Alec Kremins

In 2023, I left Ramp to move to Israel. It's now worth $44B. My equity hadn't even vested yet. My friends joke that I made the most expensive move in the world. It was still the right call. Every time I've had to choose between the comfortable path and the harder one, the harder one paid off. 10 times out of 10. Since then, I've gotten married, started a company, and become a dad. I don't think the purpose of life is to live a comfortable life. I'm optimizing mine for meaning, not comfort.

Most will ignore this, but hopefully just one person acts: Please start posting about what you're building, even if nobody reads it. Keep going through the posts with zero engagement The right people are always watching longer than you know.

At 16, I filed a patent and spent weeks on a 20-page business plan nobody read. With @rallyupteam, I: • Collected my first payment before I had a product • Signed 3 customers before writing a single line of code • Made the logo in about 2 minutes on Lovable • Settled for a .team domain because the .com was $4,000 and I had rent to pay 16-year-old me would've called all of it unprofessional. But the patent and the plan were never progress, they just made me feel like a founder. Getting paid made me one.

May 1st, 2026: Pivoted the business due to no demand. November 1st, 2026: 40x'd revenue. Since then, we hired Matt Firestone as our Head of Content. He's one of my favorite LinkedIn creators on the entire platform with 45K followers. Our pipeline is full and our offer is working. And yet I find myself having self-doubts constantly. I think about the long-term direction and question whether the decisions I'm making today are the right ones. I wonder if the traction is real or if I'm about to hit a wall I can't see yet. I used to think that feeling would go away once things started working. I'm starting to think the doubt never leaves, it just changes shape. Early on, it sounds like "Will anyone pay for this?" Later, it sounds like "Can I actually build something that lasts?" If you're building something and the voice in your head is louder than the wins on your dashboard, I don't think that means something is wrong. I think it means you care. All gas, some breaks (now that I'm a dad!)

2012: Had my first billion-dollar app idea which failed miserably 2014: Cold-emailed billionaires and landed actual VC meetings as a high schooler 2016: Started the entrepreneurship club at my high school and taught kids to study Zuck and Bezos. 2017: Launched my first semi-successful app, getting 50+ local businesses to offer discounts to students. 2021: Launched Ember, a caffeine gummy company with my cousin. Learned the hard way that CPG is brutal. 2022: Worked at a startup accelerator that went bankrupt. Or got sued? Honestly, it was ugly. 2023: Joined the AI BDR team at Ramp ($5.8B evaluation to $60B) 2024: Moved across the world to Israel and landed a job leading partnerships at beehiiv. Late 2024: Built a local newsletter as a side hustle and sold it. 2025: Found out my wife was pregnant with our first child and got fired in the same week. 2026: Raised VC money a month after getting fired to build RallyUp, pivoted a handful of times, went all in on my personal brand, and trying to be a present husband and father. 14 years of bets, and I’m just getting started.

In 2 months, I'll be turning 28. The older I get, the more I realize the secret to a happy life is to stay a child for as long as possible. My happiest friends still feel exactly like they did when we were kids doing stupid stuff together. Always smiling. Never taking themselves too seriously. I approach building RallyUp the same way I approached Legos as a kid. Grab a bunch of pieces, try to build something from nothing, and have fun doing it. Somewhere along the way we're told to "grow up" and be serious. But the best founders and happiest people I know never lost that curiosity. Funny enough, the older I get, the more closely I follow my parents' advice: • Strict bedtime • Eating healthy and avoiding sugar • Chewing with my mouth closed Turns out they were onto something. Here's to another year of building, playing, and refusing to grow up.

1,100 days ago, I traded New York bagels for Israeli hummus. I moved about 5,677 miles from NY to Israel. No backup plan, just conviction that this was where I needed to be. Since then I: • Got married • Ran partnerships at beehiiv • Started RallyUp • Became a father • Made friends who feel like brothers Has it all been easy? No. Israeli bureaucracy makes the DMV look efficient, and ordering from Amazon here takes Olympic-level patience and a PhD in tracking numbers. But the uncomfortable choices are usually the ones that pay off. An investor once asked me the question every Israeli founder gets: "Would you consider relocating to New York or San Francisco for your startup?" I didn't let her finish, never in a million years. Every day I'm here, my roots grow deeper. The network gets stronger. Sometimes the best decisions don't make sense on paper, they just feel right in your soul.

15 months ago I was fired with no plan B. Today, the stuff stressing me out is: • How much money to take, and at what valuation? • How to spend the marketing budget • How to grow the team Back then, I would have killed for these problems. Never forget how bad you wanted what you have.

Two minutes into a demo, the bomb siren went off. I switched to audio only and told my prospect (safely in Texas) that my wife would be joining us in my office, because it's also our bomb shelter. The steel doors clanged shut. My wife sat quietly in the corner. I kept pitching. "Sorry about this," I said. "But honestly, if you're looking for a founder who'll keep pushing no matter what..." He laughed and said he was pretty sure anyone who can close deals with missiles overhead can handle the work. A failed demo feels a lot less scary after that.

