In the last year, @sevensevensix has made it a priority to build the tools that help scale the services we know our founders need most.

One of the biggest? Distribution.

Our founders are shipping great product and getting great feedback, but no distribution = no impact. Now across everybody in @sevensevensix we have millions of followers across a half dozen channels.

So how do we connect our founders to that kind of distribution power?

How do we help their content be seen?

Well, we built a tool. We call it... Amplify.

Today's founders sometimes need different types of support and expertise than I did as a first-time CEO (back in 2005!), but certain things are always going to be the same.

The biggest thing that's still true?

The value of having the right person, with the right expertise, in the room with you at the right time. What happened to me with @Reddit is a good case study on the "why":

I was a first-time CEO in college. I was young and dumb, but I had a pretty good idea and a lot of organic growth with Reddit. I started with $12K from YC, a little bit of advice, and that was it.

16 months later, Condé Nast offered $10M for the company and I said "Yes."

This was the WRONG thing to do.

How to turn $4,000 into $100,000,000+ 💸

They couldn't get a single investor to take them seriously...

That's when 4 friends decided to each invest $4,000 of their own savings to launch Chubbies.

(a 🧵 for DTC founders 👇) One day... 4 friends noticed that there was a lot of room for opportunity in men's fashion.

They asked themselves the following question:

What if we reinvented men's shorts... and made them *gasp* VERY SHORT?

They pitched the idea to multiple investors... 👇

Can I tell you a small secret about how I built Reddit's community from scratch? Lots of people know we used alt accounts for the first few weeks, but that was because an empty forum is a terrible UX (we didn't even have comments yet) so I begged my friends to post... Only a couple of them, did (Thanks Connor & Morgan!) so I invited a few hundred people from a phpBB forum I ran in college. These first 100 community members are the hardest.

So how can you make your community feel alive when you have 0 users?!

Here's what I did 👇

Every founder wants to build a “community" but runs into roadblocks when it comes to execution.

Here's a couple tips ↓ 1. Do the work that doesn’t scale (to start).

📱 Make 1-1 phone calls.
💻 Write personal emails.
🎁 Find individual ways to surprise and delight your community.

If people think you, the founder, personally care about them, they will reciprocate. They will also stick around.

Within the next 5 years, the majority of gamers won't play games unless they are being properly valued for that time.

The model is called "play-to-earn" and it will become standard for video games in the future.

Let’s talk about why ↓ First – quick definition.

The “play-to-earn” model in gaming lets players earn rewards that have real-world value just for playing.

These rewards generally come in the form of in-game digital assets that players can buy, trade, and sell outside of the game for real cash 💰

For brands, attention has never mattered more, but it’s never been harder to get.

Attention spans are short, ad space is crowded, audiences are niche, and content is everywhere.

But do you know what still matters? Merch. A well-designed, good-looking piece of merch is a long-term MOBILE advertisement that people will pay YOU to put up.

There are very few (no?) other avenues for brand awareness where the consumer will pay you for the honor of broadcasting your brand to the general public.

It's no secret that I believe digital avatars are the future of storytelling.

Here are three reasons why ↓ 1️⃣ → they empower maximum creativity.

What we can design is limited only by our imagination, and that possibility will steadily attract the most exciting and cutting-edge talent.

Before Uber Eats, DoorDash, and Grubhub were created, I had an idea for a service that'd let people skip the line and order takeout from their phone called My Mobile Menu (MMM!).

I ended up pitching the concept to Y Combinator.

They passed.

Here's why... So it was 2005 and "online ordering" for food was basically a glorified fax service.

After hearing @paulg give a talk in Boston called How to Start a Startup while on our Spring Break 4th year at @UVA, I pitched MMM! with my college roommate to him after his talk.

If you think the metaverse has failed, you’re wrong.

*Meta's* metaverse has failed. 🧵 Meta pitched a VR world where a consumer could wander the halls of a digital mall and purchase items from their favorite stores.

What followed was a swath of metaverse projects that were just lazy reiterations of the physical world.

As we build @sevensevensix, we meet a lot of hungry, ready to eat founders. On @MasterClass, I explain some of the values we see out of great founders. A great founder is compelling. You deeply understand the market of your product or service, and you know how to empathize with your customers.

Wild. @PaulG got suspended (for *sending folks to his website for a link to his mastadon). This is gonna get really, really interesting. PG is SV royalty. twitter.com/i/web/status/1… For the many non-tech folks who follow me, it'll be interesting to watch who picks sides here between the YC Community (PG) and the Paypal Mafia (Elon) — both are entrenched communities in Silicon Valley (and usually pretty aligned).

Me: thinking I'll watch a little NFL today...

OH MY GOD THIS IS HALFTIME!? Me: checking up on what I can only assume is still a blowout ....

OMG WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?! HOW IS IT TIED IN OVERTIME?

5yrs ago today at our 2017 Reddit Holiday Party — I was there thinking of my mom, who got terminal cancer right as I started Reddit + how much her unflagging support meant to me + I KNOW powered our success. Thank you to all the loved ones who support us crazy startup folks. Crazy to think how much has change since then— how many layers there were to this moment — but Holiday Parties always remind me of a chance to thank the partners who deal with (and shoulder) all of our bullshit in order for us to do dope things that we couldn't imagine NOT doing

In the first few years of building @Reddit, I’d find the number one post on reddit that day and email the person who made the content. I'd congratulate them on "hitting number one on Reddit" and send them a PNG file of a "golden Snoo." It was labor intensive to track down the author/creator every day, but years later I heard from so many people — even NYTimes writers — that hitting number 1 on Reddit was one of their favorite memories (and my cold email was how they learned about Reddit).

OH THAT WAS OURS. @USWNT
OK — come right back, squad! Yooo @roselavelle making magic happen out there.

Smart. As I've said for years now, sports will be the last entertainment domain standing because it is the only one with a monopoly on attention and no social media alternative. I'm obvs biased but the @NWSL would be the biggest upside right now.

cnbc.com/2022/04/07/for… Sports are still massively undervalued. Now you see why I've been putting millions into @weareangelcity @GloriaFootball @Sorare @OnlyAltOfficial @TryMetafy @withwagr (even when these were some of the most contentious investments at the time)

LFG @weareangelcity @weareangelcity I'm loving all the aggression from the onset.

Beautiful day for practice!! ⁦@weareangelcity⁩

Investing has been unbundled like everything else—the best founders care about the *individuals* signing up to support them with capital— a Firm's Name alone isn't enough. No one wants to call the Avengers for help with Thanos only to have Hawkeye show up.

https://twitter.com/rebecca_szkutak/status/1501929726344114176

All @sevensevensix Titans have an unfair advantage w distribution/brand AND operational expertise. We believe those are the two core attributes the best founders are looking for on their cap table in 2022. Not only do we invest $500K, we plug them into Cerebro + build community.

Founders need great outcomes, not great intentions. They deserve more from their investors than a check, and we built @sevensevensix to deliver.

Starting today, @cristina_laki is stepping into a brand new Partner role dedicated to listening to and co-creating with our founders. We created the all-new Founder Outcomes Partner role at @sevensevensix to focus on 3 areas: Founder Experience, Founder Community, Portfolio Outcomes.