👋 Howdy to the 801 new legends who joined this week! You are now part of a 34,206 strong tribe outperforming the competition together.

LATEST POSTS 📚

If you’re new, not yet a subscriber, or just plain missed it, here are some of our recent editions.

✨ "Getting To Know Meee, Getting To Know All About Meee" - 1.0. A number of questions and tidbits on my companies, my worldview and other such things.
💡 Elicia McDonald Interview. Partner at Airtree Ventures. Transforming Aussie tech with top-tier investments.
⚡️ How Sidebar Went From Zero To One. Launching a startup from scratch is hard. Here is the breakdown of how Sidebar went about it.

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HOUSEKEEPING 📨

A quick update here. Last week’s ‘getting to know me’ post was really popular. I had a lot of great messages come through after I hit send which was really nice. Today’s format will be the same, and then as of next week we will be back to regular everyday programming: deep dives, interviews, our new zero to one posts and more.

BUILDING IN PUBLIC 🔎

1/ On my first startup, AdventureFit

AdventureFit was a wonderful idea, bundled inside of a horrible business. The tagline was ‘improving the world through travel, exercise, mindfulness and conversation.’ What we actually did was took people all around the world on adventure holidays for the wellness community. Picture Vietnam with cave exploring, rock-climbing, yoga, mediation, training etc.. We went to Mexico, South Africa, Iceland, you name it.

The product was incredible, the experience was second to none but we never really made any money. I probably hung on two years longer than I should have and after about four years we would it up.

2/ On the dark side of drive

At one point during my time running AdventureFit, my business coach, Arjen (pronounced AR-eee-yarn), told me “I was the most driven person he had ever seen and he’s been a business coach for 25 years.”

Then he followed by saying; “this is not necessarily a good thing.”

What he meant was, I was blindly driven. You could probably have replaced the word ‘driven’ with stubborn, narrow sighted, unrealistic, delusional. Drive and ambition are incredible when applied to the right thing. The right business model. When applied to a business model that is a 3 our of 10—in this case, travel—it can be a huge negative impact on you.

One of the things I learned by failing with AdventureFit was that failing is ok, and it is better done fast than as a frog in boiling water.

3/ On funding Athyna

When launching Athyna, my original co-founder Drew and I put ~$10k in each. When he left I paid him out and took his equity. He hadn’t been a year technically and we thought that was the fairest way anyway.

But to spend half of our initial founding funds on the dolls … I still shake my head at that one.

4/ On our co-founder split

Drew was co-founder, and his wife Madeleine joined as somewhat of a co-founder too a few months in. Drew was Head of Growth, Mads CFO and me CEO. The break happened because Drew was always wanting for a marketing budget, and Mads, as CFO, wouldn’t let him have one. “We need X amount of cash on hand before we can build a marketing budget” she would say. But I agreed with Drew. I thought we did need a marketing budget, so I proposed we all take 20% of our salaries—even though they were already very small—and divert it to a marketing budget. Invest in ourselves was the idea. But they weren’t having it. And so they left.

We hadn’t grown at all for six-months and I remember one of the last things Mads said to me when I was trying to negotiate lowering the salaries was; “we both knows Drew adds all the real value in this business.” 

5/ On raising capital

Around late 2019 we decided we were going to raise money. We were building EOR, like Deel, alongside our talent marketplace. In order to build EOR as a product you need a lot of dry powder, because you need to open up legal entities all over the world. And you need to do it fast. Anything else would be death by a thousand cuts.

So we started taking calls in Aus and the US. Just early calls. This was peak 2021 and most of the VC’s were telling us to raise at 100x. I remember a GP from GGV I spoke to told me “VCs won’t respect you if you value yourself at anything less than 75x.” So we built out the raise. Decks, data room and so forth and on day one of the raise being open, the market crashed. Or began to anyway. If you remember, Netflix were the first to make a mass round of layoffs. That was the day we opened our raise.

We actually got super close to $5M at $25M with a mid sized fund out of Austin but it got nixed at the final stage due to a conflict of interest.

_{*If you want to see the deck we were shopping in 2022 you can download it below. Don’t laugh at the shiny object syndrome. It was cool in 2022.}

He laughed and said “we just raised an $11B dollar fund … if we invest in you, we’ll give you more than $10M.”

