A short talk by Jason M. Lemkin recounting the origin of his community project (originally titled 'Catharsis'), its early traction among CEOs and founders in the early days of social media, and his subsequent recruitment into a venture-capital firm despite limited prior investing experience. The piece reflects on naming choices, audience focus, and timing (circa early social media era).
And in fact the original dumb title was Catharsis. So stupid because it was meant to be. It wasn't meant to help me, it was meant to be cathartic for other founders. But Catharsis rolled off the tongue even worse than Saster. Although I may own the don't steal whoever's listening to this or watching don't steal the domain name if I didn't take it. But that was actually the original title was Catharsis. But we could talk about why it actually took off and you know, now that I watch what other folks have done, 202012 was very early for social media because social media has changed so much, right? But it did take off at least within CEOs and founders, right? Within a core. And then not much later I got recruited to join the VC firm, one of the VC firms that had funded me. And I really had never done investing before. I'd been a founder multiple times.
