In VentureFizz, Keith Cline has created a place where great tech companies and great tech talent meet. Check it out.
I had a wide-ranging interview with this most affable and informed guest.
Click here for the full transcript of the episode.
Here are some highlights:
Sal Daher Introduces Keith Kline of Venture Fizz
How VentureFizz Came About
The VentureFizz Podcast Origin Story
“Yeah, the drama of building a new company is just so absorbing. Lots of stories to tell.”
Sal Talks About Listening to Keith’s Interview of Russ Wilcox of Pillar VC – The Amazing Story of E Ink
“Boston doesn't do consumer. Boston mostly does B2B technology. The internet, was basically built in Boston.”
Why Sal Got into Podcasting
Keith Cline Grew Up in Hooksett, NH and His Father Was an Entrepreneur
Why Rents Go Up
How Keith Cline Went from Doing Real Estate Tax Abatement to Human Resources in Tech
Keith and Sal Talk About Some Lean Years
Keith Cline Quits His Job and Starts His Own Recruiting Practice
Keith Cline Talks About His Content Strategy in VentureFizz
The Biggest Obstacles Keith Cline Is Facing Now
Golden Marketing Advice!
How Sal Decides in What Startup to Invest
Transcript of Keith Cline of “VentureFizz”
Sal Daher Introduces Keith Cline of VentureFizz
SAL DAHER: Hi, this is Sal Daher, of the Angel Invest Boston Podcast and I have a surprise for everybody today because on the other line, I have Keith Cline, of the VentureFizz Podcast.
KEITH CLINE: Hey Sal, how you doing?
SAL DAHER: Tremendous, Keith. We thought we'd create an episode that could be shared to both of our audiences. And so, we want to talk a little bit about what each of us does and then take it from there. Keith, why don't you tell me, what VentureFizz does, how you came about doing this?
KEITH CLINE: Sure. First and foremost, I'm excited to do this. It's good to talk to a fellow podcaster.
SAL DAHER: Not just a fellow podcaster, a fellow podcaster who is involved with startups in the Boston area.
How VentureFizz Came About
KEITH CLINE: Yes. Good point. Yes. Lot of commonalities, but also some differences. We'll get into that. But yeah, so I started VentureFizz... Actually, my background is recruiting. I ran my own search firm about... It was about 15 years that I was running that and the last economic recession, 2008, 2009, there wasn't a lot of recruitment work to be had. I started VentureFizz as a side project of me, already keeping tabs on who's hiring, who's getting funded, what events you should go to.
I started it as a complete side project just to keep busy and kept up with it for several years, to the point where it became a self-sustaining business and I put my search firm on hold three years ago to focus on scaling VentureFizz. It's evolved quite a bit, but today we're the leading authority for jobs and careers in tech. We cover three markets, that being Boston, New York and remote jobs.
SAL DAHER: Ah, that is tremendous. And you have the voice, which is the VentureFizz Podcast. You also do posts on LinkedIn. Where else do you show up?
KEITH CLINE: You got to be everywhere these days.
SAL DAHER: Indeed.
The VentureFizz Podcast Origin Story
KEITH CLINE: Yeah, the podcast I started about, geez, I'd have to double check. We're up to episode 171 now. It's been a couple years. I've always been a consumer of podcasts even going back to, I think it was Greg Golanz. He had a podcast for entrepreneurs in New York that was amazing. And I remember I used to download episodes to my original iPod and I would connect it... Yeah, I'd connect it to the radio frequency in my car. That's how far going back this is. I always consume a lot of podcast content like Jason Calacanis and This Week in Startup.
I always wanted to start my own. I had a gentleman that was working for me, Alex Kalafi, who had his own podcast that he did with some other friends of his. He allowed me to test the waters and he handled the technical side of getting it up and running. Yeah, it was a great opportunity because I just love the entrepreneurial journey, the story behind how someone come to the point of starting a company, to building it and the trials and tribulations behind it. I listened to How I Built This quite a bit with Guy Raz.
