I’m running PL, Arc5 Ventures, and Analog Moat simultaneously. People ask how. The honest answer is that they compound.
Not in the obvious way — not that one feeds leads to another, though that happens. In the way that building something for depth instead of reach accumulates differently than the alternative. The relationships compound. The reputation compounds. The quality of the rooms compounds.
Most founders I know are optimizing for reach. More followers, more press, more surface area. That’s not a bad instinct — it’s what the feed rewards. Post something, get distribution, get reach, get noticed. Repeat.
The problem is that reach doesn’t compound the same way depth does. A million impressions is still a million impressions tomorrow. A dinner with the right eight people three years ago is still producing things today — a deal, a referral, a conversation that changed how someone thinks about a problem.
I can’t measure that on a dashboard. That’s partly why it’s valuable.
What I’m building with Analog Moat isn’t trying to scale. It’s trying to go deep into a specific thing — in-person, curated, high-trust — and do it well enough that the people who matter find it and don’t want it to change. That’s a different bet than most event businesses make.
The long game requires resisting the metrics that feel most real because they’re most visible. Reach is visible. Depth isn’t. The compounding of depth shows up in ways you can only see backward.
Most founders get this backwards. That’s not a criticism — it’s a structural problem. The feed shows you what’s working right now. The long game lives off the feed.