The Distill - The Nate Episode

Greetings, Pioneers.

This week, Nate picks up the pen and delivers some harsh truths behind building a startup. The highs are intoxicating. The lows are brutal. There's no avoiding either. The only way out is through.

And we start a Mafia. Fun week.

The Ups & Downs

Keeping a level head is probably the hardest thing to master when you're building a startup.

Founders love talking about raising money, shipping features, closing deals, and hiring people - all the exciting things. What I never hear about is the emotional whiplash that comes from trying to build nothing into something. Dramatic Highs. Dramatic Lows. That’s been the rule at Due Gooder the past 6 months, not the exception.

One week we’re on a call with a huge university, they're floating the idea of a pilot halfway through the meeting. We walk out thinking, "holy shit, this is it." Then four follow up emails later... nothing. On the other end - you have a call we landed from an outbound campaign sending random google cal invites that will end up being our first paid university pilot.

A few weeks later a VC tells us they're interested in joining our round. One partner goes as far to say, “I want to personally invest outside of the venture check”. We grind through diligence only to receive an email saying they're rolling the allocation into a debt fund instead. Sweet.

Fast forward to a Friday afternoon when we find out we need to complete a compliance audit that would takes weeks… By Monday. I built an internal workflow that scanned our GitHub repos, Notion docs, policies, and documentation that assembled and completed 90% of the audit for us. A week later we found out we passed. A win this time, but no less dramatic than the losses.

Up & down. That's the life we chose. That’s the life you chose whether you’re the founder or employee number twenty-five at a startup.

The emotional swings are ridiculous. Some days i wish things were a little more boring. But I am not naive enough to think that will ever become reality. So we adapt or die. You either let the chaos consume you, or you learn to live with it.

Managing the chaos

Whenever I'm trying to teach myself something, I almost always relate it back to code. I started programming when I was ten, and it's still the easiest framework I have for making sense of the world. I even have a tattoo on my wrist of the bash script for a fork bomb. Paste those characters into a terminal and it'll recursively spawn processes until your computer crashes. It's a reminder not to spin out and try solving everything all at once or else you’ll crash and burn.

Lately, though, I've been trying to make sense of that same feeling of imbalance, the kind that comes with building a company. I discovered a data structure called an AVL tree - short for Adelson-Velsky and Landis. You can picture it as a branching tree where every new piece of data becomes a leaf, and as it grows it constantly adjusts itself so it never leans too far to one side. It's used for storing, searching, and sorting data.

One of it’s core rules is simple:

|hL - hR| <= 1

The left and right side don't have to be perfectly equal. They're actually expected not to be. They just can't drift too far apart. Every time an insertion throws the tree out of balance, it performs a rotation and keeps going.

I think that's a pretty good way to think about startups too.

You're never going to eliminate the highs and lows. A great sales call shouldn't convince you you've made it, and a bad investor meeting shouldn't convince you you're cooked. The goal isn't staying perfectly balanced. It's catching yourself before the imbalance gets too big and making the small adjustments that keep you moving forward.

Personally, i’m still working on that one.

nate

Louisville Mafia

Last week, Nate sent me a video of founders in Silicon Valley playing Mafia.

He thought I'd enjoy it. He was right.

Me: “lets get a game going at the block”.
Nate: “lets get a game going in Louisville”.

Sold.

A room full of interesting people playing one of the best social deduction games ever made. Founders. Executives. Engineers. Marketers. Operators. Builders. The people who spend their days creating things. That’s the plan.

Step 1: build a list. Let us if you want to be a part of Louisville’s first organized Mafia….. game.

Express interest here: https://tally.so/r/Xxg1zj

Step 2: Find a bar. Rent out that bar. Start lying, conneeving and conniving.

And If you've never played Mafia before, watch the video. I think you'll enjoy it.

More to come…

Events

Fire & Ice | July 11th | RSVP Here

Vibe Code Night | July 9th | RSVP Here

Poker Night | July 9th | RSVP Here

Welcome to the Ecosystem | July 23rd | RSVP Here

HackKentucky | September 11th | RSVP Here

Note’s on The Distill’s co-EICs: Jack Crowdis & Rachel Edenfield

Jack runs the newsletter, helps run KYX. He’s a career startup kid, past founder, and current operator. Weekly contributor. Always editor.

Rachel’s the Founder/CEO of venture-backed Swell, and a driver of KYX. Routinely delivers the city’s sharpest long-form startup advice. Always re-edits Jack’s edits (including this bio).

Know someone who should read this? Forward it, or send them this link.

That’s a wrap 🎬
Keep showing up 👊 
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Peace, Pioneers ✌️