SAL DAHER: Oh, I love that. I listen to Guy Raz. Actually, I started out listening to Jason Calacanis as well. He's actually been on my podcast. I've met him. He's quite a character, but Guy Raz, the production value of his podcast, I highly recommend that everybody who's interested in startups, they should listen to both Guy Raz and to Jason Calacanis.
Very different. Jason is much more specialized and Guy Raz is much more accessible. If you're not a business person, I think Guy Raz is really the on ramp for the business because he goes out of his way to create content that is really accessible, highly produced, beautifully done, short. Anyway, you had somebody help you get onto the podcast wagon. And please, tell me how it went.
KEITH CLINE: Shockingly, well, I guess because I was just like, "Oh, this is going to be horrible." Yeah, I interviewed Christina Luconi, the Chief People Officer at Rapid7 and I did a first... Season one, I was just like, "Let me just figure this out." I talked to all talent acquisition and HR professionals for the first 10 or 11 episodes to get the hang of it, focus on a domain that I knew really well.
SAL DAHER: Clutching your security blanket.
KEITH CLINE: Totally. Totally. I actually listened to the first episode a few months ago and I expected to be horrified and I'm like, "Aw, that actually wasn't so bad." And I think it's just because I've got 20 plus years of experience interviewing people for jobs, but I think it's just a natural extension too. Yeah, and then after that 10, 11 episodes, I realized I wanted to talk to founders and ambassadors. Have been doing that ever since.
“Yeah, the drama of building a new company is just so absorbing. Lots of stories to tell.”
SAL DAHER: Yeah, the drama of building a new company is just so absorbing. Lots of stories to tell.
KEITH CLINE: Yeah, everyone has their unique story and I mean, your podcast gets into so many great, great backgrounds and how the person hit that aha moment.
Sal Talks About Listening to Keith’s Interview of Russ Wilcox of Pillar VC – The Amazing Story of E Ink
SAL DAHER: No, actually I do listen to your podcast as well. For example, I remember listening to Russ Wilcox, your interview with Russ Wilcox. I knew Russ because Russ listens to podcasts and he listened to my podcast and he connected. And I met him here in Boston and we're investing in similar things. His E Ink being a platform technology has a lot in common. I invest in platform technologies, particularly in the biotech space and really, that business of his, about every time a board member came up with a new use case for E Ink, they fined him 50 bucks.
KEITH CLINE: Right. Yeah.
SAL DAHER: 50 bucks is more money than as a punishment because it's so easy to come up with a use case. It's hard to actually develop it. And I see the same thing with some of the biotech startups that I'm involved with. But anyways, so you were surprised at the outcome setting up this podcast. What is it that you've seen from it that you didn't expect?
KEITH CLINE: Well, I just think it's good for branding, first and foremost. I do it hoping that others will either get inspired or learn something from each episode. I mean, the Russ Wilcox episode is definitely a great one where that story just needs to be told. I mean, it's groundbreaking technology that took 10 years to hit product/market fit and they were on the verge of failing before Jeff Bezos.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. Let's set it up a little bit. E Ink, for those who haven't listened to the podcast, you should go back and listen to the podcast. Russ Wilcox was co-founder of a company called E Ink. He was the business guy and there was a professor at MIT who had developed technology for this ink that you can change the color of it, use it with electricity running through it. And it's a technology behind the Kindle and all these other eReaders that exist right now. They all use the same technology, the E Ink technology. And they were absolutely nowhere, as Keith was telling. Please continue.
KEITH CLINE: Yeah. I mean, they launched in Japan, I think it was, and it was a failure.
SAL DAHER: Oh, Sony. Yeah, that was a total disaster.
KEITH CLINE: Yeah, it was Sony. Yeah, and then a few of these handhelds ended up on Jeff Bezos's his desk and he was like, "This is the future and I'm going to cannibalize my book business that I'm selling through Amazon with the future." The rest is history of E Ink and getting on the map and then they powered the NOOK and all the digital readers of that generation and obviously, still in existence today.
