By Larry Chiang
It was nice meeting you poolside for office hours at 91 Rainey St at 12, noon in The 78701
That horrible acronym I kept repeating was #EUTWMPPM
#EUTWMPPM
Engineer Up a Tidal Wave of Momentum, Perpetual Promotion Machine
Let us set our intention to no longer be a business transaction Virgin. It’s okay if we have not met in person. It’s not ok if you do not have pen and paper. It’s ok if you have never worked at a job before.
Let’s set our intention to do one deal.
Let’s set the impossibly high goal of doing one business deal.
99% of you will just intellectually read over and skim the details. The concept of stacking seems soooooo easy when we talked about it at the pool. We vibed and you pretended to know what I was talking about when I said, “We need to build something on top of something that is established. We need to run protocol #ExternalAPI. We need to DJ API’s. Yes, disc jockey an Application Protocol Interface.â€
Permission to no longer be a virgin.
In sex, it takes two to tango. And consent times 2 is required. Simultaneous consent at perfect pace and tempo is required for oral. If there is any asymmetry, the sex deal is off
But in business, you can have permissionless leverage
You’re allowed to promote a company you do not own
You’re allowed to promote a company that you do not work at.
You must tip toe the line between copyright a d trademark infringement
You MUST be law abiding
For example, Palo Alto Delivery dot com
Initially, they sold Siam Thai Food and Macarons. They did not have permission from the business owners. They loaded up the menus into a PDF and slapped their phone number up on the website.
For example, Uber.
Initially, consumers did not know where the App Store was. At the beginning, Uber only had a five digit short code to text and they had not phone number.
Uber was paying $60 per new uber customer.
So, I took a 415-720-8500 cell and would text people a link after they called that would connect them to the App Store. They click the link to then download the Uber App for iPhone 2
Artist credit Andrew Yu
I had an Uber “API†two years before Uber hired Chris Saad to champion their api.
Text me an idea you have about building on top of SOME THING.
Together, we can take you from zero-deals-done to one deal done. As my mentee, Peter Thiel* says, Zero to One**
*technically, he built Stanford Law Review off of Harvard Law Review. His first entity at SLS was a sequel to HLS’s Harvard Law Review but at Stanford where he went.
**Before going zero to One Billion, he didn’t ask permission to be eBay’s preferred payment provider. Peter, Luke, Max and Kenny all wedged in WITHOUT PERMISSION
Ya know, instead of texting me an idea you have, let’s play a game. Text me your favorite company and I will text back the origin story of how it combined two existing API’s without permission from either legal entity
To repeat, the game is via text or email
Send me your favorite company that’s bigger than $1b and I will text back the SCANDALOUS origin story. Cliche not crazy that combined two existing API’s. Not crazy that it started up without permission from any legal entity. Peter Thiel and I share a mentor, Mark McCormack.
Although Peter Thiel may deny Mark McCormack, I can cite 4 instances where they eerily match Signature Business Protocols
– Running an #ExternalAPI
– Forward deploying an Engineer
– executing a #OneWayLetterOfIntent
– Closing a deal with #InternalEscrow
– non Employee Cofounder
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So EricJorgenson wrote the Almanack of Naval Ravikant.
He didn’t need permission but he got permission anyway.
You also have my permission to paste copy my protocol for helping students go from “credit Virgin†to Fico 800.
Duck9 is a credit score prep program that is like a Kaplan or Princeton Review test preparation service. We don't teach beating the SAT, but we do get you to a higher credit FICO score using secret methods that have gotten us on TV, Congress and newspaper articles. Say hi or check out some of our free resources before you pay for a thing. You can also text the CEO:
