VC's new favorite guessing game: Who is Arfur Rock, the 'Gossip Girl of Silicon Valley?'
"The guessing game was certainly going on," said Dylan Itzikowitz, a principal at South Park Commons who attended the dinner. "There are a lot of rumors about who he is."
Cloaked in anonymity, Rock is on a mission to bring more transparency to tech, as long it's good news.
Rock launched last year as a more serious, techie version of the popular Wall Street Litquidity account to serve up a steady diet of friendly leaks of unannounced funding rounds, confidential revenue numbers, and other insidery details.
Much of what Rock posts is the bread-and-butter scoops found in any tech publication, such as details on AI for call centers startup Cresta's Series D funding round or revenue numbers from voice AI platform ElevenLabs.
"They are like the Gossip Girl of Silicon Valley," said CC Gong, a principal at Menlo Ventures. "This has come up so many times with other VCs. Lots of people have theories."
Identifying only as an "anon GP at your favorite multistage-VC," Rock's account is named after Arthur Rock, the iconic early Silicon Valley investor behind Intel, Xerox, and Apple. The feed is decidedly niche, with just over 23,000 followers, though it has steadily been gaining fans.
"I mainly read it because it's an amazing account for nerding out about venture," said Jeff Weinstein, a partner at FJ Labs. "It's pretty cool to see granular data like this shared publicly."
"In an industry that runs on gossip, it's a breath of fresh air to have someone irreverent enough to be willing to anonymously air the laundry," said Will McKelvey, an investor at Lehrer Hippeau. "That said, it's only clean laundry."
For Rock, the effort to unmask his identity "is the least interesting question people ask me."
"If you pull apart the rose to see how it works, you ruin the rose," Rock wrote in an email responding to questions from Business Insider.
Most VCs BI spoke with demurred when asked who they think Rock is, but some offered broad theories.
"My best guess is an associate/VP level at a Bay Area growth firm," said Weinstein.
Jenny Fielding, cofounder and managing partner at Everywhere Ventures, suspects Rock is a junior associate at a large fund.
"If you're at a big firm, you're swapping deals with all the other associates at all the other firms," Fielding said. "They're the first eyes on all this stuff, so I don't think it's a super senior person."
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"The SEC's primary concern is protecting unsophisticated or inexperienced investors from being swept up in the hype of an investment opportunity they don't fully understand or that lacks sufficient disclosure," said Steve Brotman, managing partner at Alpha Partners.
As a result, details about funding rounds are restricted to trusted circles, and founders might miss out on potential investors, Brotman said.
"What Arfur Rock is doing is essentially hacking the system," he said. "It enables fundraising information to leak anonymously."
Rock says the account's information comes from founders, investors, employees, limited partners, and anonymous tipsters, and anything posted is already a "known secret" in Silicon Valley.
"Everything I share has been passed around the right dinners, parties, group chats, etc," Rock said, adding that they would never violate a non-disclosure agreement. "I take this seriously. They're sacrosanct. If I'm under one, it is followed."
Although Rock posts nonpublic information, it is uniformly positive.
"You'll notice I don't post layoffs," Rock wrote. "I don't talk about firm departures. I don't talk about company scandals. I don't do down rounds. I don't share poor fund performances. I don't dunk on people. People constantly ask for or send me this kind of gossip. I want to spotlight some of what I consider the best among the current wave of companies — not criticize founders, investors, or my friends from behind a keyboard."
Is anonymity a feature or a bug?
Leaks are leaks, no matter how nice they may be, and some question whether Rock is providing as much of a public service as claimed.
Patrick Collison, CEO of Stripe, recently asked on X:"Do the companies consent to the leaks?" (Rock replied that people "are often surprised how much of what I share is green‑lit by the insiders themselves.")
Menlo Ventures' Gong said Rock's posts can sometimes upend startups' carefully laid publicity strategy.
"I'm all for transparency that helps founders," Gong said. "The downside is when the account leaks info before the founder is ready to announce, they don't get the press coverage they were hoping for."
Rock sometimes deletes posts without explanation, making it hard to track whether the posts are always accurate. Their mission of transparency is very much a one-way street, which Jay Kolbe, cofounder and senior managing partner of strategic communications firm Impact Partners, finds concerning.
"The downside of Arfur Rock isn't that it's opening a new channel for information, it's that we don't know the motives of those who are behind it," he said. "No matter how well-intended they may be, it lacks the necessary guardrails of proven channels and real reporting."
Jesse Middleton, general partner at Flybridge Capital Partners, says he finds Rock's account "fascinating" but takes the information with a grain of salt.
"There's no clarity on who's running the account (and no, I don't know), how reliable the data is, or whether there's any inherent bias," Middleton said.
Rock sees anonymity as a feature, not a bug, and seems to relish being a topic of conversation and intrigue.
"I think the ecosystem wins on balance when more insiders can share alpha and ideas freely, untethered from their public identities," they said. "The anonymity strips away any sense of bias and, frankly, the mystery keeps it interesting."
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