Steph Mui
@stephmui
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on a mission to create more founders/angels as founder of @getpinxyz and sharing what i learn // past: VC at NEA, Stanford GSB, UChicago
invest with your people ➡️
Joined March 2011
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Pinned Tweet
Grateful to announce
@getpinxyz
's seed round today, lead by
@Initialized
@brettdg
with incredible partners including
@IndustryVC
@NEA
& many more.
Thank you
@nmasc_
@TechCrunch
, and special shoutout to my OG cofounder in
@2020_fund
,
@lmushin
!!
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This 16 person hacker house:
- listed their NYC house on google maps as a steak house as a joke
- generated a 900 person waitlist for reservations for what seemed like an ~exclusive dining experience~
- decided to actually make it real by getting 60 of their friends (almost
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in honor of turning 30 this week, here are 30 things i wish i knew about life and happiness <3
1. Don't start a company.
2. Don't start a company.
3. Don't start a company.
4. Don't start a company.
5. Don't start a company.
6. Don't start a company.
7. Don't start a company.
8.
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Tell me you work in tech without telling me you work in tech lmao
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one of my friends is in the middle of divorcing her husband for losing all their money to crypto, but now that bitcoin is over $40k again, she's reconsidering
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VCs who rejected us now circling back about investing because they heard about us getting interest from other VCs - so pathetic.
Where is your self respect? Where is your "contrarian thinking"? Where can I send my bank account information? How fast can you wire?
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Visiting SF for the first time in a while and googled the most popular things to do for inspo. What am I missing??
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new life goal unlocked: to be so badass that I have a personal website that looks like I built it in my elementary school html class that casually states I can invest $1-100m into your startup lol
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Someone is offering a $100k bounty "on a typical VC vesting schedule" to anyone who introduces them to their future partner, and their write-up on vesting and potential outcomes is literally more clear than any startup equity offer letter I've ever seen lol
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I've tried to get into watching Silicon Valley multiple times and have had to stop every time because as someone who worked in Silicon Valley for 5 years, it’s so accurate it literally hurts
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A VC asked to meet and it cost me $10,000
Hold up... $10k for a 60 minute meeting?! 🤯
Well, sort of.
I know what you're thinking - it's because you value your time at $10,000/hr, right?
No, my time is meaningless.
It's actually because I needed lots of therapy after
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A common question I get asked is how people decide to become founders
It all starts with getting a real job and realizing you're completely unemployable
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i'm 30 and still get frequent nightmares about failing a final exam and being unable to graduate
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‘
@warpdotdev
is a beloved company that just announced their $50m series b lead by sequoia last month
Their public “How We Work” doc is the best I’ve seen and has everything from how they communicate, solve user problems, make decisions, etc
There are some GEMS
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Tech bros suddenly developing strong opinions after listening to this week’s All-In podcast
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my new year’s resolution was to exercise more so I got a standing desk and a walking pad and needless to say it’s going super well
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whenever i'm having a bad day as a founder, i think back to when i was an investment banking analyst and how the literal highlight of my days was planning out my dinner order from Seamless lol
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Don’t understand the OpenAI hype at ALL. ChatGPT is basically a direct ripoff of SmarterChild, which was invented in 2001. Why is no one talking about this??
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The fact that you can sleep 8 hours but still feel tired because your body chose not to go into "deep sleep" is one of life's biggest scams
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this REJECTION EMAIL from a product designer I cold emailed is kinder and more value add than emails I've gotten from 99% of VCs lol
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you could pay $200k for an MBA
OR you could take a picture next to the GSB or HBS sign, set it as your profile photo, and accrue 90% of the same value for ✨free✨
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I got a 6am call from a vc this morning. I was like wow, that seems quite early for him.
I picked up - turns out he's skiing in Switzerland (6 hours ahead - makes more sense).
He called to remind me that it's time to build.