As the market continued to crash though we tweaked our plan and began running a bridge round alongside our main round. We were scraping together angel checks in case the larger round didn’t come together. We got that to around $500k, enough to keep us moving forward and scrapped the larger round. We pulled the pin on the round days before a partner pitch with a $2B European fund.

We had killed off EOR as a product though, so it was the right call. We couldn’t pitch a future that was no longer on the cards.

💡 Note: We just raised $2.5M to build Athyna AI. And we left $200k open for friends and family. You can still invest here.

6/ On my day-to-day job

I have a sticky note on my desktop that outlines my job description as a CEO. Set the strategy. Hire people to execute on it. Never run out of money. Hold people accountable. And scream it from the rooftops. Scream it from the rooftops meaning; communicate at a high level, internally and externally.

And to be honest, I actually feel like this is what I do from day to day now. In the early days, no. But today I can really focus on what’s important.

7/ On my own investments

Investing is something I am actively working to be better with. I have around $200k in investments, but most of which are in totally illiquid assets and those that you would consider high risk. I have invested in five startups as an angel (Atomic8, Future Super, Humane, Kiki and beehiiv), half dozen Startmate accelerator cohorts and have a decent position in two funds: Startmate again and Blackbird’s $1B fund.

💡 Read about my investment into Humane here, and interviews with CEOs of Startmate and beehiiv as well.

This will be the first time in this next cohort at Starmate, that I will sit out as an investor. I missed the last as a mentor as well. My investments at the moment are into myself, through this newsletter, and boring Vanguard index funds.

8/ On fitness

Fitness has always been a massive part of my life. I grew up playing Aussie rules football, and surfing. I started going to the gym 4-5 days a week when I was around 15 and still do today. Over the last decade the one sport I have taken seriously is weightlifting. I competed at the national championships a few years ago and am starting to train seriously again as of recently. I’d like to become the strongest CEO in tech. Or at least the one that can snatch the heaviest.

I also take sleep seriously. I wear a Whoop every day and have for years. I’ll never churn. It gives me a day by day analysis of my recovery, my training and most importantly, my sleep. Sleep is the key to health, along with diet, and I try to make sure I get at least 7:15 on average.

9/ On mental health

Mental health is also something I am really passionate about. My family has a sad history of anxiety and depression and I suffer from this also. The good news is, I am diligent around it and haven’t left any stone unturned.

I have mediated every day for years, I wrote gratitude journals, took cold showers, you name it. I have also tried medication, psychology and all different types of ‘alternative medicines’—ketamine therapy in the US, ayahuasca in the jungles of Peru, psilocybin in float tanks etc..

Some of these I went about professionally some was more ad hoc. The one things I have always tried to be is persistent. It’s important because the life of a founder is hard. Much harder than the life of a non-founder if you ask me.

10/ On building brands

I am a creative at heart. All of my family are creatives, so brand building is something I really love. And something that I think I am pretty good at. I believe super heavily in the idea of a pattern interrupt when to comes to marketing. Something that grabs you out of your mundane shakes the attention out of you. The famous Coinbase Superbowl ad is a great example of this.

Take Athyna for example. I knew that the industry we play in is pretty boring, nothing too provocative or exciting. So when building the updated versions of the brand a few years back, I told our visual designer, Andy, the brief was “the Greek Gods, in the sky and the clouds, on acid.”

And this is what we got. If you feel like your brand is swimming in a sea of sameness, brands like the Australian digital bank Up, performance cereal Magic Spoon and toilet paper behemoth Who Gives A Crap are great pattern interrupt brands to take some inspiration from.

And that's it! You can follow me on Twitter and LinkedIn and also don’t forget to check out Athyna while you’re at it.

BRAIN FOOD 🧠 

Just came across a great post on user psychology by Darius Contractor, Chief Growth Officer at Otter.ai. He outlines how to crank up funnel conversion by understanding user emotions. 

Darius breaks down every UX interaction into emotional events that you can actually measure and optimize. Check out the full scoop for the real insights into driving user engagement. Trust me, it’s a good one!

TWEET OF THE WEEK 🐣 

TOOLS WE USE 🛠️

Every week we highlight tools we actually use inside of our business and give them an honest review. Today we are highlighting Attio—powerful, flexible and data-driven, the exact CRM your business needs.

See the full set of tools we use inside of Athyna & Open Source CEO here.

HOW I CAN HELP 🥳

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