Soylent and Founders Fund: John Coogan

Terra API Podcast - Stay Fit, Stay Connected

In this video with spoke with John Coogan, Co-Founder of Soylent and Lucy, building a viral YouTube channel, and recently joined Founders Fund as an Entrepreneur in Residence. John shared some interesting insights into how to grow your audience on YouTube with storytelling and appealing to a broader audience. Moreover, John takes us through his journey of how he started his YouTube channel during the pandemic lockdown, and how he initially struggled with attracting viewers and engagement. He talks about how he wants to find a “white space” and steer away from all the mainstream videos that target negative news stories such as FTX, Theranos, SVB, etc. Later on, John reveals his success recipe on how he cracked the YouTube algorithm and how he found other social media outlets such as Twitter to be useless to drive views on YouTube. He emphasizes the importance of storytelling in the title, which enables the video to appeal to a broader audience on the platform. Lastly, John gives us some exclusive insights into what it’s like working at one of the most renowned venture capital firms worldwide - Founders Fund. John discusses his interests in the defense technology sector and Founders Fund’s successful investments in companies in this space such as Palantir, Anduril, and SpaceX. John also explains what it’s like working with Peter Thiel, and what ultimately makes Peter unique as an investor. 00:00:00 - Introduction00:02:00 - History of Silicon Valley 00:04:00 - Identifying your white space on YouTube John Coogan, YouTube script 100:08:00 - Why Twitter is useless to drive views on YouTube 00:10:00 - How to crack the YouTube algorithm 00:15:50 - Y-Combinator experience with Soylent 00:21:45 - Using the “stress test” as a marketing tool 00:27:00 - John’s second startup: Lucy 00:32:00 - Defense technology work at Founders Fund 00:34:30 - Working with Peter Thiel 00:44:10 - Future plans - Founders Fund, YouTube, entrepreneurship More about John ► https://www.johncoogan.com/ The channel ► https://www.youtube.com/c/johncooganplus The Site ► http://tryterra.co More Podcasts ► https://blog.tryterra.co/podcast/home Twitter ► https://twitter.com/terraapi LinkedIn ► https://www.linkedin.com/company/terraapi