A LinkedIn Hack That Led to a $120k Investment

With funding comes outside pressure from investors that seeps into and permeates the entire venture. The pressure to show rapid growth, alone, changes what kind of people get hired, how their responsibilities are structured, and how they interact with the pre-funding team. Founders will be pushed out or replaced by career executives from the industry, early employees will be managed out or grow bored with the monotony of an established business, and anyone involved in raising the initial rounds will likely be way out of their depth by the time growth stage funding rolls around.

Let's face it, we monkeys like shiny trophies for well quantified metrics to put on our wall and taking credit for a bunch of zeroes on a check is a lot more practical than for the sum of all of the work and value added by a company that survives for years or decades after you leave it.

I don't know about Shyp tho, but they have a lot of buzz and an innovative product, which in my mind is a success...although they still have a LONG way to go to prove themselves. So I get your point. I don't think funding is defines success, but more so a strong sign that your on your way making something work. And I totally agree...funding in itself isn't something you should brag about.

However, the # of jobs Jack helped create IMHO is 100% a success. It's super rewarding and changes lives (most of the time) in a great way.

it wouldn't have been as catchy if the title was "here's a tactic that helped me start a company that became profitable and delivering value" ;)

> The word “hustle” has lost its meaning. Everyone who works hard is called a “hustler,” even if they don’t win. Fuck conceptualization of ‘hustling’ as working hard. I only care about results. A great hustle without results isn’t a great hustle. With this hustle, my goal was to get the attention of the AngelPad founder.

are just downright blatant and uncomfortable. If everybody thinks in this way then we're doomed. Unfortunately nowadays many do seem to do so.

I haven't read that article from PG, I'll definitely check it out!

My LinkedIn is pretty invaluable for scoping out potential clients and making an initial approach. I don't usually try to use InMails, but I'll figure out the right person to talk to and make an email approach with that information.

I'm also guessing that some people might have just told him they'd seen his face on a LinkedIn ad. Not necessarily clicked through to it.

similarly, with the facebook thing. I saw that Facebook is rolling back usage of the facebook.com email addresses, so I'm not sure how long that will keep working.

I'd think that with anything like this; if it were illegal, then likely the individual themselves would have to sue me. Hopefully they wouldn't want to take it that far once I explained to them that I was just targeting them and trying to get their attention etc. Certainly for Thomas, Vungle turned out to be quite a good investment thus far and a nice story, so I hope he wont sue me ;)

The sequence of events basically was: - Thursday saw the TC post, same day created Linkedin ad campaign - Friday got a call from Thomas - next week we got the final spot (on about a Thursday) - about 3 days later we were on a flight to san francisco to join Angelpad (+ $120k at this point) - about 10 weeks after moving to San Francisco we started raising our seed round. We ended up raising ~$2 mil led by Google Ventures - about a year later raised $6.5mil Series A - about a year after that raised $17m Series B - after that the company kept growing and has opened offices in various countries etc

for myself personally, I moved more towards advising a few different startups.

I'm pretty sure LinkedIn ads weren't intended to have a picture of the guy's face who you're targeting as the ad though!

The takeaway of all this: always push, always aggressive.

That's an important distinction. I was wondering what I was missing.