Why a dodgy Entrepreneur raised $350M

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👉 These are the crazy things I learned last week.

1/ You are struggling to raise money, and you are wondering HOW ON EARTH the co-founder of WeWork - after driving it to the ground - just raised $350M to run a second company!

Keep reading and I'll show you how you can do it.

Adam Neumann was the co-founder and CEO of WeWork, and well... things didn't go as planned (translation: spent a lot of investors' money for his personal entertainment - among other irregularities).

Adam decided to jump into web3 and started a totally bogus company called FlowCarbon - remember, this name is important.

FlowCarbon raised $70M from a top Silicon Valley VC - no product, just a homepage.

Fast forward a year, Adam (yes, the SAME Adam) starts A SECOND COMPANY named (wait for it) Flow, but this time raises $350M from the same VC (again, no product).

You might be wondering why anyone would give money for TWO different companies with zero product and zero experience in the space to a CEO with a questionable past.

It is the network.

Companies don't raise money because they have a killer product.

CEOs raise money because they have a network built by their families or from attending a top-tier university.

And now you are thinking:

Slow clap Jon. What can I do that I don't live in California and I don't have a family office?

Network. Build your network by attending events and adding value.

The kiss of death for Entrepreneurs is them thinking that they can make it by building companies in their garage.

Unless you are selling tires, go physically where Angels/VCs/customers are and mingle, add value and get feedback.

2/ I love that more and more filmmakers are getting funding from NFTs.

Would you buy an NFT to be "part" of a movie?

3/ Chronos means time in Greek. Kairos also means time in Greek but has a deeper meaning.

• Chronos is the "real" time as our clocks perceive it. 1 minute is 60 seconds.

• Kairos is the time as "we" perceive it. Hours turn to minutes when you are with someone you love, and minutes turn to eons when you do something tedious or unpleasant.

Most of us live with Kairos, but we try to squeeze everything in Chronos

Be mindful and try to live just with Kairos: full, transformative experiences.

Got inspired by this tweet here.

4/ A year ago, I posted about breaking the 1M views on YouTube with an interview with Ice-T.

A couple of days ago, we broke the 2.2M views, and still going up! 📈

I am sooooo tempted to start interviewing celebrities again.

Who should be the next one ❓

See the segment here and the whole interview here - it is epic.

5/ It's been a long time since I've given some $Victory ✌️ so let's do a riddle:

Find the name of the company that IPOed today (19th of August) and get $499 coins by going to this address:

https://victory.jon.io/claim/<nameofthecompany>

That's all for now. See you next week! 🚀

-- Jon V (as in Victory)

- Fri 19 August 2022