4x founder, designer, engineer. sold my first company at age 25. now: building the AI layer for chronic illness. angel investing.
San Francisco, CA 🇺🇸
Joined September 2017
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a few years ago i got covid and never recovered.
i went from exercising every day to completely bedbound.
lost 40lbs. in and out of hospitals for over 2 years.
saw 20+ doctors. bloodwork came back normal.
"you're probably just stressed from being a founder."
i love guerilla marketing but this is not the way.
your startup does not deserve to turn natural beauty into advertising inventory.
buy a billboard and leave nature alone.
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im convinced every group chat in san francisco is just people asking you to like and repost their tweets
why isn’t caffeine free diet coke more popular?
there are so many times where i pass by a vending machine and feel the craving but don’t want 46mg caffeine at 8pm
discretion is an underrated skill.
as you grow in your career, you’ll learn things about people and companies that aren’t widely known.
sharing them can make you feel important.
but being trusted is worth more than being interesting.
if you want to be successful in business, you need to learn how to make people genuinely want you to win
a lot of this comes down to being human enough for people to become emotionally invested in your success
no one wants to cheerlead for a jerk who acts like they have everything figured out
people want to feel like they’re part of the journey, not an audience watching you perform
be honest about when things are working, when they’re not, what you're struggling with, and what you still don’t know
people remember how you made them feel way more than they remember your pitch
i've met several people this week who recently moved to sf and are having a hard time feeling like this is home.
on one hand, i completely understand it. this city can feel cold when people are sizing you up everywhere you go. how much you've raised, who your investors are, and whether you can help them get somewhere.
but i've also met the best friends i've ever had here. great people live in this city, they just aren't attending the public luma events you find when you first move here.
the people you're most likely to first meet aren't the people who will make you feel at home.
it took a lot of time and effort to find my people. but if you want to make sf home, you have to break through the public event circuit and slowly become part of people's actual lives.
part of that is being someone you'd want to spend time with. stop talking about AI for a minute. take an interest in someone's life. follow up because you enjoyed their company. invite them to something yourself.
over time, those connections turn into dinners, birthdays, and friendships that don't live on a public calendar app.
it takes a lot of effort, but i promise it's worth it.
the only reason i take uber/lyft over waymo is because an uber driver will totally floor it to get through a yellow light
would love to make as many new friends as possible
if you see me, say hi!
i promise i’m taller than you think
i’ve seen a lot of cofounder breakups.
sometimes people just aren't meant to work together.
but it's especially sad when two people who built something together can’t even talk anymore.
don’t start a company with someone you wouldn’t shut a company down with.
Austin Walker 🛴 retweeted
The only way to fix healthcare is to make the customer the most powerful participant in the system. Period. End of story.
this is fantastic advice
How to Ask for Help
If you're a junior designer, I want to share a few things that will help you ask for help more effectively, be it wanting a portfolio review, introductions, advice, or anything really.
1. Be direct.
Most of the people you want help from are busy people. It is *greatly* preferred when you are upfront and direct about what you want. There are only so many hours in the day, and I'd rather know exactly what you want and how I can help.
2. Be specific
There are very few people in the world who ever want to 'catch up' or 'get their brain picked' when you don't know someone and it's ambiguous what they want.
If you want feedback on your portfolio, ask for that. If you want ideas on how to reposition yourself, ask for that.
If you aren't specific, you'll either get no response, or get generic response. My general feedback on every portfolio will always be: show your work upfront; remove half the words then remove more again, and spend 10x the time refining the work shown vs the design of the portfolio itself.
3. Be concise
Everyone is busy, so be respectful of their time and be as concise as possible with your ask.
4. Follow up
If you don't hear back from someone, the most likely answer is they either missed your message or forgot. Platforms like X have, somehow still, terrible DM's that always seem to be buggy, so just follow up respectfully. I don't find it annoying; rather I appreciate the persistence and reminder.
5. Follow through
If someone takes the time to help you, and gives you advice or suggestions, you should follow through on them. I love hearing about how things went or the updates someone made, but I'd guess less than 3% of the time I hear back from someone. Want to know an easy way to start to build a relationship? Follow through. Those who follow up I am more likely to want to continue helping and building into.
So what does this look like in practice?
Instead of "Here's my portfolio, let me know if you have thoughts!" say "I'm updating my portfolio as I look for a full time role at a startup. Would you mind letting me know 1) if this would pass your first 5 second screen, and 2) do you think the work examples I have selected seem credible to an early stage founder?"
Instead of "I'd love to meet if you're ever down", say "I have a few first round interviews coming up in a few weeks. Would you be open to doing a 30m practice portfolio presentation with me? I'll show up at any time that works for you this week or next."
I have generally found our industry is full of people who want to help others, so I hope this is helps you better ask for help!
great founders are extremely clear about what “great” looks like.
high standards aren’t useful if they only exist in your head. people can’t hit a bar they can’t see.
your job is to make the standards painfully clear, then give people the ownership to exceed it.
Austin Walker 🛴 retweeted
ive noticed that founders who come from privileged backgrounds seem to experience stress differently.
they can be just as ambitious and work just as hard.
but when things get hard, they don't feel the deep painful levels of stress.
maybe because somewhere in the back of their mind, they know that if everything falls apart, theyll still be okay.
whereas when you come from nothing, failure can feel existential.
theres no safety net. no one coming to bail you out.
i used to think most startup events were a distraction.
lately, a lot of my time has gone into recruiting, meeting people, and building community.
you can spend months deep in a hole trying to brute force progress, but sometimes one person completely changes the trajectory of your company.
there’s a lot of noise in “networking”, but the upside can be very asymmetric.
you know you've made a great hire when you stop thinking about an entire part of the company.
not because it matters less, but because someone else owns it now.
every piece of startup advice is biased.
a hammer will always look for a nail.
ask a salesperson about your problem and they’ll tell you how to sell your way out of it.
everyone sees your company through the lens they know best.
the mistake is assuming that because someone has a good solution, they’ve correctly diagnosed the problem.
e.g. “i need to hire a PM"
well, do you really need a PM? why?
is prioritization bad? are engineers not taking enough ownership? are you the bottleneck?
the real skill is figuring out which problem you actually have.