Crashing the Founders Parade: A Stage of Social Proximity
Disclaimer: Everything below is a mix of what I observed and heard during the event. The goal isn’t to pinpoint "who exactly said what," but to share (usually) an outsider's view and overall perspective on these industries. I’m not here to act as a definitive firsthand source—readers should do their own research. I hope this inspires you to attend events, explore new industries, and hear what leaders are presenting. These notes combine my observations with thoughts on how things could run smoother and how ideas connect (IMO). I’m not an expert, you know? Just hanging out in the room with them. Enjoy.
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I can’t get enough of this song. Its the energy I want to give off lately. Not cockiness, but confidence (especially when peopel are beign transactional). Higher standards, patience… and yeah, I’ve got a lot going on, theories very few can kep up with, and I’m awesome. SO click here: this is my anthem lately. “Greedy” by Tate Mcrae :)
I debated between going to two events tonight. One was a random topic I knew next to nothing about, the other was this. A panel of founders talking to founders. I was familiar with one of the guys on stage (I’ve heard him pitch one of his businesses at least twice before) and it’s at a location I’m a big fan of. It just has a really nice atmosphere, its waterside, natural lighting… thoguh the other event was at one of my top 5 favorite locations/venues in Seattle!!! Ahhh ahhaha.
Why Attend: I’m a founder. I’m working hard to be more social lately. I’m also working in AI (which was a big part of this event), so. Yeah! I mean, what else is there to say :)
Photo Collage + Commentary
Notes from the Event
Arrived perfectly on time but want to eat before I start typing. They’re a young professional notwork (but most of their tickets are usually $100+ a person. I’ve seen them before. Even one time my friend invited me to their event but then he just had me record videos of him singing super sentimental karaoke songs. hahahah) but this one is free.
Omg their chairs are crazily comfortable too - I realize this.
The chair I was in before wasn’t comfy at all and then I moved and now I’m like holy crap, these are cozy.
A guy is talking who works for Pfizer.
barf.
He works for pharmaceutical and digital implementation. Domain expert can leverage AI. He’s like to be thoughtful about a startup and his question is how can peopel who want to bootstrap but can’t forever - how?
Now an intern from Amazon is on stage and talks so quiet on the mic. Literally you couldn’t even hear waht he said.
This guy worked for Microsoft and then left in 2020 to solve a problem. It’s dining of the future. Restaurant owners have to depend on yelp and google or DoorDash or toast or square, etc. You need is many teammates so his app brings everything together in one place.
Next a speech from the venue representative. - wait, no - the founder.
His team Is a bunch of women - but then one guy - everyone is attractive hahaha. Arguably very attractive hahaha. This guy hires attractive people. ‘
The idea of this place is where you can work somewhere with a bunch of great people to not have to work for “the man”.
Dude I’m just thinking now that I’m so glad I’ve gotten to know this city and get hte hang of things, and I believe so much in MOASS and I believe I”Ll have a lot of money here soon…. And I can do great things in this city too. And I’ve had so much time to try things out and figure things out and learn without money. Then get better at it once I do have money to work with.
Iv’e had plenty of money, lost a lot, and now I’m learning to build with less, way smarter when I get more than before. Way more.
Okay - he’s saying being in this room is fun cause you’re around people doing entrepreneurship.
A guy jsut walked in late and he’s refudsing to take off his sunglasses. OMG wait wahttttttttt his sunglasses just turned instantly into normal glasses. Did he do something? Trigger them on/off???? Or what? That was insane. I’ve never seen this.
Okay this girl on stage has a strong valley girl accent. And the guy who owns this place was saying the were rock climbing today then he told valley girl voice she HAS to be on stage. She said its her second day of work.
So she says if you were to start over from scratch how woudl you do it and what woudl you do differently?
Okay, this next girl speaking - omg I’ve heard her talk before!!! I heard her talk last week and I remember when she talked I completely didn’t understand her company and what it did. She spoke at a big event last month. I only remember it cause her company sounds like Tesla. Geeze.
She said she’d wished she’d learned the art of selling
She said she couldn’t afford anyone at hte beginning
Brah - internships
There are lots of ways to get allies to sell and build partnerships.
Some creative ways to make allies: figure out how to grow together, revenue share, reoccurring revenue streams to partners,
The next guy is speaking and I’ve met him a few times. He is about my age and now says he has started 4 companies.
He said, in the beginning, he wasn’t spending time with other founders. Didn’t go to events.