SAL DAHER: Great story. Great story. See, those are the things that, once you learn something like that... The thing that stuck with me was the thing about platforms. It really is true, but also just how that aha moment for E Ink, where Jeff Bezos picked it up and was willing to listen. They were going nowhere. They were going to go under if it hadn't been for that lucky stroke. This is one of the reasons why I like to invest in startups, is that with business, there's always downside surprise.
Most traded companies, if you're invested in Abbott or you name it, if it's a large traded company, the surprises are for the downside. There's a lawsuit. There's a this. There's a that, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. They're not going to discover a product line that they didn't have before. But with startups, these guys were nowhere. They were dog meat. And all of a sudden, they're on track to a $400 million exit because Jeff Bezos picked up their eReader.
KEITH CLINE: Yeah. It's an amazing success story and-
SAL DAHER: Quite a story, huh?
KEITH CLINE: ... classic stories of there's so much innovation that comes out of the Boston tech ecosystem, but just it flies under the radar where, eReaders, digital readers, that E Ink didn't exist, we wouldn't probably have things like the iPhone now.
“Boston doesn't do consumer. Boston mostly does B2B technology. The internet, was basically built in Boston.”
SAL DAHER: Yeah. Well, Boston doesn't do consumer. Boston mostly does B2B technology. The internet, was basically built in Boston.
KEITH CLINE: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
SAL DAHER: BBN, the Bolt, Beranek and Newman, or BBN, those are the guys who built the beginning of the internet and nobody knows about it, but it's funny, the BBN people, every once in a while, I get them on the podcast and there's always an interesting conversation to be had about BBN. But anyway-
KEITH CLINE: How did you get into podcasting and... little bit about your [inaudible 00:09:14]?
Why Sal Got into Podcasting
SAL DAHER: Well, I got into podcasting because I trained as an engineer and I never really worked as an engineer. I went into finance. I was in a large, international bank involved in international finance for many years and then I went to work at a private company here in Boston that was dealing in the same area as the bank, but for its own account. A company called Turan Corporation. Basically, I had 30 years of experience in finance and I made some money doing that, investing in the distressed debt of third world countries, countries like Brazil, Russia, Nigeria, and so forth. And that business came to an end around 2010, and I was casting around for something to do and it hit me that some years before, back in the early 90s, I'd invested in a technology startup in Boston and it had done extremely well. It got sold to Microsoft. And then I invested in a few more because in Boston you can't swing a dead microchip without hitting an interesting startup. I mean, they're all over the place. I lived in Cambridge, so they're all over the place.
I was like, "Wow, this is really great. This is stuff I really like to do and it's really nice and local. And this is the place to be for technology startups with all the universities here." But I said, "But I don't know enough about this stuff," because I know about finding a mispriced bond and trading it and that stuff, which is a very, esoteric knowledge. Building a company or looking at a company, seeing if it's going to succeed, what product, the markets it's going to reach and all that stuff, I didn't have enough experience with it. I ended up joining a group here in Boston called Walnut Venture Associates, which is an angel group. A lot of those guys are founders. And every time I went on a due diligence meeting... The diligence meeting is when you get together, potential investors get together with a startup to decide whether they're going to make an early stage investment in the company.
And so, you ask a lot of questions and it could be a two-hour, three-hour meeting and they go over what the company does. And every time I went into one of those meetings, I learned tons. The stuff that I came out with, I was like, "Geez, I had never thought of that," because I've been business. I made money investing. I made my own money... With money that I had, I made it investing, but not building companies. And so, I said, "Geez, what if I could get these investors and these founders for an hour and just shoot questions at them and have them tell me their story?" Well, that's what I've done. I'm heading to a hundred episodes. I launch every two weeks because I have a very, busy business life. Otherwise, I have multifamily real estate. That's how I make my living. And I'm invested in about 50 something, 60 startups.
KEITH CLINE: Wow.
SAL DAHER: And so, I'm on a board and so, I'm pretty busy with that. I didn't have the time to do it. I ended up doing a podcast, which is usually 40 something to an hour long, 40 something minutes to an hour long. And I love to get into the biography of the founder or the investor and to figure out what drove them to do it and then try to get a little nugget to learn something.
