Hey friends 👋🏼 Startups are games. This newsletter is about empowering brains 🧠 (with startup game theory) & hearts ❤️🔥 (with intros + celebrations). Today, we’re shouting out the community to celebrate & help each other win faster! 🫂
🎯 Hire Globally Without the Headache (Partner of the Week)
Is your workforce spread across multiple countries?
If yes, then you could save a lot of time and money by using Deel, which is used by 25,000+ customers, from YC-backed founders to unicorns.
Form your own opinion and see if it’s a fit below - you get reduced fees by coming through us. 👇🏼
PS: We only recommend tools we truly believe are the best in their category. If you think this isn’t, suggest the alternative you think would be!
🥳 Wins & Celebrations
Drop some “ggs 👾” in the comments to celebrate those of us who hit a big milestone this week! 💪🏼
Henry, CEO & founder @ Fruitful, for coming out of stealth and publicly launching on ProductHunt (#2 with 349 upvotes, ~12 short of first position) 🥳🎉
Preet, CEO & founder @ Visawire, for successfully closing his pre-seed/seed round 👏👏
👉 Got a win or launch? Click below to let us celebrate with you!
🤝 Asks & intros
We win if you win. You win if we win.
👉 What’s your bottleneck? Take 30 seconds to let 5000+ of us help you win!
👾 Incoming Games
Where we’re playing & recharging IRL.
Oct 10 | 👾 SF Tech Week Boardgames Mixer (San Francisco 🇺🇸)
SF Tech Week’s biggest tech game (400+ RSVP). Curated for high-signal founders, operators, and investors, and the community. Bring your game face for friendly competition and top‑tier connections.
Oct 17 | ♟️ Tech Chess Tournament #3 (London 🇬🇧)
London’s Biggest Tech Chess Tournaments are back. Swiss-style tournament for the best startup founders, operators, and investors in London (all chess levels welcome) for a night of sharp competition and fun.
👉 Want to host a tech game for the community or add a game to the network? Fill out the form below.
🎭 Behind the Scenes
The last couple of weeks, the focus has been on working HARD on 3 different verticals:
1/ Event infra
We’ve been testing low-key online games:
Among Us, Age of Empire, online Catan, and online Chess, among others.
We ran all these online games on Sundays, at a time that works for all time zones, in our Discord server.
Me (Imposter in Among Us) playing with some of you (Founders & Investors from SF, Ireland, Zürich, London, South America)
Pick-up Tech Game of Catan with 2 founders from NYC & 1 Investor in Berlin (all on voice-chat)
We’re still figuring out the details, but overall, the feedback has been VERY positive.
Crowds have been a mix of cracked founders, operators, & investors from NYC 🇺🇸, SF🇺🇸, London 🇬🇧, Berlin 🇩🇪, and more.
We’re going to grow it a big bigger & let you guys in.
If you want to be added to the Techgames.xyz Discord & test out some more online games before we make it public, fill this form, and we’ll let you in.
2/ Community infra
All stuff related to how to empower you guys even more (intros, hires, funding). We’ve been focusing mainly on 2 things:
Hiring: a lot of you are brutally insane engineers looking for jobs in cracked startups. We also have a lot of cracked founders within the community looking to hire. We’ve already facilitated many intros, but we’re working on making it far more efficient. If you have any comments or ideas on that, reply.
Funding: Many of you are big-brain brained early-stage founders looking for funding. On the other side, we’ve also had many of you (who are investors or angels) ask us how they could deploy capital within the community. That’s why we’re about to start exploring the idea of an angel syndicate. If you are interested in this or have any thoughts on it, please reply to this email & let’s chat.
3/ Media infra
To make sure we bring the most insane builders into our ecosystem, we’ve been exploring discovery across different channels, but over the last 2 weeks, we’ve mainly been looking at newsletter tech.
Some of you have asked us to move to Substack - to be honest, none of us on the team has a big experience with it. There are 2 signals that got us to consider it more seriously recently:
The fact that a16z (which is 99% a media company in practice operating with a VC monetisation model) moved all their newsletters to Substack
The fact that Substack is clearly showing intent towards deploying a proper discoverability engine (whereas beehiiv doesn’t have much discoverability)
If you have any comments or thoughts on whether we should write in Substack vs Beehiiv, let us know.
If you want to see us experimenting a bit with Substack, check it out here
💌 See you Next Week!
That’s it for this week!
Feedback, comments, questions? Help us iterate & help you win!
10 sec ask 🙏🏼: if you know brilliant individuals who think like us here, please…