I told him his support was incalculable. All him 💪
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Founders raising for their AI startup vs founders raising for literally anything else
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$10m right now in your hand, but there’s a catch:
- a random VC you don’t know well gives you a piece of paper, you have to sign it, and he sits on your board for life
- he can’t be killed
- he can contact you at all times
- his only purpose is to find you and ask if he can be
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My biggest failure this year is our gen z intern spending a summer at our company and then telling us his career ambition is to be an investment banker
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Half of VC Twitter says it's a very positive sign when founders respond to email right away
The other half says it’s a bad sign bc it means a founder is not doing real work
I don’t want to give anyone the wrong idea so now when I get emails from VCs I just don’t respond at all
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whoever tells you being a founder isn't glamorous is lying to you. yesterday i spent literal hours:
- on hold with docusign tech support
- undoing a clerical error our payroll provider made
- editing board consents and offer letters
- crying
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my startup founder stack:
- notion
- airpods
- zoom
- therapist
- another therapist
- tissues
- job application for faang in the drafts (just in case)
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Whenever I’m having a bad day, I remember that I’m no longer an investment banker. Now as a founder, I just work the same and make way less money
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Did you know? Consumer founders are the most endangered species in the world
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one of our gen z interns just asked me what our company's zodiac sign is, and i really don't know what to say
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The biggest difference I didn’t expect about being a VC vs founder was the mindset shift from being skeptical to being almost delusionally optimistic.
In VC, your job is to say no 98% of the time. As a founder, your job is to sustain belief while being rejected 98% of the time.
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PARENTS: be sure to check your kids' Halloween candy this year!!! My son just found an offer letter from a16z to join their investment team as a partner in his Snickers. Absolutely horrifying.
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It's no longer 2 years banking, 2 years PE, 2 years business school. Now it's 2 years founder, 2 years VC, 2 years creator
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We’ve been taught all our life that self awareness is good, but I honestly think people with no self awareness (delusional confidence, obliviousness to criticism or discomfort experienced by others) have a superpower and are (unfortunately) more likely to be top .1% successful
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who runs growth for Shen Yun and how do I hire them to do growth for my startup
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Lord give me the confidence of a guy posting on Twitter like a bank solvency expert whose primary source is some texts he got from his buddies in a group chat
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founders/vc's too quickly dismiss startup ideas that have been tried and failed because they underestimate timing and execution
for example, Fizz is an anonymous social media platform for college students, and although the description could be applied to YikYak and a dozen other
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hmmm should I be questioning my sanity since I chose to live in expensive/cold nyc when a city like this exists? 🫠
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One of the best things about being a founder is that I no longer have to stress about company politics and quarterly performance reviews. Now I have constant rejections from VCs, customers, prospective hires, etc., to ruin my self esteem every day instead
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we're no longer hiring a software engineer, but instead, a "code master" or "king of the codebase" and our response rate is 30% higher lol
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it's crazy to see my 20 year old self's new year's resolutions about wanting to be a founder, and now, 10 years later, actually being one 🥺
if i could give my younger self advice, it's that she should think about working at faang instead because being a founder is terrible
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PSA for anyone who lives in NYC who hates waiting in line or having to make reservations weeks in advance every time you want to eat out:
this website automatically surfaces the best rates restaurants near you that have availability right now
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I'm 30 and have raised $100m+ for startups I've founded. Here's how:
- raised $250k angel round to get started
- pivoted to AI 4 weeks later and raised a $100m seed round
Follow me for more entrepreneurship and fundraising advice
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Being a founder is amazing because I no longer have an overbearing boss enforcing all nighters for no reason. Now I go to bed at a reasonable time and stay awake all night because of constant stress
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google calendar invites, but they show how late all participants historically are for meetings and recommend the actual time you should join so you're not waiting or making awkward small really for 10 minutes at the beginning of every call 🙃
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observation: founders are bootstrapping more often because a) it's harder to raise VC these days, and/or b) because they've lived through the ups and downs of VC and don't want to again
we really enjoyed talking about this with
@jamesbeshara
, who raised $50m+ of VC money for his
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Founder life hack: instead of eating instant ramen everyday to save money, you should live near Chinatown and get amazing meals like this 🤤
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Nothing says “I don’t believe in you” more than old MBA classmates reaching out to ask if I’m looking for a job less than a month after we announced our seed round lol
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the founder urge leaving my body upon learning I can earn $200k ghost writing tweets for VCs working 1/20th of the time
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I sat in on the roadshow for Shake Shack in 2015 and remember the CEO saying he chose JPM to lead the IPO because they were the only bank willing to give him a loan when he was just starting out (10!! years prior)
Founders will ALWAYS remember who was there for them (and who
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founders and investors obsess over cash runway, but a founder friend recently brought up the idea of 'emotional runway' and i can't get it out of my head
running out of money kills lots of companies, but i think not enough people talk about how running out of willpower kills
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founder math is quitting a stable job that pays well to take on the work of 23 jobs that pays half
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a common mistake i see founders make is getting revenge on VCs who’ve rejected them by not letting them into their rounds
that’s wrong. instead, founders should seek revenge by ✨insisting✨ on taking their money since statistically they have a 90% chance of failing + losing it
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saw a kid copying another kid's homework on the train today
heartwarming to see that, despite chatgpt, some kids are still cheating the old fashioned way 🥰🥰
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Founders, if you want to be valued like a unicorn, you have to LOOK like a unicorn bc VCs rely heavily on ✨pattern recognition✨
That's why I had our headshots retaken at the original WeWork and even brought someone onto the team that looks like Adam Neumann >>>
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I worked at Amazon and helped run their $80B AWS business.
