Strategizing for my LLC

This post stems from my recent EOM Nov Update, where I was too lazy to list concrete next steps. Thanks Justin for hosting a useful 2026 goal-setting conversation with some other lovelies on Wednesday morn!

Feedback welcome, especially on the clarity of the executive summary—how much does it improve upon my YC application? Should I even bother YC with this madness?

I rambled a good bit. It was fun and useful for me to get everything out. Hope somehow you too, world.

executive summary
1. a living meme
2. explaining meta mechanics
3. y combinator 2.0
4. the unprofit philosophy
conclusion

EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

Zaltiva, an Arizona pass-thru LLC wholly owned by me, does business as "Andy Group", an umbrella consisting of the following brands: Andy's Blog, Capitalism Unlocked, and Ampersand U (&U).

My overall project aims to break the 4th wall, turning my life into a meme. It's a strange concept because only a few people in history have done this kind of storytelling effectively, and none at the meta level which I aim to encapsulate. From at least age 30-60, embodying the LLC (dba me "Andy Trattner") and outputting content will be my full-time occupation.

I've found it difficult to adequately explain exactly what I'm doing. So I'll probably tackle an important side-project to self-narrate or otherwise break down Andy Group's business mechanics. This explaining, along with my daily blogging, constitutes the foundation of my personal creative practice for the next 12 months. I consider this my art.

The main thrust of my work is &U, a philanthropic talent incubator for the poor and underserved. I mentor first-time founders going from -1 to 0, getting them set up to make a compelling YC startup success story. For example, an ideal outcome looks like my college friend Luana—originally from Brazil, newly crowned this week the "World’s Youngest Self-Made Woman Billionaire" with momentum.

Finding future billionaires is not easy, and I didn't spot Luana in the same way Nikhil and Lemur registered. Steven was obviously smart but not yet clearly business-oriented to my naive eye. One needs a shortcut to effectively amplify and filter one's network.

Wrapped around the incubator is a broader youtube channel. It not only documents organic entrepreneur content from my interactions as "GP", but also serves as a talent search engine. Due to my unique model, and publishing all this philosophical complexity in the background, I believe my niche can quickly become the most effective brand beacon and technical talent magnet in the world.

To align all my incentives and personality quirks with my overall goal of becoming a living meme, I must profit solely from the storytelling and content I create rather than any investments. I'm not a good star because I'm inherently Midwestern and understated. I'm also lazy, so I won't work hard unless I have moral line-of-sight to trillion-dollar bitcoin-scale ambition. And or I'm rapidly depleting my cash cushion, but preferably both!

Paradoxically, I aim to become the world's best pre-seed radar by explicitly denying myself the opportunity to engage in vanilla VC. This also enables ease of interfacing with all the various seed funds and scout programs down the line, etc.

Tyler is an excellent benchmark for many reasons. 100k followers or blog subscribers—heck, maybe even 10k regular listeners to some podcast or channel of mine—would be sufficient scale to pursue the next phase. Achieving either order of magnitude represents >100x from present, and would satisfy me enormously by end of 2026 going into a book launch. My beachhead audience over the next year is likely to be high-IQ and influence-dense.

There are details and glue yet to be fleshed out. For example, a sleek Stripe Checkout "revenue donation" page, probably located at JoinAndy.org. Maybe I'll travel to India. These sub-activities and projects should naturally flow from the above foci at the appropriate moment.

The more I believe in my exotic setup, the more I lean into the inevitability of these claims, the stronger my focus becomes. I can wait on wishful leverage-building by intros to the Midas List, since community-building and creating successful impact should naturally lead us to intersect at the correct point in the future of my journey.

As I mentioned in the EOM update, I still have at least one comfortable year of personal runway ahead, plus some dry powder for extra credit. The origin of my non-fund, as fully philanthropic and not even meeting accredited investor thresholds, is also additive to the LLC's (i.e. my) brand and story.

