Zap's Wrap January 13th

hi friends,

A small, but meaningful win from last week- 2 angels invested in Vivian’s startup through my intro!

I love working with college students and helping them pursue entrepreneurship. Vivian is a Vandy junior. After noticing how repetitive the tasks were from her investment banking internship last summer, she decided to build the AI agent for the industry.

Startup house updates

Last week was spent moving furniture, going to home depot, furiously searching on FB marketplace, moving furniture again, hanging stuff up, and then moving furniture again LOL. The good news- startup house has made great progress. Enough that I have a handful of folks working here today and it’s going smoothly!

My biggest need- ~10 more desks. If anyone is selling a bunch of desks, please let me know.

Other than that, small items like coffee mugs, plants, and books to fill the library would be super helpful too.

I think I have 1-2 more weeks of housework until I will get started on the brand and throwing a launch party, so stay tuned (:

Startup stuff that’s cool

• Jimmy is in his sweet spot- Glasshouse grew 860% from Q3 to Q4. They are digital door knocking for the home services industry. As a sales guy at heart, I’m sure he’s loving getting to run really fast and sell 😂

• I caught up with my friend Jared, who previously built a startup backed by Insight Partners. He’s working on a new thing that’s all about his passion, health and wellness. We’re working on a launch plan for their brand for February! They’ve already grown the team to 4 folks working full—time.

• I caught up with Bren, founder of Synquery. They recently closed a preseed round led by a SF venture fund and are all things ‘go’ right now and building the team.

Events

• I’m hosting a hangout for product leaders (CPOs, Directors of Product, etc) on Wednesday, January 22nd at a house near Belmont. Shoot me a note if you fit the bill and want to come (:

Personal stuff

One of the big wins this weekend- finding this couch at one of my new fav local businesses- Reclaimed Elegance! They have a super nice show room in Weho and have even better prices. Highly recommend them.

For a break, I checked out the brand new facility for Framework- a cold plunge and sauna studio. Thinking I need to host an event here soon….

I met with Tena Beard for the 3rd time, who’s a recent grad and destined to be an entrepreneur. In the next few weeks she’s launching an operations and process improvement business and looking for people she can do work for to make case studies. If you are a small biz owner and want some help in this space, all while helping a young entrepreneur, ping me so I can connect you with Tena!

to the moon,

zap