And I can tell you, I've become a much better investor and I've become a much better board member through this experience with the podcast. Something else that's happened. I've connected a lot of listeners with Walnut Venture Associates and other angel groups, like a dope pusher for angel investing, an angel investing pusher.
KEITH CLINE: Great. Need it.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, I've got a bunch of people and some really, outstanding members for Walnut for the guys at LaunchPad and so forth. Boston has a lot of excellent, excellent angel groups. It's resulted... And the other thing is that I have an investment syndicate, just a list of people who invest with me in investments, in which I have very strong conviction. For example, one company that my syndicate invested in, is a company called Savran Technologies.
They've been interviewed on the podcast and it's a platform technology, it has some certain qualities similar to E Ink, in a sense that it has many, many different use cases and figuring out what is the first use case to develop has been a battle, but I think they're onto it and it could be really brilliant. And the beauty of platform technologies is that you have many shots on goal. If your first attempt doesn't work, maybe Jeff Bezos will pick up your technology and make something out of it. This is how I ended up doing podcasting.
KEITH CLINE: Very cool.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. Yeah. Before this whole COVID-19 thing happened, we are... By the way, everybody should know we had planned this before COVID-19 happened. We were going to do a face-to-face interview... Keith, by the way, lives in Philadelphia but he comes up to Boston because he has business here, business in New York, and so on. And so, he was going to be up here in Boston. I'm going to do a face-to-face interview, but then COVID-19 intervened and the whole thing fell apart. And so, here we are recording on Zencastr, but still having a really valuable conversation. Keith, a little biography. Tell me, where did you grow up?
Keith Cline Grew Up in Hooksett, NH and His Father Was an Entrepreneur
KEITH CLINE: I grew up in Hooksett, New Hampshire. I went to high school up there. I went to Nichols College in Dudley, Mass, outside of Webster. I graduated with a finance degree. But my dad was... He was always an entrepreneur. I think I got that from him. He ran a leather coat factory in the mill yards of Manchester.
SAL DAHER: A leather coat factory. Wow.
KEITH CLINE: Yeah, legit making leather coats, selling them to retail shops throughout... Up and down the East Coast, I guess. And that's how I learned my work ethic because it wasn't too long, I was probably eight years old, starting to learn how to clean the leather coat factory. It was 10,000 square feet of leather straps, threads and so, quickly that became my job after my brother and sister grew out of the job. And then after he couldn't face competition of manufacturing in other places like China, he had to close shop down and he became a landlord. He owned a bunch of apartment houses up in Claremont, New Hampshire.
That's how I learned how to perfect painting so I can... I'm not very handy. I can't fix too many things around the house, but I can paint. I was doing that a lot. That was the family business jobs. But after college, I was a tax consultant. I worked for a firm for a couple of years then went to KPMG but I wasn't doing typical tax work. It was more real estate abatement works who were helping Polaroid back in the day and Gillettes and Liberty Mutual.
SAL DAHER: Boy, I sure could use some tax abatement [crosstalk 00:16:17]. I mean, I own multifamily properties, talking about abatement. The sole reason that I have to raise rents is because of the cost of government. Energy prices go up and down. Heating, gas, the cost of gas, it goes down, goes up and so forth, depending on the market. Insurance, goes up little by little and so forth. Now the cost of government goes up every year, inexorably.
I'm actually thinking of when I send the invoice to my tenants, sending them a breakdown of what they're paying for. First, you're paying for property taxes, then you're paying for water and sewer. Okay? Then you're helping to pay the mortgage. Then you're helping to pay this and that and so forth. And it's just astonishing how cost just keeps galloping up. I need some abatement, but they don't give you the time of day.
KEITH CLINE: Well, that's what I was doing. I was basically an appraiser for large commercial and industrial properties and fighting local municipalities with the local assessor and fighting the taxes because this was in 94, 95 when the real estate market was at a really, rough patch. Everything was depressed and then-
SAL DAHER: I'm sorry. When was that?
KEITH CLINE: It was 94, 95.