1. A LIVING MEME

When people become famous, historically biographers are the ones who interpret their actions and life arc. Posthumously or not, these journalist types connect the dots backwards from resultant wealth or power. Mainstream narratives lack nuance, and they get whittled or pared down via long chains of the telephone game over time.

Sometimes people try to correct their record before others get the chance to re-narrate reality, for example Alfred Nobel and his band-aid science prizes. Or more recently Bill Gates and his foundation with a poor naming choice on that "Melinda" part. Hmmmm looks like that was removed from the website.

These guys didn't plan to become so wealthy so quickly. They were probably too busy building stuff to figure out civic life properly as they ascended into history-making roles of inhuman scale and weighty social import. This is not their fault, but the results and messy stories remain to observe.

One rarely becomes a node in the global fabric so purposefully, or even figures out a simple median human civic life, because it requires anomalous depth of understanding in the unseen tapestry of human complexities. This is not an established field, it includes one's own ever-shifting internal landscape like 15d chess at 2897 FIDE elo, and I contend there have only ever been a few Peter Thiels.

But the most notable stories have not been so accidental. Consider certain religious figures like Buddha, Jesus, or the 5th Dalai Lama. In order to live their lives as a mythical story, without invoking any supernatural forces, what should one assume?

I believe they—or the systems and storytellers or aides around them, or the selfish but rare gene mutations inside them—understood something deeply morally ambitious. This created influence through genuine devoted inspiration and compounding 1:1 interactions, rather than jealousy or widely distributed technology products.

These figures didn't seek anything worldly, at least not directly, except maybe virtues like "kindness" or presence in the moment. Their "foundations" and "endowments" are called Church and it's about THE Holy Book.

I left out religious stories as sustainable value-creators in my essay on the morality of capitalism because I have no evidence of supernatural phenomena and generally look down on such overly ritualized, ancient, and flawed institutions. But I have plenty of direct evidence, including my own lived experience, in needing a religious OS on a personal, human level.

The internet changes things and showcases the trillion-dollar power of Peter Thiel's mafia which sees through his Girardian lens and got Trump elected, twice. By the way, one is only a "mafia" insofar as one is righteous bad-boy, attuned to capitalism and invited to the All-in Poker gatherings at Chamath's place. More recently individual religious fandoms to the tune of $100M - $10B have emerged, namely in Bryan Johnson and MrBeast. We might say they are also in some "mafia"... the terms for inner circles are inherently meaningless.

Also, go ahead and count those zeros as revenue or market cap whatever, the money doesn't matter. These specific "influencer" gentleman are a special breed. They're 110% mission driven and 10000x leveraged through organic content that scales. Their product is really a story. But they package siphoned parts of the story as entertainment, and then they sell tangible sub-products or ads, in furtherance of their respective missions.

Maybe Joe Rogan also deserves some consideration. On the other hand, Elon does not monetize his brand directly and belongs more in the historic "titan of industry" category (Isaacson agrees). But his direct speech to the public on X, and ownership of the platform, is complex on levels I either cannot currently comprehend or which are far beyond the scope of this essay to articulate.

(I think it's better to view Elon as an alien intelligent system from The Future who thankfully happens to be using human society for its own good, because ceteris paribus there's nothing better to do. However, he is the apex capitalist rn. And PR isn't looking good with him as our memelord spokesperson imho.)

Anyways, Seth Godin is more relevant as the original internet "self-marketer" in service of a mission. His message is clear: humane generosity towards yourself and others.

Seth explains how to do art within modern-day capitalism, leveraging current technology, behavioral economics, psychology, and management best-practices. He shows people how to chart their own KPIs. He builds trust by living with no fine print. He calls himself a teacher. He wrote 20+ books, and you may have heard of some of them.

Music or business, he abstracts all the unnecessary details away. Seth invented commercial email, wrote the text coining Permission Marketing, and logically applied it to his own life. His career evolved to become the OG daily blog newsletter man in 1995 or 2002, however you want to slice it.