He wished he had talked to more founders in the beginning, like him
Which events or incubators woudl you reccommend to do that?
He said, yeah, he’s at a lot of events, lots of spaces - they offer something uniquely different.
He works out of the climate hub, maybe you work within AI, anything else - work at this venue.
Everyone has a calendar (each of these venues) - thats how you stay updated.
Lol and he said if you’re trying to go to a specific event, sent him a message on linked and he probably knows who is hosting it and can help you get in
It reminds me of Larry Cheng’s post about how when you’re struggling you lack confidence and when you’re succeeding you often lack humility - how this is common for people.
Building has gotten so much easier, so when I started going and selling and so, uh, customers are like do you integrate with this? Or that?
It was liek able stakes. You couldn’t jsut solve one tiny problem - if ChatGPT can solve it, why do they need you?
It wasn’t just helping you solve one acute situation this one solution, its giving you a holistic solution. Thinking 4 steps ahead.
Balance between how easy it is to build something and how easy to distribute or sell
- now its really easy to build, but its gotten harder and harder to distribute and sell. Thinking about distribution, starting from that, that’s what I’d do.
AMAZING point and advice
Btw this guy speaking now (who just gave that advice) he and I had af funny interaction trying to both get clean water
The distribution is WAY WAY more important than the building
First time founders focus on product, second time founders focus on distribution.
Some peopel have a big following when they share content that is valuable and specific.
Provide value and
This random couple keep talking during this whole event. This girl is just locked on this guy and he keeps trying to listen to the talk. You guys, just go outside. This is ridiculous.
Just lately I’m watching a lot of videos on how to… hahahahhaha… talk to guys, respect yourself, and also be more “high value” you know? Like self respecting. And so many are talking about how guys enjoy persuing and hte more you’re like obsessed with them and giving them all of your attention, its just too easy. It’s not like, idk. Not the way to do it. So this girl is just pouring herself all over this guy.
Just makes me think of myself when I was younger and I liked this one guy so much and we went to an event together and I was talking to him during the event so much - cause he had nowhere to go - hahahha. But then other peopel in teh crowd were shushing us .And I was thinking, like, guys!! Let me flirt with this guy. Finally! hahah omg. But, now I see liek - “be the flower” and ther are lots of fish in the sea. Quit trying so hard and doing so much work. It doesn’t work.
Not doing customer validation is NOT smart. What is the pain that is so big out there that we can leverage AI to solve that massive problem? What is something so painful that peopel are dying to have somebody provide them that solution.
Then sit there and write up something to them. Liek a love letter to a single person in pain.
Talk to a ton of people.
Talk to 400 customers before writing a line of code
OMG now this girl is taking selfies of herself and the guy is shaking’ his head. They’re so distracting.
Look at your own network. What do you have that is really hard for somebody else to create? That is probably your connection pool. That is your network. T he peopel you’ve done business with for 10 years. You could pick up a phone and have somebody in a big company actually answer your call.
How do you know when it is time to build a team? When you want to hire people? When to show up to big enterprise meetings? Go alone or with a crew?
First try to give the task to AI
Only YOU can do the work, unless you delegate it to someone. In the early days, even if you have a team, it’s only you all.
Now AI is like your nice friend who is very helpful and high leverage. You can get $100 worth of work for $1 or $100 for $10,000 worth of work. Hiring peopel takes so much time and effort. It’s an insane amount of time. So, I love hiring agents.
He deeply cares about humans, but he has to make sure everyone is a good fit. So agents are much easier and reliable.
Hope you can get enough warm intros to get enough peopel to join you on this long journey to build something mission driven and impactful.
The girl said she has the opposite problem and feels she can do anything, has her team, life will be great. But she didnt’ foresee to know who you are, waht you look like in a room, and what it will be perceived as.
She says she’s a young girl and looks right out of college. So in a room of corporate executives, they’re going to be not sure if they can trust her (bro, I mean, I saw her give a 30 minute speech and didnt’ even understand whether company does at ALL)
She puts other peopel in the room with her or a second personin the way to help protect the company image and help make sure it’s a company and not a person.
Her first fire was the chief commercial officer, he’s awesome, and pretty much it wasn’t an engineer. Make sure you are organized with your information. With your taxes and talking to lawyers and all this stuff.
The more you’re organized earlier, the better that’s going to be. What are my strengths? What do I suck at?
