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.
Make your own opinion and see if it’s a fit for you below - you get reduced fees by coming through us. 👇🏼
PS: We only recommend tools we believe are the world’s best in their category. If you’ve had bad experiences or think there is a better player in this space, reply to this email.
🥳 Wins & Celebrations
Please drop some “ggs 👾” in the comments of the below posts to celebrate those of us who reached an important milestone this week! 💪🏼
Mert is back at it - after years at Goldman, he’s now cracking the world of Excel sheets - congrats on the launch of banker.so! 🎉🥳
Well done Ilia for reaching 10,000 customers - a big milestone! 👏🏽🎊
Eito for getting validation on a big viral post (1.4M views on X + 150k views on LinkedIn for our ChatGPT exploit), and feeling like he’s found a format that might work to get word out there about what he’s been working on! 🥳👏🏽🙌🏼
👉 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 help the 5000+ of us help you win!
👾 Incoming Games
Where we’re playing & recharging IRL.
By popular demand, we’re taking TechGames online. First up: Among Us - the ultimate test of persuasion, strategy, and reading people. Relax, scheme, and laugh with fellow sharp founders, investors, and operators from SF, London, NYC, and beyond. As always, curated crowd only.
Oct 17 | ♟️ Tech Chess Tournament #3 (London 🇬🇧)
Precision, patience, and bold plays. Battle London’s top tech talent in a room where every move counts.
👉 Want to host a tech game for the community or add a game to the network? Fill out the form below.
🎭 Behind the Scenes
On our side, a lot of work. Nurturing & growing the community has been EXTREMELY empowering & rewarding (although I’d appreciate a few extra hours of sleep as we’re pretty much working a 996 schedule 😅).
I’ve had the pleasure of talking with many of you either on DM or on socials (some of you are so smart & rich in high quality thoughts, honestly). I’m grateful for the opportunity and for the content to enable this.
Overall, still a content noob in many ways (with LOADS to learn & test) with but committed to play this game for years to come. 😎
If you want to be part of the journey, let’s connect!
(Note: when connecting on Linkedin, please append your request with a note saying you’re from the GTO community!)
On the logistics side, this past week was all about…
100x-ing the experience of the games that are hosted: higher ROI, higher quality guests, better groups - e.g. investors x founders fundraising, etc)
Running more of them: we got so many requests to run different games (e.g., some online games like AO2, League, or other board games, like Go, Secret Hitler, etc)
If you want to help us with it, either by sharing your feedbac,k please reply to this email or fill the following form. 🙏🏼
Finally, on a personal “fun” note, I flew to Budapest for a couple of days over the weekend for a spontaneous trip with the gf and her parents. While going on my morning run, I was actually happy to discover that Von Neumann’s birthplace was actually on the path of my morning run!!! 😱😮😮🤩
First run - got this plaque
Second run: found a much better one on the other side of that building
For those of you who don’t know John Von Neumann, he is literally a god. Among all his inventions and results, some of them are foundational results in game theory that we will use in the GTO part of the newsletter.
There is literally a page on wikipedia aggregating things named after him - “tell me you’re a badass without telling me you are a badass.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_things_named_after_John_von_Neumann
💌 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…