Hey friends 👋
179 new founders, operators, and investors joined us this week — welcome!
As this newsletter has grown, we’ve realised it’s not only about empowering both brains (aka the maths 🧮) and hearts (aka the community 💛).
That’s why we’re alternating between:
🧮 Startup GTO essays → optimal maths of startups & investing
🌍 Community editions → the network, the wins, the IRL
The goal of the community editions is simple: empower you with the network.
Together, we celebrate your wins, we give you intros, we hang out IRL.
Brains + hearts = That’s how we all win! 👾
🎯 Partner of the Week - Deel
Startups are games. Winning globally means playing with customers or employees in more than one country. 🌍
That’s why we’re glad to have Deel backing this edition.
They save tons of time (and money) when hiring, paying, and managing talent in 100+ countries. All while staying compliant.
25,000+ customers - from YC-backed founders to unicorns - today are using Deel to help them run their global game.
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
Join us in sending a “gg” message for those of us who reached an important milestone this week! 💪🏼
Congrats to Ariel Harmoko, poker player & CEO @ ArtifactAI, for their $4M Seed round led by a16z Speedrun! 👏
Congrats to Zain Mobarik’s leap of faith in breaking out of his golden handcuffs at McKinsey to enter the startup world at incident.io!
👉 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.
Akash Deb is about to start a kickstarter next week for his tool that lets people create AI voice agents on an ESP32 and wants to talk to anybody who has previous successful experience running a kickstarter.
Ishan Tiwari is seeking intros to fast-scaling teams and recruiters for beta testing an AI tool that automates and reviews technical take-home assignments, aimed at measuring real engineering skill and workflow fit.
👉 What’s your bottleneck? Take 30 seconds to help the 5000+ of us help you win!
👾 Incoming Games
Where we’re playing & recharging IRL.
Sep 11 | 🐑 Tech Catan Tournament #2 (Berlin 🇩🇪)
Europe’s sharpest tech minds meet over roads, cities, and sheep - the most curated Catan room in Berlin.
Sep 19 | ♦️ The SF Tech Poker #3 (SF 🇺🇸)
Elite founders, operators, and investors face off in an evening of cards, reads, and calculated risk - poker as a founder’s sport
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
This week, we’ve been focusing quite a lot on the infrastructure for social media content.
Outside of events & word of mouth, borrowing the algorithm to acquire more big brain techies is how we’re growing - this is an important part of the engine.
The thing is, I’m a mathematician/AI engineer/researcher/product guy/founder - not a media guy!
So this week was mainly spent on designing & picking strategies on where we’re going to play the social media game in a way that I maximise the following 2 parameters:
Highest value - i.e., the posts I produce the most empowering to our audience & faithful to our goal of building the highest ROI community
Discoverability relevance - i.e, maximise the algorithm’s ability to show our community to as many people from our relevant audience, i.e., big-brain startup founders, operators, and investors who believe like us all that startups are games.
I’m a guy who hates noisy posts - the first conflicting situation came after learning that posts require an optimal number of posts per week.
For LinkedIn, for example, 3 posts a week is a good number that balances out growth & efforts, whereas X/Twitter pretty much requires 7 posts a week.
My first thoughts were:
“Too many posts” - I’m scared of not feeling inspired enough to produce that many high-quality posts
“Scared of noise“ - I’m scared that posting too much will get people to read less.
But after more thinking, I realised how wrong I was for both!
Nikita’s Bier take on what X/Twitter post should be.
1. An easy framework to produce unlimited high-quality content
I thought I couldn’t produce high-signal posts over multiple weeks until I reverse-engineered what “high signal to us all means” & invented a concept I called “content factory”.
I can dive deeper into this but basically, a content factory is a premise used to generate an unlimited number of high-quality content. Instead of relying on one-off inspiration, a content factory defines a stream of content that can be reused and repurposed.
One then defines a few content factories depending on the value they want to give to their audience. In our case, we’re only focusing on smart founders, operators & investors’ and want to empower
their brains with sharp mathematical frameworks & results to increase their odds of winning
their hearts by making them feel appreciated, loved, and energized through stories and community.
Example of content factories:
“Analysing news with game theory” - this is unending content & easy to repurpose, there are big moves happening every day!
“Helping out people by shouting out their ask in the network” - this is infinite, people in this community will always have some bottlenecks
“Announcing next community events” - this is infinite again, there are always future events to announce
Non-examples:
Mathematical foundations of entrepreneurship” - yes there are a lot of maths but once something is said, it becomes harder to find something new to add.
“Story of how this started” - same thing. Once this story is posted, it’s hard to milk more content about it. It’s limited
DM me if you want to hear more about that.
2. Posting more doesn’t tarnish relationship with audience
We’ve all come across these random posts that are so low-signal but somehow, perform well.
For example: “Gm” posts
I hate that stuff.
I don’t want to bother my friends & audience - I want to empower them.
So to figure out how come successful people do it, I studied them for a bit.
And to my surprise, I was happy to see there are actually successful tech influencers who produce really good content on Twitter, even though they post 7 days a week.
It all boils down to knowing your audience and what’s the best way to empower them.
Random picture of me next to a car with a peculiar number plate. “GTO2EXY” as in “GTO to Exit”? 🤔
Is it one of you guys car?!!!
The most underspoken thing in media
Finally, one side of growth that isn’t really spoken about that all the Greats of the game on X did was real engagement, genuine comments, and building connections.
I’m looking for friends on socials to engage with!
If you’re active there, let’s become buddies! I’d love to follow you back and engage with your thoughts & posts!
Note: append your request with a note saying you’re from the GTO community!
💌 See you Next Week!
If you want to chat or discuss anything, hit reply - we read everything.
Feedback, comments, questions - help us iterate & help you win! 🙏🏼
Also, if you know brilliant individuals who think like us here, please…