Once you're able to find humor in any situation, you've either reached enlightenment or you're a little unhinged. Trying to figure out which camp I'm in....

Cheat code for life: Surround yourself with people who root for your growth, not your comfort. The ones who refuse to let you coast. Who celebrate risks. Who hold you to a higher standard. Who force you to think bigger. Give your energy to those who give it back 10 times over.

I was warned that being a Founder again would require becoming numb to constant rejection. Today's rejection came from a publisher for my business book. The main feedback: "I can't think of any business book I've ever worked on that used this style." Onwards and upwards!

We are absolutely cooking @wander We have some incredibly beautiful products releasing in August. Not to mention, hundreds of new locations. We're investing heavily in design and engineering. If you're a passionate designer or engineer, reach out.

Top advantages to being a first mover: - No roadmap - Tiny market - Customers aren’t sure - Limited legitimacy - Never budgeted - VCs don’t get it - Many VPs don’t get it - Tiny TAM at first - Seems minor to many - Why wasn’t it already done if it’s so important It’s great

Underrated life advice: Stop allowing your head to outsmart your gut. The worst mistakes in life are made when you allow your head to talk you into something when your gut already said no. That “gut feeling” is earned through experience. Trust it.

Introducing 37Maru Dear Friends in the Venture Capital and Startup Communities, A few months ago, I shared the news that after 17 incredible years I was stepping away from the VC firm I co-Founded, QED Investors. It wasn’t a retirement message. Far from it. It was an announcement that I wanted to return to my roots as an Operator and throw myself into the zero-to-one phase of building new businesses once again. The truth is, my time at QED allowed me to become a decent Investor over the years, but my real superpower is in the realm of navigating the idea maze and creating things that didn’t exist before. Building is in my blood. It’s who I am, and the people who've worked with me know this to be true. With this said, I’m happy to announce that my plans have crystalized enough to share what I’m actually working on. Welcome 37Maru! At a high level, 37Maru is a small-batch idea factory with one simple approach: Identify profound problems, develop well-thought-out solutions, find amazing Founders to partner with, and then obsessively build together. This is my chance to collaborate with the many remarkable people I've grown to know and respect in the VC world as well as the opportunity to partner with a few hungry, eager Founders to build special businesses together. 37Maru isn’t an incubator or an accelerator. It’s a way for me to throw my time and resources at a very small number of ideas and roll-up my sleeves as an Operator once again. And I don’t plan on doing it alone. Every idea will require a co-Founder. Every idea will require hiring amazing people to work with. And every idea will benefit from the skills of 37Maru’s wonderful and talented COO, Rachael Harnish. She’s scaled teams, navigated complex regulatory environments and built operations that work at startup speed. She’s the chaos wrangler who's worn every ops hat from seed to post-IPO who you’d want to call if you needed someone to turn ideas into reality. I encourage you to check out our new website (link is in the first reply) where you’ll find more information on the themes that we’re currently investigating and the first business that we’re actively building (First Press). The site is a great place to sign up for my new Substack that very soon will contain all the historical posts that I’ve shared on socials over the years. And now that I’ve finished the first draft of the book I’ve been working on (!!!!) it will be a great place to learn when and where it will be available. And in case you’re wondering about the name, it’s an homage to two personally inspirational “events”: Move 37 and The Kobayashi Maru. There’s no doubt both ideas have had a profound impact on the way I see the world. Finally, as many of you know from my recent posts, I’m currently in fundraising mode for First Press so wish me well as I navigate the gauntlet with my amazing team! Onwards and upwards, Fintechjunkie

I couldn't be more excited to officially launch the @footprint_hq Onboarding Engine (OBE) to the world. We're on a mission to build the best onboarding platform, and this is our biggest engineering lift to date to do exactly that. Footprint now has a graphical view to handle incredibly complex onboarding scenarios in an intuitive UX. Some examples of how our customers are using OBE today. ➕ Modeling a multi-step-up flow (if flag for synthetic, step-up to doc scan) 🟰 Now in Footprint click a template for this scenario (30 seconds), or create a custom flow where you toggle on synthetic, auto-populate rules, and click add doc step-up (3-5 minutes). 🏦 Partner bank templates We’ve now mapped the CIPs of dozens of partner banks into Footprint. What’s unique is we can show the bank a more compliance-focused view (ie Lexis Nexis risk codes) whereas our customers can use Footprint in more plain text (ie fail if Lexis can not locate SSN). 🏧 Link KYC + BAL playbooks The vast majority of companies had to build internal logic to get their KYC + BAL flows to talk to each other. 💳 Call transaction monitoring platforms or other third party nodes from Footprint. This means Footprint can now talk to your other tools in the identity/fraud stack with relevant information still surfacing back in Footprint. If you'd like to learn more, please visit our website below and we'd love to talk!

Just discovered: "The Boy the Mole the Fox and the Horse" by Charlie Macksey. The lessons in the book are priceless...a new classic.

Yes. Writing is not a second thing that happens after thinking. The act of writing is an act of thinking. Writing *is* thinking. Students, academics, and anyone else who outsources their writing to LLMs will find their screens full of words and their minds emptied of thought.