SAL DAHER: 94, 95. I remember real estate being in a rough patch in 87, 89, as well, because I was in the banking. And those days, yeah... Well, at least the mortgage market was troubled. But yeah, you were bouncing around being a tax advisor. And so, how did you switch over to HR?
How Keith Cline Went from Doing Real Estate Tax Abatement to Human Resources in Tech
KEITH CLINE: I always wanted to get into technology. That was something I always enjoyed as a child. I wanted to get involved, but I didn't really have that experience and I thought maybe sales would be the path and through the tech industry, but didn't have sales experience either.
SAL DAHER: You want to get in sales, kid? You need a sales book. Where's your sales book?
KEITH CLINE: Exactly.
SAL DAHER: Forget about it. You don't have a sales book? Forget about it.
KEITH CLINE: Exactly. It just so happened that a good friend of mine was working for a staffing firm that was building a full time, permanent division and their master, evil plan was to hire people from the big five, at the time. I think it was... Because it was the big six, then it was big five and then four, hire people with that experience because we're going to recruit people out of the management consulting arms of those firms and place them at our customers so that they can hire contractors from us.
Keith and Sal Talk About Some Lean Years
It was a good plan, but it was right when 1998 and the internet bubble was blossoming. That was all my customers was dealing with tech and a lot of web professional services firms like Psion, Razorfish, and IXL, helping ramp those companies up and the internet bubble burst and that's when I went off on my own and started my own firm.
SAL DAHER: For me, those were difficult times. Two years before, 98, Russia melted down and we had a big position in Russia. We had mostly sold the position, but I spent a good year and a half closing these trades that were way, way, way under water. We sold stuff in the 90s and that stuff was trading in the twenties. And so, the buyers were very reluctant to close. I mean, they just put me through the wringer and I remember the glory days of tech in the late 90s and everything zooming up and booming and so on. And I was struggling with Russia.
The Long-Term Credit Management, LTCM, when that whole thing burst, we got caught up in that, in a different situation from LTCM, but we survived because we weren't leveraged. We were investing our own capital. And so, we lived to fight another day and it came out really well. We actually made money from all those positions that we retained from those times. But I've been there.
I remember being laid off from the Bank of Boston earlier, before I joined my business partner back in 1988 and being on the streets at a time when it was really tough to find a job. Anyway, continue the story. You got into HR and then the whole world fell apart when the tech bubble burst.
KEITH CLINE: Yeah, the internet bubble burst and so, I got reallocated within the same firm to become... I was actually, because they would do different projects. They were becoming more of a consulting firm. I was allocated as a frontline consultant to advise AT&T Wireless on their 3G rollout, which that was not my background, obviously, but it was... A person I was partnering up with was more of the subject matter expert. I was more than just doing the PowerPoint stuff and doing interviews and gathering data. But I was flying down to New Jersey every week to do that work but it wasn't what I wanted to do. I love dealing with entrepreneurs and my experience was helping on the people side. It was a no brainer to go off and start my own firm.
Keith Cline Quits His Job and Starts His Own Recruiting Practice
I was living in South Boston at the time and my girlfriend, now wife, she was like, "You should start a company. Start a firm." I did. It was called Dissero and I left the firm I was at. It was called Darwin Partners and Dan Walsh was the president of the company and he was very gracious because when I left, there's non-competes and I was like, "Hey, this one customer called 170 Systems is still hiring, yet it's not really a customer that fits the model of Darwin anymore. Do you mind if I go off and do my own thing and take this customer with me?" And he's like, "Go for it. Good luck," and all that." I was very gracious that they allowed me to do that.
SAL DAHER: As my old partner used to say, "A mensch. A mensch."
KEITH CLINE: Yeah. Yeah, totally. I serviced the heck out of 170 Systems and started pounding the pavement and stalking venture capitalists on different networking panels that they were part of and I wasn't really at the board level. I remember Larry Bohn from General Catalyst gave me some great feedback. I'm sure he does not even know this story at all but I remember it well. I was just like, "Hey, I'm Keith from Dissero and I help with staffing up tech companies." And he's like, "You seem like a go-getter. Good for you but you're not at the board level so the best thing for you to do is just reach out to all the portfolio company CEOs and tell them what to do, because they're the ones paying for what you provide."
