Matthew Giampetroni

What are you compulsive about? Is it possible to put that at the center of the platform’s activity?

Pseudosecrets allow people to:

1. Feel like they know a secret about your company (Even better if you can make an investor think they figured this out themselves vs. being told).


2. Be able to combat doubters in a way that feels intellectually dominant and non-obvious.


3. Paint a narrative that makes the upside future that you believe in feel closer to a

Debt can also scare off growth equity funds, who don’t like not being the most senior money in the pref stack.

You can’t charge a premium price for giving people what they expect, and you won’t ever have break-out products that way—the kinds of products that people line up around the block for.

Start-ups of any kind are awash in ambiguity. It’s the founder’s responsibility to hold that ambiguity for everyone, which is often a lonely job.

People on the outside sometimes wonder why businesses with so few traditional assets seem to require so much financing. Well, they  are  accumulating assets: users are the new assets, and their  use  is what you’re out to monetize.Whatever your business model is, acquiring users is the new building factories. 

For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says

Execution at each core inflection point of a business enables continual narrative growth, and pseudosecret belief vs. erosion and doubt because in the end, narratives and pseudosecrets only accrue value to their relevant companies if they eventually become truths.

Beyond deliberately architecting the people who surround you, the best way to control your mindset is to “own” the way you speak to yourself, what sports psychologists call your “self-talk”