Blessings in disguise

January 2022

I’m a 20 year old kid scaling my company, Closify.

and on twitter, a well known entrepreneur reaches out that he wants to buy my company Closify and to DM him

I send him a DM asking when he’d like to set up a zoom meeting, he suggests I fly to their office (I’ll refrain from saying location)

really wanting to meet this guy, I agree and I book a plane ticket for the next week

I fly in on an early flight, I arrive and his assistant is waiting for me at the entrance to the office with a coffee for me

she brings me up the elevator, and then points to a glass enclosed room “they’re all in there, just walk through that door”

I walk into the door

8 men in suits down a long, rectangular table, all of them wearing rolex’s or AP’s

I’m 20 and dressed in jeans with a decent shirt

I sit down and they start grilling me on questions about the company

our finances, long term mission, moats, and handle myself well

finally, after at least an hour, we come to a favorable agreement

not to buy out the company, but a vested equity deal to get a chunk

they tell me they won’t force me to sign any paperwork there, that we can do it on our kickoff call

I leave the office, and I was going to stay the night at {location} but I was 20 so my hotel didn’t let me check in…

so I get a return flight to miami that same day and get home at midnight, a super long day for me

that next week we have our kickoff call on a Tuesday, they say we’ll have the contract by Friday

keep in mind, all throughout this, they’re telling me how big this company is going to get, how rich I’m going to get, the people they’ll introduce me too

Friday rolls around….. nothing

I follow up….. nothing

I continue to follow up for weeks, and never heard from them again

they completely ghosted me after I flew to them, we came to a deal, and we had our kickoff call (I also paid for all my travel arrangements)

it would have been very easy to mope around at the fact of what had happened

but instead it just made me realize, I didn’t need this big entrepreneur to hit big numbers with Closify

I just wanted an easier route to it that I thought he could provide

so, I locked in on doing it myself, and by May 2022 we hit our first six figure month

I could rattle off many more instances of bad things happening to me that turned out to be blessings

there’s two main lessons from this I believe

1) Many of your hardships are blessings in surprise

2) Entrepreneurship has a lot to do with stress management, if stress will break you easily, you won’t go far

so next time it seems like $hit hit the fan, just know it’s never as bad as you may think and zoom out

thank you for reading this caffeine induced rant

alex