The Joke is You Can Do This More or Less in the Open, No One Will Care

October 13, 2022 4:32 AM

I made $200,000 last year ghostwriting tweets for superstar VCs. It takes me 5 hours a week. Here's how I found my clients and built a booming side hustle from scratch. [Business Insider; archive]
posted by chavenet (30 comments total)

Does... does this person think they just invented Public Relations? Or is that the joke? I can't tell.
posted by gwint at 4:58 AM on October 13, 2022 [22 favorites]

Feels like "idiots pay too much for straightforward service they could have gotten much cheaper". I guess a fool and their money really are easily parted.
posted by plonkee at 5:07 AM on October 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

Did I just read that company founders now won't talk to VCs until after the VCs have signed a document giving them a bunch of money? And this is because we have VCs with tens of billions of dollars and not very many founders? Or not very many of the right kind of founders, for some value of "the right kind"? How do you become the right kind of founder - is it also about hiring the right ghostwriter who hits all the right topical notes? Could you be a ghostwriter for both a VC and a founder and talk both your personas into a big deal because they're both so cool?
posted by clawsoon at 5:10 AM on October 13, 2022 [5 favorites]

clawsoon: " How do you become the right kind of founder"

Step 1: be born white, male, rich, and connected.
Step 2:

Also, I'm gonna take a wild guess that the writer already executed step 1.

Evidence:

The average founder of a Series C company makes something like $120,000 a year. And you're expected to cover your travel costs out of pocket. So that work doesn't actually pay the bills.
posted by signal at 5:16 AM on October 13, 2022 [13 favorites]

I do think there is an interesting point to be made about people fighting shy of tweets and other SM linked to professional activity. I do a bit of SM for my dept, I am a long way from being an expert, though I have been described as one in some meetings. This poorly informed conclusion, and my point, are that colleagues tend to see SM as some sort of dark art, where only the cognoscenti should venture. On one side this is because people can't be arsed, but I think it goes further than that. Because of the bit of SM I was doing a colleague asked me to handle comms for a research project, which is only tangential to my real area of expertise. I spend maybe 15 mins a week on that, with a bit more hassle around bigger deliverables like writing and getting a 2 min video produced. This is over 3.5 years so say 50 hours for SM plus other comms duties (video, travel, comms strategy document) coming to say 2-3 weeks? Less than a month's work overall. For that input we were able to negotiate the equivalent of $100k, enough to cover a researcher FT for a year, inc overheads. I did a presentation to our funder on our comms package the other day and was told it was the best they had ever seen. I am really not delivering very much, but its enough to go beyond what the average research project wants to take care of for itself. It's just astonishing to me how easy most of it has been. It really makes me wonder whether there is some way to monetise it as a side hustle.
posted by biffa at 5:20 AM on October 13, 2022 [15 favorites]

It really makes me wonder whether there is some way to monetise it as a side hustle.

Based on what the article said about being this-week-topical, it sounds like you should immediately write an article and a tweet about how you turned a few hours of social media work into big bucks for your research department, "if you think getting money from VCs is difficult you should see how stingy research funders are", get it out there today while this Business Insider article is still hot, and you'll have the best start to your side hustle you could've hoped for.
posted by clawsoon at 5:43 AM on October 13, 2022 [13 favorites]

I did a presentation to our funder on our comms package the other day and was told it was the best they had ever seen. I am really not delivering very much, but its enough to go beyond what the average research project wants to take care of for itself.

I think comms work is interesting and is fairly easy to do at least averagely well (it is my current professional field). I am regularly reminded by other people's actions and comments that it is not easy for everyone. With social media, and to an extent pitching to traditional media, not everyone is comfortable with the risk of making a mistake when it's inherently in the public domain. In addition, a lot of people are squeamish about the persuasive side of it.

If you're doing something effective then you can monetise it, what you need to work on are your connections and hustle - who else would pay for this kind of work and how can you get in touch with them. (I hate and am therefore terrible at hustle, which is why I work in-house.)
posted by plonkee at 6:15 AM on October 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

So there's a book about this: The Winner-Take-All Society: Why the Few at the Top Get So Much More Than the Rest of Us. "...the spread of 'winner-take-all markets'—markets in which small differences in performance give rise to enormous differences in reward.' (Of course, who wins doesn't depend only on performance, as explained by one of the authors' other books, Success and Luck.) But the potential for the right tweet to make a huge difference means that people are willing to pay a lot for the right tweet. And although there's no way to know whether hiring this guy will result in the right tweet, if he's got a good track record (or at least is perceived as having a good track record), it's rational to pay him a shitload of money rather than take a (perceived) risk by paying someone else less.
posted by Mr.Know-it-some at 6:20 AM on October 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

We've been living in the metaverse for 15 years. We live in a technology-mediated reality. There are no facts. Narrative is the only thing that matters. Everything is propaganda. That's the world we're living in, and we're not going back.

Christ, what an asshole.
posted by RonButNotStupid at 6:26 AM on October 13, 2022 [24 favorites]

Business Insider: I made $200,000 last year ghostwriting tweets for superstar VCs...

