Venture Twits

Like many people, I am now getting more and more news and information through twitter. I’ve always thought that facebook is socially familiar —  because it is permission-based and synchronous, one gets information about people one knows.  However twitter is socially aspirational — you can follow people you don’t know well and who, if you met them in real life, would probably grant you even less than 140 characters.  And then there is the copious amounts of data, that Twitter is just beginning to mine.

What is also interesting to me is the variance in the twitter power law. I follow a number of venture capitalists, and the most prominent have far more followers than people they follow. However some seem to use twitter to receive information (thus following more people) as opposed to just using it as a distribution channel (following very few).

So, on a fairly random day in early December, I looked at the respective followers and following numbers for the (somewhat dated) list of 10 leading VC blogs (although I tossed out Guy Kawasaki), ranked by the number of twitter followers:

VC                            Followers                 Following             Ratio
Fred Wilson             116,808                            550                          212:1
Dave McClure           40,475                         4,309                              9:1
Paul Graham             20,812                               55                          378:1
Mark Suster               18,321                             599                            31:1
Brad Feld                    17,718                             505                            35:1
Josh Kopelman          17,178                          1,209                            14:1
Bill Gurley                   13,196                             174                            76:1
Bijan Sabet                 10,988                            388                            28:1
Mark Peter Davis        5,742                            304                            19:1
Jeremy Liew                1,307                                91                            14:1

The variation here is remarkable.  Clearly at some point there is some sort of diminishing law of follower returns, but the individual choice of how many people to follow shows a high degree of difference.   The insightful Matt Harris has a related post on venture blogging where he points out that most VCs are, at heart, geeks with limited social skills. It’s not clear that the skills an early-stage firm wants from an investor and board member, and the skills inherent in being a successful blogger and tweeter, are in any way aligned.

Now I don’t claim this has any deep meaning, and judging by the company, dominating twitter may not be the goal, but venture capital is an information-based business, and the way that VCs choose to both collecting and using twitter as an information platform says something about how the overall industry will continue to evolve.