and I had a family to support. Then someone from my past reappeared and opened a new door up for me.
Sunshine and Unicorns (July 2016-July 2022)
Thanks to a former colleague from my pre-MBA days, I was able to make a soft landing and ended up at DigitalOcean as a product manager.
It was a great fit for me as a former founder: High growth, great product, and a ton of autonomy. It reminded me a lot of my time working at VMware – which at the time was the fastest growing software company in history.
All the while I kept working early mornings, nights, and weekends on the blog, newsletter, and GoingVC.
And then this happened.
Turbonomic, the startup I had worked at more than 10 years earlier, exited. And DigitalOcean IPO’d.
I was finally in a position to take a step back and think about what it actually was that I wanted to be working on, without near term “pay the bills” financial pressure hanging over my head.
Yet I didn’t take that step back right away. Until one meeting changed everything.
Exits and an Exit (July 2022-October 2022)
DigitalOcean was the best place I’d ever worked. But one day, in one meeting, I decided that I was done. I gave notice on the spot, wrapped up over the next few weeks, said my goodbyes, and then took some time off.
My original plan was to look for product leadership roles at startups after enjoying the summer with my family. I remember one week in particular during that time. We were in South Jersey, enjoying a beach vacation. While at the beach I was doing a lot of doomscrolling of jobs on LinkedIn. None of them were jumping off the page–and the idea of becoming an employee again seemed less and less appealing.
But as it turned out, the “job” I wanted had been right under my nose the whole time.
I had built a great following of founders, funders, and operators over the last 14+ years. From that platform I had launched and spun out GoingVC, which was doing well as a standalone business. And I was generating meaningful revenue from the various sponsorships, paid content, and courses I had been selling.
Which begged the question: Did the side hustle have the potential to become the main hustle?
I guess it did 🙂
Who Doesn’t Love a Pivot (Late 2022-Early 2025)
At that time I thought the business would be driven by paid content and courses. After all, those things had made up the vast majority of our revenue for years. What ended up happening instead is that the script was flipped.
Advertising and sponsorships soon made up the lion’s share of our revenue as companies looking to reach founders, funders, and operators saw us as a great channel. If you’ve been following our work for the last couple of years you saw some of the biggest names in cloud, SaaS, startup banking, fund administration (and more) supporting our work. And that resulted in 70% revenue growth last year.
Our content began making a subtle shift, too. Although our VC job board was still an important piece of the puzzle, we started creating more content for founders, VCs, and LPs. We launched, among other things:
- Our Emerging Manager Spotlight virtual event series
- A 2-day conference focused on AI enablement of VC firms called the V5 Summit
- IRL and virtual events connecting founders and VCs
- Our ‘Moves in VC’ and ‘VC Deals’ newsletters
Along the way I started investing personally into startups and into emerging VC firms. A lot of those emerging managers were people who had followed my work since they were getting started in the industry – a full circle moment if there ever was one.
The New Venture5 (Today)
This is Venture5: We create content about venture that empowers, improve access to capital for founders and funders, and build products and services that solve real problems for the venture ecosystem.
Media is our foundation. 50,000+ founders, funders, and operators trust us because we’ve been adding value to the ecosystem for nearly two decades. Founders follow us to see which firms are actually funding and what types of companies are getting backed. Investors rely on us to stay current on industry trends and ecosystem movements.
Catalyst helps emerging managers. We highlight their firms to our 50,000+ monthly audience, plug them into our community of GPs and LPs through events like our “Moves in VC” dinners and V5 Summit, and leverage the personal networks in the VC and allocator community we’ve built over 20+ years.
Studio builds new products, services, and businesses that serve the venture ecosystem. GoingVC has trained 700+ people. V5 Summit connects AI-native VCs. VC Prime helps emerging managers reach the audiences they need to connect with most.
Thank You
First, a big shoutout goes to the extended Venture5 team. This launch, and what led up to it, wouldn’t have been possible without a major team effort. In particular, if you like the new branding and site design, send our partners Hollie Arnett and Laurie Owen a note and tell them we sent you.
I also wanted to extend a special thanks to the Standard Metrics team for their support of this launch. Check out their automated data collection and portfolio monitoring solution for VCs. It’s being used by top firms including Bessemer Venture Partners, Lerer Hippeau Ventures, and many more. And the founder is an ex-VC, building the product from real life experiences.
And last but not least, I wanted to thank you. If you made it this far it means that you’ve been on this journey with us for a little while, or a long while.
There’s a lot more to come.
-John Gannon
