Thank you for the support this year, whether it was by reading our work, sharing it, or telling a friend about it. That’s why I thought it was important to show you what you contributed to building. So here’s how Venture5 did in 2025, by the numbers … along with some lessons learned!
I generated 1.47M impressions (+22% YoY) and 12,625 reactions and comments on my LinkedIn account, and ended the year with 20,465 followers (+54% YoY). What worked well?
- Posting every day. I saw a clear increase in follower count growth rate in 2024 when we first made posting a daily habit, so we kept it going in 2025.
- Content curation can outperform content creation. Have both in your posting mix, especially if you are trying to get to an every day posting motion. “Repost with your thoughts” on Saturdays and Sundays is a great way to start exercising that curation muscle, and you’d be surprised at how often these reposts outperform “regular” posts.
- Event recap posts with photos drive a lot of engagement.
2025 also cemented a LinkedIn lesson I’m continually reminded of every year. I’m still unable to predict if any given post will go on a heater. I’ve had 4 line posts I wrote in 5 minutes at the dog park get more engagement and impressions than a post that took me an hour+ to create 🤷 This ties back to the ‘posting every day’ bit I just mentioned. The more you’re out there posting, the more likely it is that you will have a chance for something to catch fire.
Website
Across johngannonblog.com and venture5.com we had 1.3 million+ page views. The latter was added to the family over the summer and the former is the OG that we’ve had running for over a decade (and not surprisingly the one that made up 90%+ of those page views). Our biggest referral source continues to be Google, by a large margin. LinkedIn is right behind Google as the second biggest referral source. We’ve not put any effort into AEO and are not seeing much traffic from the LLM’s as a consequence.
I do feel like there is more we can do to help users understand what content we have available, and make it more readily accessible for them. Although we still publish a large number of VC jobs, I don’t think folks yet think of us as a source of VC deals or VC fund formation news. Hopefully we can change that in 2026!
Email/Newsletters
In 2025 we delivered over 5 million emails and had an average open rate of 49%. In those emails we’ve reported on:
- 300+ venture deals monthly in VC Deals
- 500+ VC talent moves (folks joining a firm, leaving a firm, or getting promoted)
- 500+ VC fund announcements
In particular, it’s been awesome to get so many messages this year from people we covered in Moves in VC. It’s not uncommon for us to get a DM or email from them letting us know that their friends and colleagues told them that they saw it on Venture5 first!
VC Salary Survey
In January 2025 we released our 7th annual VC compensation survey results, made up of 600+ responses submitted by individual investors as well as firm leaders (eg CFOs, GPs) looking to calibrate their team’s compensation. Every year it has influenced millions of dollars in compensation decisions across hundreds of VC firms. And this year, we were quoted by the New Yorker about a certain VC, adding to the list of press mentions we’ve received over the years about the survey from WSJ.com and other leading publications.
(Spoiler alert: In 2026 we have an even more comprehensive dataset, so stay tuned 🙂
Events
We hosted 1,500+ attendees across 15+ IRL and virtual events. Our virtual events continued to host panelists across the spectrum of VCs, LPs, and founders. Highlights included:
- Hosting a (virtual) event for Brad Feld’s book launch and a (IRL) event for Jeff Bussgang’s book launch
- 2 ‘Moves in VC’ dinners (in NY and SF) for folks who had joined a new firm, launched a new fund, or been promoted in the last year
- The Venture5 launch party in NYC
Emerging Managers
It’s no secret that we’ve been creating a lot more emerging manager content and event programming over the last year and change. We’re (John) also putting personal capital to work. We just participated in a GP staking, and have written a number of “angel” sized checks into emerging manager funds. We posted a summary of what we’ve been up to on our Catalyst page.
Sponsors
We were fortunate to welcome 17 new sponsors in 2025 who supported us in making much of what you saw above possible. Sponsors in the HR/payroll, banking, fund administration, and portfolio analytics spaces tended to find the most value in our readership, which spans 50,000+ startup founders, funders, and operators that read and follow our work and attend our events. If you’d like to learn more about sponsoring our work, this is the best place to start.
What’s In Store For 2026?
The best way to keep up with our work is to subscribe to any one of our newsletters and to follow our Events Calendar on Luma. We’ll share more soon. Thank you again for all of the support over this past year!
