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egoless execution

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...

2 months ago • 1 min read

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...

2 months ago • 1 min read

Why would a billionaire bring a date to a furniture store? Unless it's Restoration Hardware (RH). This is the Disneyland of Furniture. Here's how the $4 billion brand exploded👇 Back in 1979, Stephen Gordon has a problem. Why can’t you buy good, affordable furniture? He started Restoration Hardware (RH) to solve it. But 44 years later, RH is way different: Today, it's a luxury home goods brand with restaurants, coffee shops, and hotels. And they do over $3 billion in sales. The secret sauce to...

6 months ago • 1 min read

Hey so I found this $8 billion business that battles Nike and Adidas. The founder used a garden hose for an early edge. Then tennis star Roger Federer blew up the brand. Here’s how On Running disrupted the crowded footwear category: In 2010, a 6x Swiss Ironman athlete grabbed a garden hose. And he realized the shape could offer cloud-like cushioning. He grabbed glue and hacked together the first version of “On Cloud” running shoes. Today, On does over $1 billion in yearly sales and worth $8...

6 months ago • 1 min read

Hey strangers, I'm back! I spent the last year learning how to actually build a startup. Not talk or write about it. And damn it's been an awesome experience. I'm still building. But I'll be writing a series on The Stories Behind the World's Biggest Brands. So without further ado... In 2010, TIME called it one of the “50 Worst Inventions”.Others called it the “ugliest shoe ever”.But since 2002 they’ve sold over 600 million pairs.Here are 3 ways Crocs transformed from boat shoe to global...

6 months ago • 1 min read

hey strangers. It's been a minute since I crawled into your inbox. But I'm writing to you my lovely reader about imposter syndrome. Why? I recently became the Chief Revenue Officer at Meow. This forced me to rethink how I need to evolve to take our business to the next level. Also... it forced me to face the fact that imposter syndrome never goes away. (for the uninitiated, imposter syndrome means you don't feel quite ready or deserving of your position) Know why? No one ever knows how to do...

10 months ago • 2 min read

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...

about 1 year ago • 1 min read

hey hey! - I'm 6ish months into Meow. I'm leading our go-to-market engine. But it bleeds into product / ops too. However, my most important job is closing sales. For the uninitiated, Meow helps startups earn more yield on their cash with ~5% US Treasury Bills and a ~4.3% checking account. Our most important metric? Assets under management (aka dollars on the platform). Well in my first 100 days, I closed $100 million. I've been drinking from the sales firehose - but also studied the best and...

about 1 year ago • 4 min read

So I woke up semi-hungover at 8:17 am on Sunday morning and scrambled in the dark searching for the little rectangle that ran my life. That rectangle (aka my iPhone) marked the day's bleak beginning. Next, I got in 43 minutes of dopamine drips - twitter likes, new emails, instagram stories from that girl I barely knew from high school, linkedin posts and other mindless soul sucking activities. At 9 am, I pop out of bed and start playing the All-In Podcast on YouTube (it's a few tech...

about 1 year ago • 2 min read

$80.7 billion of Warren Buffett's $81 billion fortune came after his 50th birthday. How? This magical force called "compounding". For my unitiated friends, compounding is earning money on your money. If you earn 7% on $100, you get $107. If you earn 7% again you don't just earn $7. You earn $7.50 because you get to earn 7% on your bigger base of $107. Over a long time, this makes a massive difference. Here's what I mean: 1% better every day for a year = 37,778% gain 1% worse every day for a...

about 1 year ago • 1 min read
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