He could have been a billionaire Sam Altman figure after his first $30M exit, but he intentionally chose to be a funky interesting dude writing free ebooks and inspiring Derek Sivers instead. I believe he stopped writing pretty early each day and cooked dinner for his kids and wife every afternoon, at latest 5pm.

Hosted dinner parties. Made oat wine in a vat in his basement, etc. Played with audio speaker stuff. Got his yellow glasses hand-sculpted to his face. Must be nice.

He even called me once, for about 10 minutes. I learned 3 new words in our conversation, crazy how fast this old dude knew exactly what I was saying and went one step further to tell me the questions I should have been asking him. Mindfuck.

He seems harmless though, less toothy than Elon as an agentic but relaxed human. I think Seth has the highest true fan to hater ratio of anybody live-operating at scale beyond Dunbar's number. Therefore, he's probably reached the highest signal to noise ratio in human history, when it comes to surgical cultural impact with few visible ripples to the naked eye of the median commoner.

"Marketing" to Seth isn't ads. It's changing the culture. It's art. Bringing your deep emotional labor to others, sharing generously of your soul. The moving of your single silent first viewer at the grand unveiling. And then moving the next one. Tears or not, he'll teach you what you need and want, not him, and not necessarily your current user audience. According to Seth, sometimes you have to fire the customer.

But always with grace. Seth's mini-book Graceful is behind the title of my proudest essay, The Future of Loving Grace. I think it's way better than Dario's poem as a north star.

Fascinatingly, on brand with his character, Seth is very shy about sharing personal anecdotes. He's almost a pseudonym, except it's his real name. Most of his writing is based on impersonal stories—highly compelling, punchy, deeply profoundly analytical, and centered on team human—just not him.

I'd love to be as humble and private as Seth, and I hope to prove it in the following sections as well as my lived actions. But I think the most effective way to quickly achieve brand scale of 5M+ subscribers in a year, like Cleo Abram, is to be substantive. Unless she invites me on the show somehow, I must meticulously outline my "huge if true" hypothesis for public consumption.

I think the next iteration of Seth will have to be more authentic, more personal, and more of a public incarnation of his ideas. It's also the only natural way I know how to blog and share my own ideas. Others can play Peter and Valentine. My full-send Bryan Johnson approach involves potentially more mainstream conflict and controversy, but my goal in living as a meme is not to confuse people. Rather, I want to enlighten them.

But people don't want to be told they're getting enlightened. They will immediately react with skepticism and potentially even call the loony bin to take you away. I have conflict-avoidant DNA lol. Reddit upvotes comedy. So, this whole thing should be truly fun™. It must be joyful and genuinely conveyed with good taste, all insights packaged neatly in humor.

I enjoy sharing my story and how I learned certain ideas on my own, with my own weird words, in my own weird way. The quirky ideas I'm expressing here are inherently long and complex, rooted in deep history layers that people normally don't examine from any angle, let alone mine in particular.

Interpreting what exactly this elephant is...clipping and dumbing it down for the blind mainstream to grasp, one part at a time...will follow naturally once it's born, grown, and walking towards the zoo's exit gates. The emperor has clothes, but I might need him to strip and put on these transparent garments I'm holding, for reasons that will become clear later...

I truly dislike DOAC's clickbait titles, but the content is high quality. Steven is the biggest contender to take the podcast interviewer throne from under Joe, Tim, Lex, etc. He has 14M while Modern Wisdom only has 4M subs. Similarly to DOAC's title and thumbnail game grabbing him mindshare from a crowded space of Spotify-powered incumbents with deeply loyal subjects, my life meme is a marketing "hook" and necessary evil to grab attention and create a fiefdom from thin air.

In my case, it also provides infinite commentary and substantive content. It's like manufacturing authentic Hawk Tuah moments every day. I can say "Giving away all my money" or "Going broke to live under a bridge" but really it's just a $300k initial investment in this LLC, as Santiago quickly understood in our recent chat (soon to publish). That doesn't make burning all my net worth to zero any less scary to me, personally, however...

