🚀 a lifetime in a week + belief capital
hey stranger. if you forgot about me, I'm the guy who ghosted you and failed to deliver juicy golden nuggets to your inbox for a month.
typically, I could try to make an excuse that starts with bull and ends with s-h-*-t.
but this time i have a good reason.
the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank will forever be the craziest 5 days of my career.
panicked $27 million wires to get out of SVB at the cutoff. 2 am calls with customers in india making $50 million decisions.
i quickly transformed from a glorified sales guy to financial therapist to neurotic twitter refresher (follow me here btw)
meow crossed $1 billion in assets... which is wild.
"treasury management" somehow got cool. and i was caught in a maelstrom of money movement that likely won't happen again for awhile.
but after a few sleep deprived weeks.
I'm back baby.
Here's 100 words on a concept that's been ricocheting inside my brain...
Belief Capital.
Last month, I made my first "angel investment". If you're reading this and invest for a living, you now have permission to laugh.
But I gave my friend $5,000 for a new startup.
He's a friend I met through Twitter. We've met in-person twice ever. But he's a guy that I deeply know.
I've seen him think and I've seen him grind. He's a guy without a fancy pedigree. He never even graduated college (and no it wasn't a stanford dropout story).
But I know he's a savage.
And so he tried to raise money for his new thing. He met with 100 investors. And outside of a few hundred thousand bucks, everyone said no.
Everyone told him his idea was stupid.
So why on earth would I give him $5K without ever seeing a deck?
Because belief capital.
I don't care about the idea. I don't care if every VC told him no.
What do I care about?
Backing my baller friends who eat brick walls for breakfast.
Because what actually matters?
Believing in your friends before anyone else.
I know deep down it's only a matter of time before he wins.
And the greatest gift you can give is believing in a dream before it becomes a reality.
see ya,
How I Think
hey team, it's chris hladczuk back in your inbox. this idea has been rattling around in my brain for awhile so I needed to share it with you. Egoless Execution You need crazy confidence to start a company. You spend countless hours pitching people on the vision. You believe a secret about the world no one understands yet. Plenty of people say you're crazy. You must have an ego to endure constant rejection. A big enough ego to believe you're right and everyone else is wrong. A big enough ego...
Hey Team, it's your boy Chris Hladczuk back in your inbox. (if you missed it, I raised $2.5M + am assembling the avengers. If you know a savage engineer with startup experience who loves mobile, reply here! I'll pay you $5,000 if I hire them.) Okay so safe ideas are really risky. Safe ideas = consensus stuff that the random dude at the company holiday party immediately agrees with Examples: Work at Goldman Sachs for 2 years - it's "risky" to quit after 1 year Go to business school - it's...
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