Bro, I’m just sitting here thinking, like… idk. I’m having sorta a big thought about going to all these evnets and hearing these peopel talk and it’s just like. IDK is it innovative? Is it inspiring? Are these questions people want to know answers to ?What are we doing here? Idk… just feels like this isn’t enough. And I wonder how fulfilling this is for everyone here. I can’t figure out the worst for this but I feel liek going to 200+ events, this feels off. I’m not sure why.
I think some of it is that two of hte peopel on stage I’m not sure about. Definitely not that girl who I still don’t get her company
But even the other guy who I met a few times and he never gives me the time of day… and he works in an industry where I’ve been to their events and its just like, hard to tell what’s even going on + they’re building in such an exclusive way.. And then even the 3rd of 4 guys owns this place. So he just got invited to talk cause he founded it?
So its this balance of like “being on stage” yet, do we want to hear from them specifically? Or is this (pardon my French) just a circle jerk we’re all here to watch?
Like, none of this advice - minus the one thing that guy said about distribution - feels that innovative or “next level”. And I realize there are only 10 minutes left of this evnet… and what’s even been said?
This whole audience is founders… I wish we coudl jsut have founders ask questions. Not this “what would you do differently” or liek idk? Not working mics and liek “I’ll help you get on the guest list” and “I love AI”.
If you have a human and give them AI as super powers, let’s see waht will happen. Your’e the manager of not humans, but AI agents.
Now, this is the question everyone has been waiting for: What’s in your bag? What’s your tech stack?
Yeah, this woudl take too long (the 4 business guy says)
Why use so many tools?
Then he just talks a lot and idk what he said.
Oh one girl said everyone else was fast to answer - OMG and now she literally says whats in her bag. Her laptop with a 5090 chip hahaha. I think they meant like which apps do you use.
One guy says: my bag is super interesting. At first jsut using ChatGPT then gemini and then something happened, open claw and I’m on - unlock, this is it. The world is changing now.
Idk I’m just like, now they’re running late… and he’s just talkigjna bout how he watched lots of videos aobut open claw. No one knows what they’re doing We’re all figuring it out in real time.
I feel liek they’re just not respecting this audience’s intelligence… right? Am I just really AI-saavy? I think i’m a bit above average but not THAT much. I dont’ get what is this event. It’s just a bit basic. I’ll go get myself some water. Just to feel alive again. A sense of purpose hahahhaa.
They asked who wanted to lead breakouts and I raised my hand for wainting to talk about interns. Giving humans opportunites who want to help - not just replacing them with AI. And how I’m disappointed with our current culture/setup where its hard to just get help from humans legally, in some ways. To give them experience, yet you can have a bot running 24/7
Ahahah I’m like - bro, lemme grab a hold of this event. We need Kelly Tutors to lead this conversation.
Then I just hosted a table and gave so much advice and relief to a number of women who came up to me and wanted to learn about how I’m running this internship program. Even a few worked for big consulting firms and said I’m doing this really well and even better than some of the startups they’re consulting. It’s so empowering.
How I just have them work 2-5 hours/week, they come up with their own work, gain self esteem, pick their contract
And I talked about my frustration with how easy it is to have AI work for you but not interns 2 hours a week. It’s not fair, but I want to empower humans and bring them on
Two women who work for consulting agencies said that what I’m doing is much better than what they see some of the startups they’re helping with doing. They love it.
Later when I went to the bathroom I saw I had pepper in my teeth hahah. SO cleaned that up. Now I’ll head over to my guitar jam :)
One of the employees of the place even came up to me after and was glad I spoke up and pushed back on our normalization of using AI nonstop instead of seeing human value.
On my way out, I walked by the host of the event. Earlier he’d come up to me and thanked me for offering a topic (the internship thing) so I decided to shoot my shot and I told him his events are all really expeisnive, his other events, and I’m a bootstrappign freelancer, but if he ever wants to give out a charity event, I”d be happy to join.
he said to add him on LinkedIn, and we can do a skills share
Later, I sent him this message (below), and he replied that I can join and write a blog on his event!
His event?? (I didn’t realize it was THIS one - I thought it was just a social/party) - it’s a $150/person dinner at a SUPER nice Brazilian steakhouse to watch some FIFA gamessss hahaha. OMG. SO, let’s go enjoy that.
See? It’s all about social proximity.
Until next time, I wish you the motivation and success to search for opportunities around your area. Search and explore: Who is out there giving talks? There are new things happening all of the time.
Find relatable or interesting topics you like and check them out! Maybe even something hosted at a cool venue, if there’s no other reason to go. Let’s see what you can learn and discover not too far from home. 😊