And even scarier—especially given recent Charlie Kirk conditions with polarized citizen terrorists—I think my story functions on the same powerful and intrinsically biological memetic mechanisms as the original religious figures of old, as well as Bryan Johnson's "Don't Die" Zero thing today.

We all preach altruism and kindness, freedom and free speech and free markets and American pride, in some form or another. We vote with our money, and we vote with our feet. We build and buy houses. We go to our jobs. We celebrate health and life and love.

People around the world don't actually dislike Americans. I've lived on 4 continents. We are pretty loved and Trump making immigration harder is universally reviled as a shitty move (at least to the individuals dealing with those messy changes, including my $25k of live O-1 sponsorships in process today, which I just learnt are getting 80% RFE instead of previous 10-15%).

But we prove that we're on Team Human in our actions, as best we can. The novelty is that I'm doing nice things and open-sourcing them specifically around money, as opposed to health or something else. It's a weird kind of profitable non-profit which I call a deliberately "unprofitable" for-profit.

The memes will come thick and fast with my brazenly Ayn Randian, for-max-profit, in-your-face capitalism. Of which, even if I'm the next MrBeast, I won't technically make a dime...unless all of society agrees with capitalism...on my terms, through my eyes.

Then from the same team, with curiosity, you can critique me and say how my meme suicide torpedo mission is actually a for-profit (obviously, cuz corporate structure and governance and bank account signatories) and I'm full of terribly evil billionaire intent and I should be taxed more.

Oh and I shouldn't be allowed to give away my $300k life savings money so many years ago to those impoverished kids struggling to live their dreams, who am I to choose, and all the 25 subscribers in the audience who watched and were inspired—shame on them.

After all, Andy didn't publish the game plan and try to literally tell everyone he knew and encourage them to do it too, no, no, he kept all the secrets to himself so nobody could copy his secret master strategy yaarrgggg he's the worsttttt IP trolll

But now these previously poor mentee folks are living their best lives making $2000/hr instead of $2/hr, and paying it forward, with their resources and mentorship uplifting the next generation...

and they and their families and their neighbors and their grandchildren are so-so-goddam-happy that we did.

I'm ready for the fight, the controversy, shouting debates, the memes! But I'm also ready to tell people something they've always known but just never quite had the words or actions or models for. Either way, the good word will be spreading.

2. EXPLAINING META MECHANICS

I have recently converged on a 3-step plan for the next year:

1. Make a few 10 minute videos explaining each component of my business as a separate topic. Use google slides or a few figma wire drawings as best I can to walk through everything with visuals.
2. Share this series with a couple friends who have already expressed interest in live discussions with me on the philosophical underpinnings. Record debrief workshops as podcasts with them to get feedback and post to Youtube as well.
3. Consolidate learnings into a book. Publish by end of 2026 as the "official launch" of my brand. Capitalism Unlocked will have a year of pre-work behind it, hopefully some momentum and followers and relationships I can lean on more heavily by then as well, to build a digital-native best-seller campaign.

I have identified 6 underlying components as the core outline thus far for the video series, which still need visuals and snappy presentation:

1. Morality - quick rundown of how trade is the first order thing uplifting people over the centuries. Reasonable people can and should and must align on this. Basic definitions. Turns out this kind of mutual understanding in good faith creates trust and community and family, from strangers.
2. Stories - the above is missing in most people's lives, operationally if not explicitly. Symptoms include political divides, All-In's "suicide of the West" characterization, masculinity crisis, single parents, atheism. The above historical figures and our memetic brains latching on to narratives. Living as a meme = brand + process power. Blogging as googling for people.
3. Talent - all smart or successful people care about education. Unify the culture through uplifting humanity, creating scholarships which gift precious time based on merit to founders struggling in early days thru poverty. What aspiring Elon teen in Joburg wouldn't want to talk with the world's current Jesus of Capitalism? Build the talent search engine and deliver results. Show it's the best over time, YC 2.0, cultivate a community, "corrupt the youth."
4. Unprofit - i'm creating my own infinite game framework as a company, aligning my personal incentives for maximal quality of life and moral satisfaction. Proof of work as "inverse bitcoin" social protocol. Reverse scale. I explicitly want others to put me out of business, like Tesla open-sourcing EV patents to encourage competition. Turns out this whole idea is completely against current (dumb, immoral) social structures (legal, imagined) and therefore seems financially suicidal at surface level. Not being a 501c3 nonprofit is more difficult, sure, but also a clear counter-position, brand reinforcer, and long-term moat.
5. Change - bending the culture, a la Seth Godin. Making tacit knowledge of capitalism explicit across the stack, sharing the inner workings of businesses and teasing apart the underlying principles for society's benefit. Becoming influential means holding mindshare, so people listen when I say something. Have to stay on brand. Trust is voluntary and quickly lost, not an absolute power. PG doesn't wield his position fully, nor does Elon. Budget is only $100k/yr so a few million (~maybe $10M total lifetime spend) including grants. Successful book could fund it all. Impact should be at least $100M ultimate annual revenue creation, if not capture (Bryan Johnson). Helps with AI Alignment / gov’t alignment long-term, see Future of Loving Grace.
6. Me - uniquely suited to spearhead this. Not interested in personal gain, mostly want to see the outcome and create a protocol to do it continuously, beyond myself. Truly willing to die for this: financial suicide, Charlie Kirk, Tim Ferriss warnings on fame, etc. High opinion of self from Operational Excellence (chess pong poker, Nikhil Buduma and MIT, Scale AI + ReadMe, Tiger certified shuffle) + Hardships (Dad Mom Wendy) = Agency, Ambition. Optimistic story of self and others, compelled to help bridge gaps. Have constantly tried 1:1, communities, Lean On Me nonprofit, Prez Scholars alumni, MIT alum volunteering, Secret Societies, interact + YC, EA. Lived on 4 continents, bathed in culture. Been among the people, hanging with peasant grandmas on bus in Guayaquil. Want to highlight the best culture. Seth as cultural icon. i Care. i Smart. i Act. i not Robot, yet. iHuman.

3. Y COMBINATOR 2.0

Mentoring the right people has been extremely fruitful in the last few months. I've made more mental leaps and connections resulting in more learning—just sitting, talking to Phu for example—in the last few weeks than in all the years since college, combined.

You don't know something until you teach it. I think my ambition post finally approached PG's essay quality in the last few days without even trying to do so. I'll probably make a Substack by January to repost the top 1% bangers and to draw more eyeballs (h/t Aly).

I have new focal points on all these major figures. I will at some point write in more detail than I have before how I was wrong about Scale AI and my former bughouse partner Alex. He wasn't the root culture problem, and I felt good working there personally.

Aatish was right that I didn't understand the nuances of running a company at those kinds of growth rates. Burnout was only a problem for the young ones, whom I felt for, without self nor world experience to withstand a truly crushing grand mandate that contradicts how one is raised: with short-term kindness as the higher virtue.

In fact, nobody pointed out the real issue I detected, which was much more vast and almost incomprehensible because it takes decades to see. The issue is America's culture and global (contractor, finger-pointing) culture. As a society, we are not yet religious about capitalism's North Star and the unintuitive but principled implications thereof.

My version of Hacker News and Bookface will be a discord at first. Maybe Ivonne or someone wants to build a Capitalism News, with a better algorithm tuned on liberty upstream, innovation, and human flourishing downstream. My recent posts got flagged when I don't think they should have, because it was a productive contribution to the Parlor.

Reddit is not so densely wonderful, which is why Substack is driving a wedge to the top of the intellectual discourse heap. I'm not sure if video storage will ever move off Youtube.

