fifty meetings teach you what fifty books cannot
a week of fifty conversations.... and the pattern almost no one talks about.
you can read every book on venture and still not see it.
fifty conversations in five days will.... and that is what the week just gave me.
founders pitching. operators rebuilding. capital allocators sniffing. quantum thinkers. media theorists. crypto exchanges. each one a little window into where the world is actually going.
the books tell you what already happened. the meetings tell you what is happening right now. and there is a gap between those two things that almost no one wants to admit.
the gap is where the alpha lives.
most people are afraid of the meeting. they think it is small. they think it is a tax on their day. one founder asked me this week if i regretted doing fifty calls in a week.... like it was a problem to be optimized away.
i told him the truth. the calls are the work.
every founder you meet at the early stage is carrying a piece of the future in their head that they have not yet learned how to share. your job is not to teach them. your job is to listen long enough that the piece falls out of them sideways.... and then you can hand it back to them clean.
you can not do that over a slack thread. you can not do that over a 200 word email. you have to sit with them. fifteen minutes. thirty. sometimes an hour.
and most of the time nothing happens. that is the part nobody warns you about. forty seven of fifty meetings will give you nothing immediate. they look like a waste. they feel like a waste.
then meeting number forty eight changes your year.
you would not have gotten to forty eight without the forty seven.
so the question is not whether fifty meetings is too many. the question is whether you are willing to keep showing up after the first forty seven were quiet.
are you?