- Max's Musings
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- Announcing our $30 million Series A
This week’s a bit different. Instead of ‘musings building a $100 billion company in public’, I’m sharing an exciting update on the journey there:
Announcing Superpower’s $30 million Series A!
We’re excited to welcome investors including Kirsten from Forerunner, Masha from Day One Ventures, alongside actress Vanessa Hudgens, NBA star Giannis Antetokounmpo, DJ Steve Aoki, and others including Alex Botez, Balaji, Arielle Zuckerberg, and Shaan Puri.
This is just the beginning.
Soon, we’ll unveil what we've been working on behind the scenes.
For now, you can find more in my Twitter and LinkedIn posts:
And an ask for you: Could you please like and comment on the posts to help them reach more people – it all goes a long way 🙏
Now, into the ‘musings’.
1) How do I feel about this announcement?
We shouldn’t even be celebrating it.
Hype milestones don’t count. It’s easy to get addicted to hype. It’s easy to delude ourselves into thinking that capital means success. It doesn’t.
The job’s not done yet. In fact, we’ve hardly started.
What should we celebrate?
Revenue.
Customer love.
Improving member’s health.
Not fundraising.
To mark this announcement, we’re putting our customer love score on the TV in the office (s/o Sachin Shah).
When that increases, we will celebrate.
We will also start tracking % of members whose superpower health score improved.
When that increases, we will celebrate.
2) How did we get here?
I’m often asked for ‘advice’ on how we got here.
To that, I often recall the following:
“Opinions are like assholes. Everyone’s got one and they all stink".
Every company is built in a unique way. So, the real advice is to stop always seeking advice and start reasoning around the first principles of what is true in your specific situation.
But, because folks will ask for advice anyway, I think there are a few things that allowed this raise to come together:
Big vision — we can be a >$100b company
Good storytelling — we communicate that vision reasonably well
Strong brand marketing execution — Twitter & LinkedIn virality; strong visual identity
Elite team — 10 people on our team are former exited founders, 5 ex-YC
Compelling market — this space is hot and growing quickly
You can reverse engineer these reasons to come up with ‘advice’. Most of these are quite malleable if you are intentional: turn your vision into something bold, invest in brand marketing and storytelling, take a long time to hire and keep the bar high.
3) What’s next?
We plan to be a unicorn in 12-18 months. Some think it’s a bold goal … but hold me to it!
If you want to join the team or know people who might, we are hiring. Even if there’s no ‘on paper’ role, we create roles around great people, so please do reach out.
As always, flick me a message with any questions, I read and reply to most emails!
Until next time,
Max
