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William Quigley: Reviving the VC as Thought Leader

Challenge

In spring 2011, William Quigley ¬was a managing director at Clearstone Venture Capital well known and respected by his fellow VCs. Not only that, he was someone who had amassed a wealth of experience in venture capital back to his earliest days at southern California’s Idealab, the region’s pioneering technology incubator. However, in all his time as a VC, Quigley lacked the public recognition or media presence of “celebrity VCs” like Fred Wilson or Mark Suster. The challenge was to leverage Quigley’s unique and significant experience within the industry to become a singular and identifiable public voice.

Solution
  • Work with Quigley to develop thought leadership materials that would help publicly establish his expertise, highlighted by a media-friendly PowerPoint presentation that directly rebutted the notorious “R.I.P Good Times” presentation made by Sequoia Capital in 2008.
  • Pre-brief the most important – and receptive – press with a preview copy of the presentaton.
  • Host a version of the presentation on online slide portal SlideShare so that interested media could easily access it, while also allowing SocialRadius to easily track web traffic and other view metrics.
  • Continued thought leadership, even outside the realm of venture capital to broaden Quigley’s exposure, through the establishment of a “The Quigley Report” blog .
Results
  • Coverage of Quigley’s presentation and ideas from the likes of major financial and technology outlets like The New York Times, Barron’s, Business Insider, GigaOM, TechCrunch, VentureBeat, ReadWriteWeb.
  • Beyond the initial surge of interest in Quigley’s venture capital revival presentation, SocialRadius maintained consistent thought leadership on behalf of Quigley through blog posts syndicated to Business Insider’s “Contributors” channel, and longer guests posts in both VentureBeat and Huffington Post. Ongoing coverage for Quigley generated 95,922,270 VPM and $363,131.42 ad equivalency.
  • Quigley became an established VC thought leader – especially in the southern California region – and is now a regular guest on Jason Calacanis’s popular This Week In Startups.