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8 Jan, 7 tweets, 2 min read
Most of my life I wanted to connect deeply with the people around me but didn’t know how. I was a painfully shy extrovert as a kid.

Here's what I've learned about how to build meaningful relationships with others.
First: what didn't work.

I thought becoming successful would attract people to connect with me.

It turns out the types of interactions people want to have with you because of fame and money are not often conducive to deep relationships.
Eventually, I realized what I'd been doing for the first 35 years wasn't working.

After a lot of soul searching and self work, here are the things I found:
1/ Invest in spending more time with people around you. Time spent == deeper relationships.

In that regard, COVID has been an opportunity to get closer to people as for many of us it has freed up time from surface level social engagements.

researchgate.net/publication/32…
2/ Develop a genuine curiosity for people i.e. learn to be interested in people not just for what they can do for you, but because you see something interesting in every person’s story.

I started to get curious when I decided there was something I could learn from every person.
3/ Get comfortable being vulnerable with other people. Vulnerability leads to closeness.

I got comfortable sharing the unfiltered version of what was going on with me, and to my surprise, instead of repelling others, they were attracted.

ted.com/talks/brene_br…
Deep relationships are work. It can be easy to look at others and say "those people just have them naturally, and I don't." Like anything, building relationships is a skill you can invest in.

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More from @justinkan

Justin Kan Profile picture
6 Jan
10 months ago we shut down Atrium after raising $75m in venture capital. Anyone hearing that knows I made tons of mistakes along the way. Someone asked me today what my biggest lessons learned were. Here they are:
Start with the mission
.

It is very hard to write the mission after the fact. You should start with a clear reason to exist and filter early hires for believers.
Start remote. SFBA is over for startups: the cost of housing and rent gives you much worse operating leverage. Many talented people choose jobs they want to be flexible re: location. Remote is better at this time in the market.

I wrote that before COVID, now it's extra true.
Read 16 tweets
Justin Kan Profile picture
3 Dec 20
I talked to my friend @mattieuga from @altopharmacy on @the_quest_pod this week.

Here's how he built a unicorn digital pharmacy serving tens of thousands with 800 employees and raised $350m after starting out of my living room 5 years ago:

[A thread]
I met Matt & Jamie in 2015 when they were engineers at Facebook. They wanted to start a co, but wanted the assurance of raising $ before quitting their day jobs.

I asked them how anyone would believe in the founders if they didn't believe in themselves. They quit FB the next day
After a few weeks delivering prescriptions from my living room, Matt decided they needed to own a pharmacy to build something better. So he started walking into pharmacies in SF and asking if he could buy them.

He actually found one: AG Pharmacy in the Mission.
Read 9 tweets
Justin Kan Profile picture
12 Nov 20
A friend who just started a company texted me last night and asked:

"What's the best piece of advice you have for me?

What do you wish someone told you when you were running these companies?"

Here's what I answered
Work on yourself:

Meditation, therapy, exercise, get good mentors, find a network of founders at your level

Every hour you put into yourself will pay huge dividends in the long run
Don’t worry about goals or outcomes, only worry about building a framework for directional progress

You don’t control the outputs, you only control the inputs
Read 5 tweets
Justin Kan Profile picture
2 Oct 20
I just fasted for five days (120 hours). No food, just water, coffee, and electrolytes. I did zero preparation; I only decided to do it the day I started.

Here’s what I learned about myself:
Hunger is in the mind. Most of us eat compulsively out of habit, not because we need to.
After 3 days, hunger subsided and I started to feel very calm.

Days stretched out and felt much slower. We don’t realize how much time we spend eating.
Read 9 tweets
Justin Kan Profile picture
8 Aug 20
One thing that is working well for me recently: Internal Family Systems.

IFS is a therapy system that proposes the mind is composed of multiple “parts”. These parts represent different personalities, emotions and motivations.
By recognizing these parts of ourselves we can better understand our own mind. Often we have elevated or repressed parts because of challenging experiences. Ex: I have a part that desperately wants to be approved of by others, because I felt like an outsider w my peers growing up
Eventually that part of me that needed approval became dominant as I grew into an adult.

Often we want to reject parts of ourselves that seem “bad.” Who wants to go around seeking the approval of others? That’s fucking thirsty.
Read 8 tweets
Justin Kan Profile picture
22 Dec 19
It’s been a wild ten years for me. Here’s a bunch of things I’ve learned in the last decade:

Things that seem disastrous at the time can happen for a reason.

Some of my most important learnings came from failures that I thought were the end of the world in the moment.
The most important success factor in your work is who you choose to work with.

This has been more important to my success than having the right idea, the right resources, or anything else. Having the right people around you is the difference between success and failure.
No matter where you are at, you are probably giving up too early. Big things take time to succeed at.
Read 11 tweets

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