A much belated life update - I’ve sold my company,
@theleague
, to The Match Group! WE’VE BEEN CALLED UP TO THE BIG LEAGUES! We’re now competing in the same arena as the most successful dating brands in the world, so I’m hiring a world-class Head of Marketing & Head of Product to
Proud mom to 21 more frozen oocytes 🪺 This was my 5th & most productive cycle yet! (tho > 35 yo so its probs a wash probability wise). Tbh I didn’t think any funnel could be worse than
@theleague
’s 😂 until I started number crunching to see # of frozen eggs needed for 3 kids 🤯
9 years ago I incorporated
@theleague
with the goal of finding an equally ambitious life partner & to create a community where equal partnerships were the norm, not the exception. Use my anniversary VIP link to skip the wait 🙌
#neverSettle
#meetYourEqual
@Jack_Raines
💯! I pitched LinkedIn cofounder Allen Blue on this in my PM interview back in 2013. I also pitched LinkedIn becoming a CRM / sfdc competitor, and said I would happily lead both. Needless to say I didn’t get the job, so built it myself and it worked! 😂
@theleague
It is, however, super interesting to see how many more high quality eggs I got post selling The League / since I have adopted much healthier habits then when I was in the thick of founder hell, 2016, not exercising ever with lots of unhealthy habits and no sleep etc. Maybe better
Finally going through our user survey on dating & marriage - I am pleased to see that the men on
@theleague
crave an ambitious, goal-oriented partner nearly as much as women do! This is a huge shift from our parents generation
@theleague
Credits:
🥇So much gratitude and pure love for my League DREAM TEAM who’s heavy lifting got us over the finish line: Mary Bradford, Eddie Bradford, Marko Krosnjar, Laura Stover, Christopher Taylor, Michael Rapp, David Siu, Rozmeen Ali, Kazuyuki Kohno, Alonso Holmes, Tiffany Von
The 1st check IS EVERYTHING....
@XFactorVentures
2nd Fund has launched and I'm excited to be part of the team that invests in more than 50 new female-founded companies going after $B opptys! Get in touch if you're building something we should know about!
The austin founder/creator crew is STRONG, thanks Nick for making IRL meetups happen. I left inspired by these two to stretch my creator muscles finally - which apparently means cringe posts are a given in my future so buckle up 😂🙄🫠🤷♀️🙈
I was with 2 founders in Austin today
Left is
@kimkaupe
— she’s huge on LinkedIn but I’ll try to get her here more
Center is
@amandabradford
— she started dating app The League and recently sold to Match
Both very smart and savvy 👍
You should follow them!
Who needs tech conferences when you have podcast meetups w theme parties & a
@Grimezsz
set? Met such an awesome group of new besties at
@allinsummit
( like
@AlexElsea
)! Thx
@Jason
@friedberg
for creating an oppty for us to meet & rock my red rave wig. I’m all in 4 Dubai 2024…
In this beautiful moment, the billionaire Wolfram Alpha founder, one of the world’s leading academics, held an impromptu debate on the essence of our universe outside an insane
@Grimezsz
rave where many of the world’s top founders/VCs danced like its 2021
That’s the
@AllInSummit
I love this list and this one especially:
16. If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that.
Some of my favorite
@naval
ideas:
1. If you don't know yet what you should work on, the most important thing is to figure it out.
2. Books make for great friends, because the best thinkers of the last few thousand years tell you their nuggets of wisdom.
3. You will get rich
Steve Carell did not know that the cast would sing '9,986,000 Minutes', as it was kept a secret from him. His reaction to the song is real and not scripted.
@sweatystartup
This worked for me in LA but not Austin. Some markets like austin have pocket listings (off MLS) which are guarded by gate keepers and incentivize both buyer and seller with less property tax bill due to off mls transactions not needing to be disclosed
don’t date when
- your life feels chaotic
- your home isn’t in order
- you don’t know what you want
date when
- you very much love yourself
- you feel a strong center of gravity
- you have space for someone else
go inward, find your intentions, be intentional
@FoundersPodcast
@naval
16 is an excellent mantra to have handy when approached by acquirers that threaten to build it if you don’t sell. Wish I had hung this on mirror >>> If you are fundamentally building and marketing something that is an extension of who you are, no one can compete with you on that.
@Aella_Girl
@tailcalled
Interesting! If you did this pre-work w/ your audience we could send the final survey to
@theleague
users to get unbiased sample- I’d be curious how our users grade themselves on the sex negative sex positive spectrum & how it correlates w/ who they seek
We just released our podcast episode about modern dating featuring
@amandabradford
from The League - one of our best guests to date. The best line from the episode - she describes Bumble in two not-so-flattering words (cc:
@LisaQFetterman
,
@kaykas
):
I’m so glad we can edit SMS texts (imessages) now. My adhd trigger happy fingers breathe a sigh of relief that my logical brain can catch up. Why did that take so long. Also why did it take so long for suitcases to have spiny wheels
Pumped to do my first ever live podcast (😬) tomorrow about modern dating / life in San Francisco for “This is your life in Silicon Valley” podcast with the one and only Sunil Rajaraman!!!! Come out and join the fun!...