Maybe there are some crypto applications aside from money in domain names, identity, and social protocols like my "Hunger Games for AI governance". But my high-trust cultural movement should make such things either less existentially essential or easier to implement and adopt quickly across broad swaths of the population.

Ideally, as a lazy man who seeks influence without office and on merits of the ideas outside of me, someone else can just go do the things I mention as high-pri. Let's make Orson Scott Card's pseudonymous blogger president dreams come true. If you can't join 'em, beat 'em!

Scott provided ample demonstration of the Ender trend with mathy wiz kids winning at startups. I predict Bryan Johnson is the first clear cut tis + rizz winning at organic retail consumer distribution. I'd love to know other examples, otherwise I'm aiming to be the self-proclaimed second. The genius child prodigy generals will be here soon, followed shortly by AI and nuclear disarmament.

This section has obviously gotten away from us, but my focus is truly on the people and their focus on other people, not the quality of their current business idea. This is the most meaningful difference between myself and PG. He views people as an evaluation function for things one makes. And money as an accelerant for the things to spring to life, outstripping their people at mind-boggling rates.

I appreciate his perspective and applaud it. Certainly I've learnt from it and want to build upon it. Those things growing on their own allow people to tackle other meaningful projects with their newly spared time.

But I view things post-scarcity, in abundance, as almost redundant to the spirit of making, for its own sake to nourish one's soul. I view money as a plaything, a medium of fun (Carse, The Infinite Game). This is the most serious of all fun because it's morally correct to coordinate free and voluntary resources in service of generosity and true enduring cultural change.

There is value in this story. In these ideas, not as wikipedia or grokipedia articles, or my blog posts...but lived and breathed and writ large across all facets of society, from the prisons to the schoolhouses, to the hospitals to the VR Metaverse Chuck E Cheese on the moons of Neptune.

Responsibility and Competence and Ambition become the currency of the future. Zuck is right about "personal AI" but I'm sure they have no idea how to build a business model around it because Alex isn't quite as interested in people, like Elon versus Sam.

Nobody aside from me is both poor and loony enough to go straight to the source and fight Jesus (or the non-profit altruist military-industrial religious deep state capture complex) for cultural upstream supremacy. Thank goodness for Peter Thiel and Tyler for pointing out the Stagnation, and Ayn Rand showing that it's a cultural problem of individual posture.

Let's wrap this up.

YC started with $200k or $2M, depending how you count. It's so strong as an institution, nearing a trillion in market cap "produced" and the clear Harvard + Stanford + MIT of "startup higher ed", that nobody serious dares compete. Many dreamers try, as Sam pointed out.

They are so focused and great at their single intervention point. It's working, so I'd rather just supplement and plug in upstream. My entity is a spiritual successor and an extension, rather than a competitor. I am a peer to YC top talent in certain regards and can at least help others get to that starting point, the application, if not crossing the finish line as a new mini-Tyler-Seth-PG myself in 2056.

I'm already starting to re-derive certain pieces independently. A couple days ago, I spoke with a girl in India who could use $4.5k for 3mo to run a batch with just 3-4 of us. I think she could easily get to breakout performance or positive cashflow. Certainly if I had 10 of her, one would.

This is worth experimenting with, as an ongoing thing and maybe even run by deputies—or ideally just independent partners, someone like Farza. I'm actively trying to avoid scaling my incubator or spending any more of my money on others. I'd rather focus on content and highly concentrated amplification of top top top global talents in their life's breakout month, T minus 30.

In addition to transparently posting all my interviews, mentor content, and financial statements, I doubt YC 1.0 treats their public community as first-class citizens and the real "users". They try, but simple things like putting this doc into a product roadmap kanban on Product Board and making it public like Rippling would be wonderful. I wonder if Parker should be a partner of either YC 1.0 or 2.0 someday, I'm sure his compound media company would be fabulous to compete against.