I used Apollo to find the hiring manager's personal email. That's how I got my job at beehiiv, and that job eventually led me to build RallyUp. I found the role in Ben Lang's newsletter. It could have been LinkedIn, Glassdoor, anywhere. Where I found it doesn't matter. I applied through the link too, but I also sent him: 1. A Loom walking through exactly what I'd do in the role 2. My plan for the first 30, 60, and 90 days It's a lot of work for one application, but hiring is a risk, and your resume only tells them what you did. This shows them what you'll do for them. Now I hire people at RallyUp, and none of this has changed. The resumes blur together while the person who shows up having already done a version of the job doesn't. Don't just apply, send the work beforehand.

looking for an absolutely cracked youtube expert who can help me build and scale my channel from scratch. DM's are open. 💰

When I was 16, I cold-emailed 50 VCs with the worst pitch deck you've ever seen. Three agreed to meet, probably because they thought it was hilarious that a high schooler was pitching with such confidence. I walked into those Midtown offices with my dad's briefcase and a dream of investors throwing money at me. Spoiler alert: they didn't. Ten years later, I got fired and posted about it 48 minutes later. I didn't email anyone. A VC I'd never met DM'd me. He ended up investing in the pre-seed. At 16, I went to them, at 26, one came to me.

"You didn't join at 10:30. You joined at 10:30 and 11 seconds." A founder said that to me, and he wasn't joking. An investor introduced us, we'd had a great email thread and booked a call for 10:30. His first words: "Sorry, this isn't going to work." I asked what changed, and he said they don't hire people who show up late to calls. I checked and the clock still said 10:30. I laughed, he hung up. When I told the investor, he was shocked. But his partner respected the founder more after hearing it. Still not sure which of us was the crazy one lol

Keep a list of every founder who said "not now." "Circle back after our raise." "Send me something next quarter." "Love it, just not this month." Don't send a single outbound message. Interact with them and leave a valuable comment every time they post. That's the best way to stay on their radar. They already know you and if you've been posting, they've been watching. That's your warmest pipeline.

A 19-year-old I was interviewing once asked me, dead serious: "Wait, why don't you live in SF?" For a startup founder, the Bay Area is one of the hottest places to be, and I've never even visited. Her case: the tech network, easier fundraising, all the talent, more customers. She's probably right about all of it. But I moved to Israel almost three years ago, and I'm building from here. My lead investor is in New York, and my customers are spread across six time zones. Life is so much more than picking a zip code just for professional success.

Andrew Wilkinson DM'd me and told me to stop growing my newsletter. I was running a local one in Jerusalem, 169 days in, and posting my Facebook ad numbers every week because growth was the easy part to show. He said this: "Pause growth, go make money" I took the advice and immediately found out why I'd been avoiding it. A few thousand local readers don't attract sponsors on their own. Business owners want proof before they'll try a channel they've never used. So we built free landing pages for local businesses and tracked leads for weeks without asking for a cent. One real estate agent took three months and multiple conversations to convert. What convinced him was seeing the numbers other businesses were getting. The first deal was one month and we made barely anything. It was also the first proof I had that any of it worked.

The first person I ever hired is now the CTO and co-founder of Whop. My startup still died. I started it freshman year of college, and you know that awkward moment when you say, “find me on Instagram, it’s alec underscore underscore, no, two Ls, wait, one underscore” and then they squint at their phone? I built a business card to kill that awkwardness. Tap it on someone’s phone and your social media pops up. Everyone said it was a great idea. But the handle thing is awkward for maybe five seconds, tapping meant both people had to learn a new habit (which nobody did). I hired a genius high schooler (future Whop) to build it but it still didn’t work out. If your idea needs people to change a habit, expect it to fail. Build something that fits what they already do.

My dad told me something when I was 12 that shapes every business decision I make: “It takes years to build a reputation and one second to lose it.” Today, dozens of founders and execs trust us with their name. So I treat every client like my reputation depends on it. Because it does. Is it scalable? Probably not. Is it the fastest path to unicorn status? Definitely not. But business is just relationships at scale, and relationships are built on doing the right thing, especially when nobody’s watching.

A founder I know went to five cities across multiple continents in about a week, and he posted from every one of them. So many executives that I know tell me they worry about looking obnoxious if they post about themselves. I tell them to start with the events they’re already going to. Posting “I’m going to NY Tech Week” ahead of time lets people who’ll be there book a time with you, and posting “I’m in NY Tech Week now” once you’ve arrived lets people there find you that day. Not posting about events is a waste. The person who changes your career might be the one who sees it.

When I was 16, I met Jeff Bezos’s niece at a high school party and somehow convinced her to forward my 20 page startup idea to her uncle. It was a terrible idea with an even worse pitch, and obviously nothing came of it. I spent the next decade failing, experimenting, and trying things that went nowhere. It took me over 6 years before I built something people actually wanted to pay for. Looking back, the patent I filed at 16 and the 20 page business plan nobody read were just ways of staying busy so I could feel like I was building something. The second time, I skipped all of it and got someone to pay me before there was ever a product.