@hunterwalk
This also happens tons in dating! User: “Bug report - my match randomly expired!? We were having a great convo!” CS: Ummm......he/she expired you early
@_TamaraWinter
Oh man I wish this campaign only cost $200K - want to guess again? 😅
@_TamaraWinter
are you not feeling our
#goalDigger
campaign? Have you seen our other taglines? Would love to hear your thoughts! Now that they’re all finally up I’m going subway riding to see them 🙌
Facebook fumbled the bag so hard on being the common denominator identity platform.
By never trying to be cool, LinkedIn never became uncool, and outlasted everyone as an immutable utility
@ABCsofADHD
Thanks for posting about ADHD things daily. I am newly diagnosed and a silent appreciator of these threads that help me learn about it without a giant research project, and hear how it impacts random day to day stuff. If there is anyone else I should follow would love to know! ☺️
@danhockenmaier
I agree w this take, pick one and crush it. We did this & it worked (press). Only issue is if it dries up (like when everyone moved to social media + press paywalled) you’re back to square 1 (0?) so maybe takeaway is Always Be Exploring/experimenting/improving your
#2
channel too
In Opinion
“School is the only place in the world where you’re expected to excel at everything, and all at the same time. In real life, you’ll excel at what you do best and let others excel at what they do best,” writes Margaret Renkl.
@JessicaVaugn
This makes zero sense, what are you trying to say? You are worried being good at biz means you are repelling men? Our data shows otherwise, men like women who are ambitious. Agree with whoever called this word salad 😂
Huge (belated) congrats to my friend Brendan Dowdle on raising a MONSTER SERIES A for his startup Arraiy (transforming how filmmakers create visual effects for film/TV - eliminating thousands...
@jasonlk
Agreed with always remembering who gave you a check when you had no traction yet (
@rosenrosen
,
@aileenlee
@robsiegel
), as well as remembering to appreciate luck + timing + the people that helped in the early days! Just wrote a post about this today!
💯This holds true from my experience too (albeit we were at a much smaller scale). We were more effective with 12 vs 35 employees, and when there was one point person on product decisions (me, the founder), no question
I built and sold for $1.3 billion to Adobe, and along the way, I received plenty of advice that turned out to be entirely off the mark. Here's a look at some of the most glaring misdirections:
1. "As CEO, focus on executive business tasks." This couldn't
If OpenAI is back, we're all back, so we're bringing
@theleague
back on Twitter, er, X! We'd welcome any thoughts on content (you'd want to read/follow). I'm pushing for FUNNY "overheard
@TheLeague
" tweets that illustrate dating in today's weird era, but maybe overplayed? Ideas?
@dustychipura
Thank you I needed this today! Do you find your ghost rate on emails/text/slack goes to an all time high when you throw in a bunch of travel (creating even higher level of crushing guilt of knowing you probably won’t respond 🫠🥲)
Salesforce will match any OpenAI researcher who has tendered their resignation full cash & equity OTE to immediately join our Salesforce Einstein Trusted AI research team under Silvio Savarese. Send me your cv directly to ceo
@salesforce
.com. Einstein is the most successful
I am pro-vax but getting these brand new vaccines to be listed in childhood vaccine schedule is gross & clearly (the only way) for Big Pharma to have zero liability for any long term effects that may show up from the vaccines. How did nobody stand up?
ANNOUNCEMENT: I'm back.
Last July I founded a new startup. Today I'm sharing it with the world.
It's called Hampton: a highly vetted membership community for entrepreneurs, founders and CEOs.
Why launch a community? I'll explain + why it'll be huge biz.
Thanks to
@amandabradford
from The League for making controversial statements about
@bumble
on the podcast - and to
@TechCrunch
for publishing the transcript :).
My favorite kind of launch party - a digital one with no set up and no clean up! To all my singles out there, please join me for our League Live Launch Sunday December 1st at 9PM!!! Be there...
I made my first meme today when a friend sent an article telling me I was smart to move to Austin, what do I do now how do I make it more memy and look more like it was birthed from a Reddit bro
"You need investors"
"You need connections"
"You need rich parents"
"You need capital"
"You need a novel idea"
"You need a ton of experience"
“You need a cofounder”
You don't need any of the above to build a startup so please stop making excuses and please start building.
Twitter has broken just about every piece of this FTX story using blockchain analytics, while NYT is writing puff pieces on a criminal.
Feels like a turning point for citizen journalism and loss of trust in MSM.
@karrisaarinen
They barely shipped anything *because* they hired so many people. The more developers you have, the slower everything gets. Keep your team under 10 people and you will go at lightning speed.