Communicator spotlight: Josh Machiz, partner at Redpoint Ventures
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Photo illustration: Axios Visuals. Photo: Courtesy of Redpoint Ventures.
Josh Machiz leads the founder experience team at Redpoint Ventures, tasked with identifying marketing, content and storytelling opportunities for the firm and its portfolio companies.
Why it matters: Redpoint — which has backed companies like Snowflake, Twilio, Stripe and Ramp — has embraced a content-first marketing strategy, with roughly 70,000 followers on Instagram and more than 40,000 on TikTok.
Catchup quick: Machiz joined Redpoint from Nasdaq, where he helped develop the exchange's digital marketing strategy, most recently serving as chief digital officer.
- "I grew Nasdaq's social channels from literally zero to 3.5 billion followers and then continued to ride every social media wave," he said. "I think that the exchanges hadn't really thought of marketing as an enablement for sales to win deals."
- Part of the sales pitch was the opportunity for social marketing moments during the bell ceremony and appearances on long-form video series that were created and promoted by his team.
Zoom in: Machiz says he learned a lot while working with the Duolingo team on its IPO.
- "I learned how to think about your brand as an influencer and how important it is to create a face for your brand," he said.
Now, Machiz touts Redpoint's social media following and engaged audiences across audio and video platforms.
- "'The Logan Bartlett Show' is going to hit 50,000 YouTube subscribers and has featured [interviews] with every luminary you can you can think of, from Sam Altman to Marc Benioff, and our AI podcast, 'Unsupervised Learning' just reached 10,000 subscribers. We're really hitting our stride on the content front," he said.
What to watch: Machiz thinks YouTube is the most interesting social channel right now.
- "TikTok kind of killed the age of the follow, because you don't need to follow people to see the best stuff anymore," he said. "And so it's very interesting to me when a platform as old as YouTube that, because it's just been about subscription and discovery, has stayed."
The intrigue: He recently binged the latest season of "Traitors" and threw a Traitors' themed birthday party last year, with the help of AI.
- "As a marketer, you have all the ideas that you wanted to do at one time, but it would be too much work. Now, with all of these AI tools, it feels possible."
- As part of his content plate, Machiz is testing out new AI tools, with Replit being the latest.
Best career advice: Go in with an entrepreneurial lens.
- There are "possibilities for innovation everywhere, so don't be afraid to go in with an entrepreneurial lens, shake things up and build something that people can't live without."
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