I don't know exactly how to measure my success yet. One thing would be an alumni page, where (like YC's top companies chart) I put people I give grants to with the date and their individual + family's estimated net worth at that time, as well as their hourly rate in the market. Just as an example

• Phu:
  • $50k gifted, $15/hr job equivalent = 3000hrs = 375 work days.
  • $500 individual net worth, $0 - 150k family net worth (not sure),
  • O-1 visa assistance & general mentorship, alumni community.
  • August 15 2025.
  • now: $0/hr job equiv
  • paid forward to other causes: $10 to fam, gifted back: $0
• Justin:
  • $39k gifted, $5/hr job equivalent.
  • -$27k individual net worth, $500k family (separate).
  • Alumni community.
  • October 7 2025.
  • now: $25/hr job equiv = 5x uplift in 2mo
  • paid forward to other causes: $200 to charity, gifted back: $0
• Ivoine:
  • $20k gifted, primarily for O-1 visa assistance.
  • $0 family net worth, $500 debt, -$2/hr equiv, leaky bucket.
  • General mentorship. Alumni community.
  • December 2 2025.
  • now: $300/hr + fundraising storytelling capabilities = $300k uplift
    (6mo worth of earnings delta, so 15x ROI just him, and he employs 3 Bahamas kids on top of that, so maybe 40x ROI total?)
  • without Andy: idk? 6mo later, slower path, losing out on $2B in year 15 cuz it's year 17 instead in alternative world?
  • paid forward to other causes: $2000 to grandma, gifted back: $5k to Andy for next kiddo

No access to LP side on YC, but I have design ideas for making my public donation portal and above metrics sleek, compelling, human. Youtube should speak for itself to some extent.

3. @capitalismUnlocked ON YOUTUBE

Broadcasting my authentic mimetic story and the story of the incubatees, interviews, and ideas underlying it all... Biggest blocker is here for overall growth right now. I'm willing to spend 20 hours writing this essay at the cost of not pushing out as much content. Should just pay someone to help edit & produce, by end of January at latest.

If we just viral hop to 10k regular viewers at high quality maybe say $100/video according to gemini. If my money story as compelling angle is correct, then $300/vid optimistically with super dense audience. So 4x weekly = $60k/yr close to self-sustaining budget. Growing at that rate in 4mo, it should be $120k/yr and from there we're compounding.

Bottoms up, currently have 3 people paying $25/mo out of 200 total subs, maybe 20 youtube. So to get to 100k just need 100x = 20k subs or 2k youtube super high intent? Conservatively something like 10k - 50k subs should hit $100k revenue mark. Money density is initially very important and useful, so could be 5k subs if they are all YC alums for instance, or just OrangeDAO gives $2M etc.

Aim for 500 subs by end of Feb then 1k March as intermediate short term goals. Then 2k Apr, 4k May, 10k June. Continue from there.

In searching for a hire, they will have to align very strongly on brand. The goals are threefold, and the producer should be able to articulate this in their own words or framework somehow:

1. find the next Elon - top top talent magnet, make them apply to us.
2. hit the subscriber targets - go viral within ideologically aligned network pockets.
3. open source content repo - for GP interactions, story with incubator ecosystem (talent + mentors, friends, principles, tips & hacks, etc).
   
   brand and education aspect is tertiary or quaternary because I can do that also thru blog, book, substack, socials, personal whatever. but def also want to ideally compress these 3-4 goals all into one single unified beautiful thing.

4. THE UNPROFIT PHILOSOPHY

This is life on extra hard mode, building a long-term moat and doing it for real, hella principled.

I've had trouble getting more than $75/mo so far because

• not focused on this, distracted, still just 1mo in to editing youtube all by myself. and blogging every day, mentoring, etc.
• my content is shit. rambling. even this blog, who the hell will read this except me in 10 years.
  • Only crazy person would subscribe. i would not.
  • unless it was a truly good friend, then i would perhaps more than anyone else, because this is my kind of idea.
    • i trust good friends, like Tiger for example.
    • Andy I need $100k it will make you rich. here's why in great detail. i promise from bottom of my heart. OK done.
    • (with Welcome he told me not to invest it's risky...lol...)
• not morally certain financing is correct given I still have plenty to work with and stretch. so this contributes to (1) above, lack of serious outreach.

