I Find Making Content in Venture Capital Really Interesting 🤔

I don’t even know why, but I find making content in venture capital really interesting. I’ve even started paying attention to related content, learning about it and looking into opportunities.

Yesterday I had a short chat with someone who works at a VC firm. Then she said she was in HR. For a moment… I felt a small, quiet flicker of surprise, but then again… all I had learned was the other person’s role. What was I so happy about? 🤪

Before that, I had always assumed she was in PR. It turns out she also does related work.

During the conversation, because I was curious, she recommended an episode of Zhang Xiaojun’s show—the one where she talks with a partner from ZhenFund.

I listened to it.

To be honest, in terms of the personal charisma I felt, Zhang Jinjian was still more appealing to me.

The former felt more lively, more alive; the latter was quieter, with more of a Zen quality.

Although I don’t know who will see this ramble, I want to add a disclaimer: everyone’s feelings and tastes are unique. This is not a judgment of who is better. It has to do with the person expressing the view and is closely connected to their private factors—their experiences, preferences, and so on. These affect where their attention goes and how deep or shallow their response feels. And I ignored other inner qualities and all external labels; getting to know someone through only one episode… is inevitably biased.

ZhenFund’s respect for people—not only young people, but every rejected founder and so on—is probably something every office worker dreams of.

Before, I didn’t know much about VC. After slowly spending time around it, I found everyone in the industry so interesting. Whether they are looking at projects, choosing people, or making decisions—every choice they make eventually points back to people.

Some people just inexplicably seem cute, even if all I have heard is their voice or the way they express themselves—not only in VC.

Conversely, founders are also choosing among investors. That decisiveness and resilience that is not the “throw yourself at any remedy in a crisis” kind of choice is also shaping the possibility of sticking to a long-term approach in building a company.

“There is always a mess of life behind the polished surface.”

After listening to a few PR teachers talk, I realized that my image of making content in this industry really does contain some idealization.

But what I can say for sure is that I will always love direct, candid work environments, things that build influence from what is real, and companies that respect people.

Also yesterday, I saw a post on X about the “Karpathy effect.” It came from a term used by Andrej Karpathy, who used to lead Tesla’s self-driving work and was an early core member of OpenAI, and who studied under Fei-Fei Li. Now he not only teaches people how to use AI, but also tells them what AI is and how to take part in building it.

What is the “Karpathy effect”?

In simple terms, it means making deep, complicated knowledge simple and easy to enter, so it no longer sits out of reach and can “enter ordinary people’s homes.” Being both brilliant and sincere is also how the public tends to see Andrej Karpathy.

People with a programming background, especially Python, may want to check out Andrej Karpathy’s course Neural Networks: Zero to Hero.

btw, his conversation with Dwarkesh Patel a few days ago is also worth listening to!

Andrej Karpathy reminds me of Y Jango, the first person who helped me understand more about learning and deep learning—the relationship between learning behavior and neural networks. Like Andrej Karpathy, Y Jango’s videos and courses are very accessible. Highly recommended!

Then I thought: in venture capital, there are also many things that are inaccessible to ordinary people. How a PR person designs similar ways of facing an audience is also pretty interesting and challenging. Even though the final audience in this field is not ordinary people, making things easy to understand is always a good thing, right?

To come back to the subject, I’m very aware of the filter I have around “making content in VC,” but this may be the path that is currently closest to the industry for me.

Although, actually… I’m still very far away.

Anyway, let me allow myself to say some messy, presumptuous things without knowing how high the sky is or the fine details. I wrote them down, so I’ll forget them anyway.