Hey I’m Matt, and welcome to my monthly newsletter on my journey building my startup - directly to your inbox 📬

🚀 TLDR (for this month);

• Personal Update (March + April)

• Raising Capital -> Strategic Exit

• My Favourite Things This Month

• Top Reads This Month (worth your time)

• What's Next For Me

🆕 Personal Updates

It's now Mid-May!

I skipped the April update (mostly cause I was focusing on exams), but I'm excited to dive into too cool things I've up to recently!

Did a Y Combinator interview, finished my Envision Founder Cohort, partnered with Curious Cardinals (Forbes 30 Company), been binging The Drop Out w/ Inner Circle, participated in a pitch competition at Visible Hands, joined Republic as a venture fellow, did a pre-mint for the Dolce&Gabbana, and created an investment thesis around the tokenization of startups.

Right, let’s get to it - time for this months roundup 🚀

~ Matt

🧩 Raising Pre-Seed -> To Strategic Exit

This past couple weeks made the exciting decision to go for a strategic exit with my web3 company.

We had a pre-seed of with some of my dream venture capitalists and angels, but before taking in much more capital we decided to truly evaluate the market.

I chatted with Sunita Rao who was previously head of tokenization and crypto at Republic and we had a deep dive on the current token market. We ultimately came up with the 3 main stages we believe the token market is headed:

1) Token Investment in Companies (Republic is leading this charge and democratizing access to wealth)

2) Token Investment in Organizations (Multiple DAO tooling options here)

3) Token Investment in People/Creators (We were leading this charge)

I believe it was summed up perfectly with one line:

"You're building the equivalence of Virtual Reality in 2012, it's genius but the market just isn't there (yet)."

Eliot from Coinvise also shares his similar thoughts on why Social Tokens are doomed in 2022

I also had a chat with my investors, and it was super heartwarming to hear that they would invest the same amount of capital in whatever I build next. Especially in pre-seed stage, it's truly betting on the founders succeeding instead of the main startup idea.❣️

I learned more this past year building a true startup, raising capital, building the team, etc. than I ever could have otherwise. The startup gave me a reason to break into the web3 space, and x1000 my network in the tech world.

Planning on taking (at least) a 9-11 month hiatus from building another impactful startup, and currently working on some smaller projects, and working on some new aspects of myself (will update monthly on this newsletter).

🦄 Sponsor S/O: Collective (Get Hired in Web3)

Everyone is currently looking into breaking into the web3 space.

With Collective (talent matching network), it makes it 10x easier for top companies and talent in web3 to connect.

Being built by my friend Ryan Haraki, this is a very promising web3 project, and it takes less than 1 minute to get started!

Getting connect to web3 talent || Get your first job in the web3 space.

💠 My Favourite Things This Month

🎬 YouTube Video - 10 Years of Coding Everything I've Done - a great motivator for those getting into the development space. It gives a great overview (+ motivation) towards getting into coding and building projects

🎧 Audiobook - Bad Blood - in complement to watching the HBO Series The DropOut, I wanted to do some additional research about Theranos. This gave me a great in depth analysis on the the entire Theranos story and startup crime

🎧 Audiobook - Before Happiness - analysis and prequel to the Happiness Advantage that I read the previous month.

📬 Tweet of the Week

🛠 Ending Remarks + What's Next?

That's it for this month!

For those curious, after exiting my web3 company, I'm currently building projects on buildspace, completing a full-stack course, teaching web3 at Curious Cardinals, and just really focusing on building stuff

Thank you to everyone that’s been a part of my life and with me on my journey (especially the investors!)

If you made it this far, hit REPLY and tell me what you thought of this newsletter. Was this 🚀 or 🗑. I read every response 🤩

If you enjoy this issue, share it with your Twitter friends!

Until next month,

Matt | @mattespoz 👨🏻‍💻

P.S. I'm going to be at Collision Startup Event next month! If are a developer and want free tickets, you can get them here. Shoot me a message if you plan on going, we can meet up IRL!