Business Insider: "I made $300K last year reading Twitter for VCs. Here's how I find potential founders with the best hustle"

Business Insider: "Yacht Life: How Working for VCs and Founders Got Me Free Trips on a Megayacht"

Business Insider: "Can you meet your soulmate on a billionaire's yatch? Yes! And we did!"

Business Insider: "Getting hitched at a SV Titan's New Zealand Megamansion-- it happened to us!"

Business Insider: "Held Prisoner in an Crypto King's NZ Compound. If you think that sounds bad, you're wrong!"

Business Insider: "RaftLife is the the new VanLife: Leaving the Tech Industry is Easier Than You Ever Imagined"
posted by gwint at 6:38 AM on October 13, 2022 [35 favorites]

Step 1: be born white, male, rich, and connected.

Going down the Twitter hole leads to:

Venture capital as currently practiced by established investors is not an economic project, it is a political project. This paper is just a small piece of a mountain of evidence showing VCs consistently invest in the entrepreneurs least likely to produce outsized outcomes.

Now why would they do that? Why would VCs invest in the worst entrepreneurs? Because the best entrepreneurs (and investors) sit outside of current VC networks. They are disproportionately NOT the wealthy Stanford wiz kids we’ve been taught to envision.

Studies like the one above paint a picture of a venture outperformer that is quite different than the standard VC archetype—one that skews much older, more female, and more Black, Latin and Asian than the current VC and founder class...

VC incumbents have constructed a false image of the asset where the most important attribute for an investor is a "strong" network.

The study in question, Age and High-Growth Entrepreneurship[PDF], says that the likelihood of being an extremely successful founder peaks at age 60, but VC firms prefer much younger founders. From that data it says:

We also see that venture capitalists tend to bet on relatively young founders. Given that younger founders have substantially lower batting averages (e.g., see Figure 2), the founder-age tendency in VC investments may be surprising. VCs may thus be seen as making bad bets, which may be consistent with empirical findings suggesting that VCs have trouble predicting success and have earned low returns (Kaplan and Lerner 2010; Kerr, Nanda, and Rhodes-Kropf 2014). However, young founders may also be more in need of early-stage external finance, thus leading to this relationship. More subtly, and noting that VCs are seeking high returns, which is not identical to high growth, it may be that younger founders tend to sell their equity at lower prices, and thus VCs are making optimal return decisions.

So VCs are bad at VC? And maybe this whole Twitter-ghostwriter-to-make-deals-happen thing is a sign of that?
posted by clawsoon at 6:48 AM on October 13, 2022 [12 favorites]

I won't be specific, but... yesterday a professional organization in my field had to apologize for a tweet on their account. Their explanation was that their social media was outsourced.

Several replies immediately asked "why aren't you paying someone from your own membership ffs?!" and they... didn't answer that one.

I suspect that biffa's comment above explains how this happened.
posted by humbug at 6:54 AM on October 13, 2022 [6 favorites]

We've been living in the metaverse for 15 years. We live in a technology-mediated reality. There are no facts. Narrative is the only thing that matters. Everything is propaganda. That's the world we're living in, and we're not going back.

In addition to RonButNotStupid's reaction, which I must say I agree with, this perspective is just seems so hopelessly out-of-date.

This person is trying to imply that they see the truth of "our" technology-mediated reality for what it really is, etc. but I think they are living in the past. Facts are real. The Earth's climate systems don't read Twitter or hackernews. Narratives and propaganda cannot stop a river, cannot summon rain to quench a drought, cannot replenish arctic sea ice.

Some days it feels like I can't help but see evidence of the great discontinuity of our times everywhere. This person is doing PR for VCs and thinks that artificial environment their work occurs in (narratives and propoganda) is an inescapable reality, and that there is no going back. This person is severely deluded. They are the "this is fine" dog but also the dog doesn't see the flames at all and the house the dog is living in is a VR plot leased from MeTa and also the dog thinks that Meta-leased VR plots are the inescapable future of our collective reality. At some point, they will smell the ash of old-growth forests through the Meta Quest Pro v8 or whatever.
posted by lazaruslong at 7:11 AM on October 13, 2022 [13 favorites]

You need to be reasonably contrarian and also be Straussian about it; encode your meaning in a set of memes that people already understand. You should never say what you actually want to say. Instead, you should make hints and oblique references. Think of it as Playboy, as opposed to porn. You want to leave some work for your readers to do. It can get repetitive, at times. Read the timeline for long enough and you'll start to realize that most of this is just cribbing other people's jokes.

It's so funny to me, reading some dipshit's guide to how to tweet generically enough that people like it. And it's funny to me that VCs care about this enough to pay this much money for a dipshit's tweets.

Then again, it's entirely possible that I only feel that way because I too consume entirely too much Internet.
posted by Tom Hanks Cannot Be Trusted at 7:47 AM on October 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

Any more it's gotten to be where I just can't tell if some things are meant to be serious or if someone's just taking the piss. Something about this reads more like the latter.
posted by jquinby at 8:11 AM on October 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

There are no facts. Narrative is the only thing that matters. Everything is propaganda. That's the world we're living in, and we're not going back.