There are 15 things that every founder needs to know regarding how to build a multi billion dollar business.
Here's a breakdown of them in plain English:
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men in tech will get a free baseball hat from a random startup event one day and end up wearing it everyday for the next 5 years
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With the holidays coming up, I've gotten asked by a lot of founders when they should avoid fundraising from VCs.
I'd avoid:
- Nov-New Years (holidays)
- Jan-mid Mar (VCs in Tahoe for ski season)
- Mar-Jun (lots of holidays like Easter, MDW)
- Jun-Labor Day (summer vacation)
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vc (who doesn't invest unless there's a lead) to another vc (who also doesn't invest unless there's a lead): we're not like everyone else - we're contrarian thinkers!!
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VCs at the start of every pitch meeting: I can start and give an intro on our firm and what makes us unique
The intros:
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proud to announce we've cut cash burn by ~100% by implementing chatGPT!
we've let everyone go (including myself) because we no longer have use to be employed
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Neopets still has ~100K DAUs and 1M MAUs 🤯
(+ was bought out last year from its corporate owner by an HBS grad + and raised $4m to relaunch !!)
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The best part about being a founder is never experiencing holiday blues or Sunday Scaries. Anxiety is no longer seasonal or even temporary and now it's just everyday
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Elon, a BILLIONAIRE, charging for verification among Twitter’s power users, the very people that ~MAKE THIS PLATFORM~ is ridiculous.
Where is your integrity? Where is your business sense?? Where do I send my $20? When will I get my blue checkmark??
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kinda brilliant: TIL that NYC has ~100 "ecommerce exchange zones" for people to meet for FB marketplace/craigslist transactions that are monitored 24/7 by camera
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VCs, if your early stage founders:
- eat any meal away from their desk
- idolize anyone that isn’t a unicorn founder
- make any new year resolution that’s not directly related to their startup
- takes any holiday ever, but especially to the Bahamas
Very bad sign 🚩
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everyone makes fun of MBAs (including me, lol) but there's a reason why there are so many funds dedicated to investing in students and why VCs eagerly recruit scouts on campuses
29% of VC-backed unicorns have at least one MBA founder (!):
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lol’ing at the fact that multiple friends working at cloud kitchens get hit up by VCs constantly asking them what they’re working on because they’re all forced to have “stealth startup” on their LinkedIns
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when someone you're supposed to have a zoom call with asks whether y'all really need the zoom call or whether an e-mail/async catch-up could be more efficient and offers to cancel the call
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whenever i'm having a bad day as a founder, i think back to the when i was a vc associate saying really cringe things to founders, and instantly feel better that at least now i'm getting a reality check
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Zuck was 19 when he founded Facebook
Steve Jobs was 21 when he founded Apple
Evan Spiegel was 22 when he founded Snap
Brian Chesky was 27 when he founded Airbnb
Takeaway: none of these people were Forbes 30 Under 30, so if you are, you should give up
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it's only monday and i've already had to reschedule calls with multiple MBA students this week to work around a Vegas party, a ski trip, and an "early President's day"
and now i understand why everyone makes fun of MBAs
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our whole team is in town today so I made sure to be intentional with my office outfit
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Consumer founders just starting their companies vs consumer founders one year in on their way to pivot to b2b
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hear me out! a new business idea:
a single platform for all your friends, photos, events, groups, life updates, messages, birthday reminders, free & for sale, memes, etc
who is working on this???
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something i didn't expect about being a founder is the number of seemingly trivial and mind numbing administrative decisions there are to make all the time😵💫
besides "incorporate in Delaware", what are some others? and why are there not more?
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I have horrible news for founders - I listened to a VC's advice and it actually worked, like really well. I’m so sorry
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Running a startup 🤝 living in nyc
moving a single muscle
and having my bank account
balance go down by $35
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Hosted this consumer founder dinner last night and rumor has it we already lost someone to b2b 😔
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