And that was great experience because I was basically spinning my wheels, trying to connect with these people that were sitting at the board... Doing executive searches was on the radar and I wasn't there yet but once I started VentureFizz, a lot of the content on our site was provided from venture capitalists that were already blogging, but looking for additional exposure for their content to a target arrivals, which was VentureFizz. Right away, I built a lot of credibility and a peer-to-peer relationship with a lot of the investors in Boston that ended up doing my whole search firm. As far as the search work we were doing, it was mainly intros from the investors that was product management and marketing hires, mainly. It was CMO, VP of marketing or VP of product or first product hire, once the founder was stepping aside from leading product and scaling a company.
Keith Cline Talks About His Content Strategy in VentureFizz
SAL DAHER: Yeah. Yeah, the content that you create is content that really gets people's attention because they're like, "Yeah, I need to know what's happening in my job market. Who knows? Who knows how long this job is going to go," and so forth? You send out a lot of mailers and yet, people read your mailers. If I sent out that many mailers, people would just forget about it, unsubscribe, unsubscribe. But if you're working, you always want to hear what's going on in the job market. And so, you provide great content in that way.
KEITH CLINE: I mean, that's definitely a key value that we add with VentureFizz because we're not a traditional media company. Everything on VentureFizz is supported by our customers that pay a subscription to be on our site, where they publish their employment branding page called a biz page. They get unlimited postings to our job board, and then they have access to our content series that are telling the story of a company, their people and their culture.
The challenge that most people have is their head's down doing their job, focused on building a company product, whatever job they are in, and then they poke their head up and they're like, "Oh, I'm looking for a job. What's going on in the Boston tech scene or New York?" The company discovery piece is a challenging thing for most people because they just don't have the bandwidth to keep tabs on all that's going on. When they come to VentureFizz-
SAL DAHER: And that's all you do is keep tabs on companies. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
KEITH CLINE: Yep, and it all tracks back to a hiring of, is the common goal.
SAL DAHER: Sure. Yeah, but that's part of your business is to know... As my late sainted business partner, Robert P. Smith used to say, "Who's doing what to whom for how much? Kiddo, you'll find out." Yeah. Yeah, yeah. That is really interesting. What are the big challenges for you, Keith, right now? What are the things that you would like to overcome that you were struggling with? You care to share that?
The Biggest Obstacles Keith Cline Is Facing Now
KEITH CLINE: I guess this statement's not going to make this evergreen content, but the pandemic that everybody's dealing with is number one right now. Companies are laying people off or pausing hiring, or they're still cautiously hiring. But yeah, Jason Calacanis, since we were talking about him earlier, he's got a very optimistic viewpoint on what's going to happen. I'm siding with him. But outside of that is, I've had to evolve the identity of VentureFizz over the past three years because it was a side project. It wasn't a full time business. I had to really hone in on what is our voice? What is the content that we're providing because people would confuse us to be more of a traditional media outlet and I understand why. We would publish stories about startups that... I was always thinking that startups need an outlet to tell their story and it's almost like the farm system for baseball where need to groom these companies. They're starving for attention so we'll provide them a voice on VentureFizz.
But as I started to really focus on building the business, those stories really didn't add value for what our core mission was, nor were they getting the page views that one would expect for that type of content. We just continued to sharpen the lens on what we do, what's our value, what are we providing for our customers and what are we providing for our audience, which is, mainly job seekers. I feel good about exactly what we do now, as it relates to the content that's across. We do a lot of video now, obviously the podcast. There's a lot of still photography with our office tours and Q and A's. All of that's got a common theme of why that contents on VentureFizz versus before, there was really no rhyme or reason why that was on there other than, "Oh, that seems interesting."