Direct talent re-gifts will not happen for many years. So content patron subscription revenue and more highly leveraged "fundraising" are my only two real options. But real fundraising pools are typically looking for equity. So grants and EA and nonprofit people are my best bets, philanthropy angle. Then they are annoyed or confused that my LLC structure expresses disdain for nonprofits.

Then I'm stuck with a few highly ideological people: Peter Thiel, Elon, Sam, Patrick Collison, maybe Vitalik, Balaji... actually this list is long. But they will come in naturally once my dealflow is anywhere near relevant to their own funds and GPs of choice.

There should be opportunities down the line, if takeoff velocity is achieved at some point in next 1-3 years, such that we can leverage our position to take aligned SPV <= 10% "tithe" carry in rounds of funding from certain founders we contribute the most to launching in big ways (funding as a service on founder end, dealflow engine as a service on VC end).

All roads lead back to doing the work. Proving the model out. Working with founders scrappily for cheap, creating incubation structure, and producing at least 2-3 true talents to fire thru the pipelines and ride their coattails on the way up.

Seems indirect. The intermediate step is doing this proof of work will generate enough buzz and views. So just publishing what I'm doing and why and how will create story traction as a leading indicator of the talent incubation for the smartest people to come find me or at least have a call and maybe test out some small collaboration July-Aug 2026.

Sam told Tyler 5mins is all you need and the YC interviews at that stage have never missed. Strong words, so I guess my youtube videos should be enough for people to steer me in the right direction after a brief watch of the right playlist. Me seeking feedback as a conversation starter around Feb-March would make sense, even if traction is slow then.

Like bitcoin, adoption of a social protocol takes years. n=1 with first-mover advantage and trusted social credibility. Also I can redistribute gifted revenue or equity to initial donors, as I see fit down the line, in service of the story as "content creation expenses". Thus being a true for-profit, yet personally unprofitable, as a novel philanthropic fund and social commentary moving the cultural needle like YC has.

It's not worth consulting a lawyer yet and introducing fine print, but maybe should invest next year in legal protections along with breakeven ramen profitable cashflow and perhaps trademarks (on book title, all these entities, etc).

CONCLUSION

1. focus on talent incubation with resources I have today.
2. unblock youtube production pipeline, 10k+ subs in 6mo, minimum.
3. write a book.
4. don't forget to have fun!

Budget for production hiring: 1k myself vs 10k subs in 6mo with a great helper is worth spending $20k on tentatively, and up to $75k if true trajectory proof yields 95% confidence to go all-in on that momentum. shoot past 20k subs = $100k annual revenue payback. monitor as we go. Writing and thinking and talking are my strengths, not editing or posting or downscoping myself to perfectly bite-sized TikTok tidbits.

Chat with Tyler et al very very last thing: kinda just like socializing with friendos or happy hour randos. hard to swallow, but gotta chill until results catch up.

Personal alignment with moral urgency... I need to be more careful about spreading myself too thin, socializing or self-indulging with wild funemployed abandon as I have for the past 5 years on vacation mode, or else the future of humanity suffers!

Book will contain next steps. Chill on the social protocol speak, too much "someone should beat me at this same thing benchmark for AI etc", when this thing isn't even a thing yet.

It only will become "a thing" for real when my intentional bus factor of 1 increments, so this LLC is no longer strictly needed, i.e. at least 1-2 other LLCs owned by some other crazy lunatics pick up the financial suicide baton I'd like to pass them one day soon...

For example, they should perhaps do better on a 10-year time horizon at uplift ROI metrics to become the proven most competent lead "unprophet" living capitalist money meme factory.