Want to work in venture capital? Maybe it’s time to start posting some memes.
The anonymous founder behind the finance meme account Litquidity, who goes by “Lit,” announced on Twitter last week that he landed a partnership as a venture scout for Bain Capital Ventures, the firm whose portfolio companies include the likes of BlockFi, Lime, and Cameo. Venture capital firms tap venture scouts to find new founders and companies, often in the very early stages of their startup journeys, and write small investment checks on the firm’s behalf.
Since starting the account in 2017, Litquidity, who says he previously worked in investment banking and private equity, has amassed roughly 192,700 followers on Twitter and around 633,000 on Instagram, posting satirical memes and news about the often grueling nature of the finance industry for those who work in it. The anonymous influencer also has a daily newsletter, Exec Sum, which now has over 100,000 subscribers, Litquidity told Fortune, and recently launched a podcast with Litquidity’s first and currently only employee, former banker and reality TV star Mark Moran.
Among Litquidity’s goals is to one day create his own venture firm: “That would just be a meme in itself—memeing a VC fund into existence,” he told New York magazine last year. (As to when followers could expect a Litquidity venture firm, Litquidity told Fortune “maybe 2023.”) Over the past year, Litquidity has invested his own angel checks into startups including Substack competitor Beehiiv and social investing app Iris.
Litquidity’s move to set up special purpose vehicles (SPVs), which pool capital to make an investment, as well as landing the venture scout partnership at Bain Capital Ventures, put him well on that journey.
Naturally, the Bain Capital Ventures partnership originated over Twitter. The Litquidity account initially commented a fire emoji on Christina Melas-Kyriazi’s tweet in December announcing her move to Bain Capital Ventures as a partner, to which she replied, “Let’s do some deals.” After that, “I slid into the DMs saying, ‘I’m serious,’ and we spoke on the phone to get to know each other, see what types of deals that we’re interested in,” Litquidity says. He said he shared intel about his own investments and opportunities he was seeing. Litquidity describes his value to the role as, “I would say, first and foremost, it’s being a known presence in the finance ecosystem.”
“I’m primarily known in the finance ecosystem as a jokester. I think that’s a great way to establish a relationship with a lot of people, making them laugh,” he says.
Melas-Kyriazi at Bain Capital Ventures notes there’s a growing trend of “next-generation media entrepreneurs who have built their audiences on social media, podcasting, and other digital channels” who are “now sought-after as investors,” pointing to podcasters Harry Stebbings at 20VC and David Rosenthal at Acquired, and newsletter writer Packy McCormick at Not Boring. Litquidity, according to Melas-Kyriazi, has “a unique perspective as a creator having built a broad and engaged audience on social media at the intersection of finance, technology, and meme culture,” she told Fortune via email.
Meme posters and venture capital aren’t a new pairing. Turner Novak, for example, has amassed his own following on Twitter from posting memes and comical content about VCs and has made several venture investments through his firm Banana Capital, garnering limited partners including Litquidity.
Litquidity’s scout gig is not a job (he’s not employed by Bain Capital Ventures). Litquidity declined to provide details about how much money he’s been authorized to invest as a scout, or details about his compensation structure. Melas-Kyriazi said that Bain’s venture scouts write “small, angel-size checks into early-stage startups, funded by BCV,” and that the firm wants “founders to feel that the experience of taking money from a BCV scout is nearly indistinguishable from working with an angel who is investing their own dollars.”
For Litquidity, “not much is changing” for his day-to-day work, and he will continue having “conversations with founders the same way that I had been” prior to the scout deal, he says—only this time with a Bain checkbook in hand. Litquidity says he hopes to gain more knowledge about VC investing through the experience. Companies on Litquidity’s radar include those in the fintech, Web3 and DeFi, creator economy, and e-commerce spaces.
When asked whether his often provocative content might be a concern as he becomes a more serious investor, Litquidity said he’s come this far by being himself with his online content, “so it’s not like it’s a surprise or anything like that,” adding that “I don’t say anything that I deem to be controversial in the sense of it being, like, cancelable.”
For some onlookers, like former Morning Brew writer and current content lead at Launch House Toby Howell, “It never fails to crack me up that @litcapital went from a meme page to an actual early-stage startup investor. The new american dream playing out before our eyes,” he quipped on Twitter.
As for Litquidity? “It’s my American dream for sure,” he says with a laugh.
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