The article doesn't quite connect this dot, but I'm pretty sure this is the root belief underlying "the joke" he keeps mentioning everyone wants to signal they're in on. And of course it's convenient that such a "joke" implies no one needs to feel responsible for their actions or speech. It's explicitly the same "joke" that powers all the rightwing lies worldwide. And would he even disagree that "joke" and "scam" are truly interchangeable here? Everyone wants to believe they're in on the scam. Everyone wants to believe they're in on the joke.
posted by nobody at 8:23 AM on October 13, 2022 [11 favorites]

~There are no facts. Narrative is the only thing that matters. Everything is propaganda. That's the world we're living in, and we're not going back.

~In addition to RonButNotStupid's reaction, which I must say I agree with, this perspective is just seems so hopelessly out-of-date.

Is it, though?

This has been the operating principle on the right for decades now, and it seems to be working brilliantly for them. Talk radio, WMDs, Birthers, Qanon, FoxNews, Trump, Jan.6, etc. You have at least a third of the country seriously believing that Biden stole the election. They live in a world of pure propaganda, an alternate narrative flowing 24/7 via the internet. All because the right made a strategic shift to "alternate facts" and weaponized them.
posted by Thorzdad at 8:42 AM on October 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

Facts are real. The Earth's climate systems don't read Twitter or hackernews. Narratives and propaganda cannot stop a river, cannot summon rain to quench a drought, cannot replenish arctic sea ice.

Lately I can't shake the notion that the answer to the Fermi paradox could be that intelligence inevitably leads to stories, and stories inevitably enrapture the intelligent, eventually to the point that stories matter to them more than reality—leaving them unable to recognize, let alone contend with, reality's challenges.
posted by CheesesOfBrazil at 8:44 AM on October 13, 2022 [7 favorites]

I doubt I'm alone but I'm sick to death of these side-chisels.
posted by drstrangelove at 8:59 AM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

Is it, though?

This has been the operating principle on the right for decades now, and it seems to be working brilliantly for them.

Oh, it's certainly still a viable and popular perspective as you rightly note. It's still wildly out of date with respect to suitability for our shared state of global precarity, imo. The game was up for alternative facts as soon as mother earth became the one punching back, now it's just a question of when that alt-reality comes crashing down.
posted by lazaruslong at 9:34 AM on October 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

I spent a few years ghostwriting social media posts for a wide variety of people and companies, but I didn't make anywhere near $200,000 doing it. In fact, I quit when the agency I was working with tried to cut my pay by 50%, despite the fact they repeatedly told me I was the best writer they had. Obviously, I was doing it wrong.
posted by vibrotronica at 9:46 AM on October 13, 2022 [5 favorites]

now it's just a question of when that alt-reality comes crashing down

To borrow from Warren Buffett, they can sustain their alt-reality for longer than you can sustain your life. It will inevitably have to crash, but that doesn't mean any of the rest of us will be alive to see it happen.
posted by aramaic at 9:57 AM on October 13, 2022 [8 favorites]

Gather round, ye Business Insider readers, as I regale you all with a tasty tale of how I became a millionaire due to sheer tenacity and ... okay, okay, I matched 5 on a Powerball. AND YOU CAN TOO!
posted by revmitcz at 11:03 AM on October 13, 2022 [2 favorites]

"from scratch"

At first, I used Twitter like anybody else. I was a principal in the VC world.

He broke into the industry that he was already part of!
posted by meowzilla at 12:01 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

Ironic: The source of the story chose to remain anonymous, despite "No one will care." I guess that's the joke in the joke on the joke?
posted by clawsoon at 12:01 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

I think it's no one will care that the CEO's are doing it, getting paid for it is the shameful thing. See people in power having affairs, where their partner, often a women, is the one who is castigated.
posted by Carillon at 1:07 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

We've been living in the metaverse for 15 years. We live in a technology-mediated reality

[Guy Debord's ghost kicks over some reels of 16mm film] EVERYTHING ONCE DIRECTLY LIVED HAS RECEDED INTO A REPRESENTATION
posted by Fiasco da Gama at 4:45 PM on October 13, 2022 [3 favorites]

I mean, 5 hours a week, maybe, but built on years of connections and the massive benefit that comes just from being immersed in this culture probably for their entire adult life. But yeah, easy side hustle.

The "120K doesn't pay the bills" thing pissed me off too. "See, even CEOs and such struggle and have to do extra work -- shouldn't you, lowly office worker, also spend every free minute trying to scrape and grind yourself ahead?"
posted by Saxon Kane at 6:18 PM on October 13, 2022 [1 favorite]

That article was written in such a stilted and boring way that I had to skim it and it was still tedious. Tweeting for cash definitely doesn't make one a good or even decent writer.
posted by oneirodynia at 6:37 PM on October 13, 2022 [4 favorites]

Business Insider is a constant shitpost of rubbishy articles about people making huge amounts of money in questionable and often immoral ways.
posted by hrpomrx at 6:06 AM on October 14, 2022 [4 favorites]