Howdy, Founders 🤠 

Today is my 36th birthday 🎂 and I’m right where I wanna be!

It was cool to have a chance to meet up with some of you at SXSW this year 🤝 

Today we’ll get into:

• The Hard Thing About Hard Things 📙 

• Bali Retreat Update 🌴 

• Taking Care of Your Health 🏥 

• Business Idea of the Week 💡 

📙 The Hard Thing About Hard Things

This epic book is 10 years old!

If you’re a startup founder, you’ve probably already read “The Hard Thing About Hard Things” by Ben Horowitz. In fact, as an a16z portfolio founder, it was even required reading!

One of the things that struck me about this often-quoted “Startup manual” is that it wasn’t very startup-y. It was mostly big business stuff. Managing teams of hundreds and making multi-million dollar decisions. Fortunately for us, I just had a re-skim and pulled out the most relevant lessons for early-stage startup founders and I’ll summarize below. Maybe you’ll be convinced to pick it back up for a re-read?

Embrace the Struggle: Horowitz emphasizes the importance of perseverance through the inevitable challenges and struggles of startup life. For early-stage founders, understanding that difficulties are a natural part of the entrepreneurial journey is crucial. This mindset helps in preparing for the unpredictable and often difficult path ahead.

🔑 : Struggling is not an indication of failure but a fundamental part of the entrepreneurial process. Early-stage founders should expect and accept struggle as a normal, even necessary, part of building a company. This mindset helps in preparing for challenges rather than being demoralized by them.

Make Hard Decisions Quickly: The ability to make tough decisions swiftly is critical for early-stage founders. Whether it's deciding on a pivot, addressing co-founder conflicts, or managing limited resources, the book highlights the importance of not shying away from hard choices. Learning to act decisively in the face of uncertainty is a valuable skill for any founder.

🔑 : Early-stage founders often look for a "silver bullet" to propel their startups to success. Focus instead on hard work, persistence, and iterative improvement over looking for magic solutions.

Managing Your Own Psychology: Perhaps one of the most crucial lessons is the importance of managing your own psychology as a founder. The stresses and pressures of founding a startup can be overwhelming. Horowitz’s experiences and advice underscore the need for founders to find ways to cope with stress, maintain perspective, and ensure their mental and emotional well-being.

The book offers so much on the lessons above. If you’ve read it in the past, I highly recommend a re-read!

Bali Trip Update 🌴 

Biggest update: Lodging is now included 🤑 

We’re renting out a gorgeous resort!

This baby has 24 rooms in private villas, 8 pools, a library, an event space, a restaurant, and a spa, and it’s ALL for us! More details on the website.

I’m interviewing every potential attendee personally so if I haven’t reached out to schedule a 1:1, then your application probably didn’t go through.

Apply to attend here!

Again, the dates are June 1 - 3 (checking in to the resort on May 31)

The price is $750 which includes everything except your travel. In this case, “Everything” even means Travel Medical Insurance thanks to Insured Nomads 🙏 

📈 But how healthy are you, really?

Often, startup founders will go months/years without their health being a priority.

Your calendar is slammed, that thing broke, Apple rejected the latest update, you’re fundraising 🤮 , etc. I get it! It’s not always easy to add on countless hours of thinking about your health.

Well, I’m here to look out for you, and I’m excited to tell you about one of my favorite things: Function Health. NO, this is not a sponsor and I’ll get nothing from telling you about this other than the satisfaction that I will have helped a few hundred of you maintain good health.

Function is like Whoop for your internal health.

For $500 per year, Function tests over 100 bio markers TWICE and gives you an awesome dashboard to help you understand your health. They also allow you to export the data so you can be an advocate for your own health.

For example, I noticed that my testosterone was pretty low so I took the PDF to my doctor and said “Hey, I wanna fix this” and he said, “Yeah good idea”. As you can see from my follow-up results below, I’m doing great!

Some things, I did NOT improve, such as my Total Cholesterol. KNOWING THIS STUFF IS IMPORTANT!

Function currently has a waitlist a mile long but one of the co-founders gave us his personal “Skip the waitlist” code which is MNEMKE10. Please go check up on your health. It was very affordable and painless!

💡 Business Idea of the Week:

Facilitate influencer compensation via equity

Nowadays, it’s not crazy for influencer marketing campaign arrangements to include some sort of equity component. Smart influencers (who have heard stories of graffiti artists making millions on Facebook stock) are starting to understand the value of sacrificing a bit of cash for equity. Read more here.

I think there’s a big opportunity in this space.

Easy Mode: Build a niche marketplace for brands and influencers to find each other to make this sort of arrangement.

Hard Mode: Build the platform that would actually facilitate this arrangement.

THE END

As always, thank you for reading 😁 

Come find me on Twitter

Sincerely,

John Hancock