That's been a challenge. Being everywhere is a challenge because there's always different channels that help build with the customer acquisition side, so the job seeker side. We're doubles-sided marketplace so we're always looking to engage with more of an audience that is going to come to our website and find value there. We have to really spread your wings across so many different channels and there's always new ones coming up so that's definitely a challenge.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, I'm pretty limited on the channels that I use. Mostly, I use LinkedIn. I mean, tangentially, I use Twitter and by the way, Facebook, but LinkedIn is where I spend most of my time and is where I have the most impact because these little videos that I load on there for the guests on the podcast explaining the podcast, it gets easily, four or five times the number of downloads that the podcasts themselves get and they drive downloads to the podcast. And they're really easy to do. 30 seconds. I like the fact that they play with the sound off on LinkedIn and you like, "Geez, what's the person saying?" It draws you in. All the other channels, I haven't found them to really be very valuable. Is there anything that you found to be particularly valuable?
Golden Marketing Advice!
KEITH CLINE: Well, I completely agree with you. We measure all the different channels and by far, LinkedIn is where we double, triple, our time because one, that's where the audience is. It's professionals. Two, we do get a tremendous amount of value from things that we post to my feed, natively, and then to the VentureFizz company page. LinkedIn is number one on our strategy. Twitter is second, but that's been declining. And then Facebook and Instagram are just afterthoughts that were there because you might as well and they're not really strategic it's... But you know what? The number one part of our strategy is email and you highlighted before. We do send out a lot of emails. It's all opt-in so people are signing up to review them. That's where we get the most engagement. I always crack up because the old is still very new again.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, here's a tip. If you're a company that has clients, the most valuable piece of data you have is their email address and their name and the opt-in for them to allow you to communicate with them by email because if you rely on Facebook, if you rely on LinkedIn, if you rely on anything else like that, you're allowing these people to filter the information. Facebook used to allow people to post to their feed. If you were a store and you had people who followed you on Facebook, they would see all your offerings and so forth. No more. And so, a business should be always... I mean, I'm not an advertiser for Constant Contact or MailChimp, but let me tell you, if you're any type of business, the first thing you should think about in marketing is building your mailing list. You agree with that, Keith Cline?
KEITH CLINE: 1000%. It's gold and it's one of those things that you do control your voice to your customer, your consumer. For us, it's job seeker.
SAL DAHER: And you hear back from them. You hear back from them. I mean, it's like people... Sometimes they come back to you and say, "Hey, you took 13 minutes to get to the story, blah." People tell you stuff.
KEITH CLINE: Yeah. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I highly recommend use MailChimp, Constant Contact, Privy for email grabbing. There's lots of tools out there that help you build up your email list and that should be your A-number-one priority. LinkedIn, even though that's still number one on our social strategy-
SAL DAHER: Sure.
KEITH CLINE: ... they did change the algorithm for video exposure, I think, back in September of last year. Even that, the views went down because they changed the algorithm. You don't want to be reliant on a platform's algorithm to channel your success because it can change at the drop of a dime.
SAL DAHER: Yeah. Yeah, I've experimented with the format, tried to create a little bit of visual interest. You do much better than I do, but that seems to make a difference. Yeah, very interesting.
KEITH CLINE: Sal, you're an active investor. How do you decide on what to invest in and what's the typical criteria that you're focused on, as far as the type of company?
How Sal Decides in What Startup to Invest
SAL DAHER: I've been investing in startups since the early 1990s and I've invested in, by this time, probably about 60 startups, and the criteria keep changing all the time. As I look at my portfolio, I've invested in broadly, biotech companies. I've also invested in the marketing technology space. I've invested in companies in the nanotechnology space, various areas of technology. And it's becoming increasingly evident to me that where I should be focusing my energies is in biotech. And I'm looking closer and closer into investing, just exclusively in biotech and not writing checks in any other area. Why? Because I've invested in some really successful, marketing technology companies, at least three or four of them that are doing really well. But when I look at the valuations, I'm up 3X, 4X, in some of these and there's really no way for these companies to build really massive value because there are no barriers to entry.
