How to Build an Audience at Scale

Sahil Bloom is Vice President at Altamont Capital Partners, a generalist investment fund managing over $2.5 billion in capital. At Altamont, Sahil helps lead the consumer products and services sector. Sahil also participates in board activities at Altamont’s portfolio companies Fox Racing, and Brixton.

Sahil is an angel investor in over 25 tech startups. He works with entrepreneurs and founders to build scalable and sustainable value for all stakeholders. Sahil also publishes a popular newsletter about business, mental models, economics, and more.

Sahil graduated from Stanford University with a bachelor’s degree in economics & sociology, and holds a master’s degree in public policy. While at Stanford, Sahil was a four-year member of the Stanford baseball team. Sahil is also a two-time recipient of the Bruce R. Cameron Memorial Award. This award honors students exhibiting excellence in athletics, academics, and leadership.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

• How Sahil went from 500 to 200,000 followers on Twitter in one year
• The emerging seven-figure opportunity Sahil sees for localized newsletters
• Sahil’s system for writing exceptional content
• The key difference between income-producing activities and wealth-producing activities

Links & Resources

• Packy McCormick
• Mario Gabriele
• Anthony Pompliano
• Fred Wilson
• Tomas Gomez
• a16z
• Future
• Synthesis School
• Hone
• Sequoia
• Benchmark
• QED Investors
• Ryan Holiday
• Notion
• Clayton Christensen Institute
• Pallet
• Patrick O'Shaughnessy
• Ben Thompson

Sahil’s Links

• Follow Sahil on Twitter: @SahilBloom
• The Curiosity Chronicle

Episode Transcript

Sahil: [00:00:00]
I think of writing and storytelling as foundational skills to your entire life. I mean, if you write well, it makes you better in every other area of your life. I think more clearly it exposes the gaps in your thinking so quickly. And that happened to me all on the way. Like the amount that I learned about investing by writing about investing was insane.

Nathan: [00:00:27]
This episode is with Sahil Bloom. So, Sahil, full-time is an investor. He’s a vice president at Altamont Capital Partners. On the side he has built a massive Twitter following over just the last year before we started the interview.

I had no idea that his 200,000 plus Twitter followers have been in the last 14 months, basically since COVID.

So, in this episode, we talk about growing a Twitter audience. We talk about all kinds of things. Sahil was a baseball pitcher for Stanford. And so we get into the new name/image/likeness rules for the NCAA.

What else? There’s all kinds of good stuf: his creative writing process, his mental models, how he thinks about income versus wealth. It’s the kind of episode that I absolutely love some.

So I’m going to get out of the way and let you listen to it. But really quick, if you’d do me a favor and go ahead and subscribe on Spotify, iTunes, wherever you listen to the podcast, and then write a review, I’d appreciate it. It will help the podcast reach a few more people.

So, all right. Let’s dive in.

Sahil, thanks for joining me.

Sahil: [00:01:34]
Yeah. Thanks for having me.

Nathan: [00:01:35]
Okay. So, I want to start with what you put in your bio, which is just three words, investor, educator, and storyteller. I like how concise you’ve got this down to things that describe you, but how do you think about the way that those three interact with you?

Sahil: [00:01:50]
You know, it’s it’s interesting. I tend to think that there is like a natural flywheel that is being created in real time around the universe of like investing, in the universe of creating. And you’re seeing it in real time with some of these, you know, creative capitalists for lack of a better way to put it.

Like Packy is one of my favorite writers, does an incredible job. Mario, over at the The Generalist. A lot of these folks, I mean, Pomp was one of the early ones to do it. A lot of these folks have built these scale platforms, these audiences, and then as a result of that, and as a result of the reach and the leverage that they’re able to get on, having that kind of owned audience in a certain extent, to a certain extent, they’re able to really support these companies.

And so, as an investor, as an advisor, you can kind of just create this natural flywheel around it, where your content creation and the creative work is the leading into, these really interesting investment and capitalists opportunities. And then because of those, you’re actually getting more content to write about.

It actually is creating this really unique, flywheel that I think we’re really in the early days of candidly, like, we’ve seen a lot of people starting to do it, but it’s very much the first inning in my opinion. And I think there’s a massive shakeout happening in the investment world because of it.

All of the VC is, and all of these growth equity funds are just starting to realize that in order to win deals, in order to be a part of these cap tables and really provide value, you know, they’ve said, how can we be helpful as like the joke moniker for a long time, but in order to really be helpful, you need to be able to do tangible things for the companies that you’re supporting and investing in.

And these creator capitalists, I do feel like have figured that out and I don’t put myself in the same ranks as those people that I mentioned at all. I’m kind of very green and new to this, but, it’s been fun to start see the early fruits of that.

Nathan: [00:03:42]
Yeah. It’s interesting to me. Cause you’ve seen for a long time, investors like, Fred Wilson, Tomas Gomez and others, like have these blogs or newsletters, you know, for a long time. And it’s gotten them incredible deal flow and reputation and everything else, but it does seem like there’s a new wave.

I don’t know if it’s just the next generation of creators doing this, but it’s much more Twitter forward rather than starting with a blog and a Twitter, a newsletter. do you see other continuations or differences between like sort of the previous generation in the second generation.

Sahil: [00:04:17]
Yeah. I mean, I think that the VC world has known this for a long time. like the early stage VCs in particular have known that. Audience and reach was a wedge for deal flow. And...