You create a way of optimizing video audiences for this brand. Somebody is going to copy what you're doing and they're going to eat half your lunch. I'm really now focusing more on a... I also happened to live in the center of the biotech world, which is Cambridge, and I've invested in a bunch of really interesting biotech companies. For example, I'm an investor in SQZ Biotech, S-Q-Z Biotech, which is a tremendously, consequential company because it has a platform technology, that word again, platform, that can be used in many different ways in helping people do things much better. For example, they receive $132 million from Roche to help Roche, deliver a particular type of immune therapy for cancer. They didn't develop the therapy. Roche had the therapy before, but Roche couldn't make the therapy work without the technology that SQZ has. And so, this helps SQZ build tremendous value and they have lots of other areas that they are developing.
And the company I mentioned before, Savran Technologies, which is also working right now in something that can tremendously enhance the value of existing businesses with its technology. I look for defensible, for moats, technology that cannot be replicated by anyone else because it has patent protection and then I look for technologies that can be developed with no more than five or $6 million in early stage funding, which is really the most you can get from angels because VCs are doing less and less of this financing. With four or $5 million, a company that can get to the point where a strategic player, such as Roche in the case of SQZ Biotech, can come in and say, "Here, I want to work with you. Let's do a multibillion dollar deal to develop this technology in this area because it's going to add tremendous value to us." That's the kind of company I'm looking for.
I'm really narrowing the focus towards biotech startups that are platform-driven and that can be developed with not a lot of money. I'm not interested in something that's going to take $50 million before you can proof out the technology, you can bring the technology to market. Another one that I'm invested in that could fit the bill is something called AltrixBio. It grew out of this collaboration. There's a surgeon at Brigham & Women’s Hospital that was doing this weight loss surgery. It's the best weight loss surgery there is. It's called Roux-en-Y gastric bypass. And it happens that this weight loss surgery causes 80% of diabetic patients to go into remission.
They've created a Roux-en-Y bypass surgery in a pill and they're testing that and that is something that, I hope, will probably take no more than five or $6 million to get to the point where a big, strategic player will say, "Ah, we give a pill to people. As long as they're on this pill, 80% of the patients will have their diabetes go into remission." That is a goldmine and that is something that can be developed, I hope, with... I've interviewed the founder, one of the founders, on the podcast, Nancy Briefs. I've interviewed the founder of Savran. I've interviewed the founder of SQZ. That's the kind of company that I want to populate my portfolio with.
KEITH CLINE: Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah, I imagine it's high risk, but obviously, the return is tremendous
SAL DAHER: Completely high risk. I mean, these companies are... Until they hit it big they're a few steps away from disaster all the time, but the potential is massive. That's the thing. I mean, you're involved with a later stage companies that are VC funded. Those are the people who are hiring. I mean, the companies that I get involved with, I'm helping the company. It's like, "I need a CEO, but I don't have cash to pay the CEO. How do I do it?" That kind of thing. Very good.
Keith, I'm really grateful that you made the time and I hope that you continue to do well. I hope you stay healthy in isolation and continue doing your remote interviews. And yeah, let's do a check-in sometime. Let's keep each other abreast of how things are going.
KEITH CLINE: Yeah. Yeah. I enjoy your podcast and I was glad that we're able to do this together. This was a lot of fun.
SAL DAHER: Yeah, and I'll keep listening to your podcasts as well, to the VentureFizz Podcast. Listeners of the VentureFizz Podcast, check out Angel Invest Boston. We interview early stage founders and investors in early stage companies. Sometimes we interview VC's. We interview a few of those. As I say, VentureFizz tends to be later. We're not focused on jobs because I'm not a recruiter. I'm an investor, but we have a lot in common, but we don't compete, so to speak. Keith and I are not competitors in any way. Great to share notes.
KEITH CLINE: Yeah. This was a lot of fun and hopefully, we catch up again soon.
SAL DAHER: Excellent. Stay well.
KEITH CLINE: You too.
SAL DAHER: I'm glad you were able to join us. Our engineer is Raul Rosa. Our theme was composed by John McKusick. Our graphic design is by Katharine Woodman-Maynard. Our host is coached by Grace Daher.