An investor told the speaker that chasing a billion-dollar valuation could burn them out and kill what makes them special: teaching investors through community and content. The speaker realizes they've lost the humor and lightness they had when they started, buried under worry about scale.
I was talking to one of my investors, and one of the things I'd talked about before was like building a billion-dollar firm. And she was like, well, your magic to me is not that you're building a billion-dollar firm, it's that you're— you have a personal touch. Like, you want to educate the next generation of investors and leaders through investing community and content. So you don't need a billion dollars to get to that goal. And she said, in fact, I'm worried that If you set a billion-dollar firm as your goal, that you'll burn out trying to compete and this ecosystem will lose a valuable spark and educator. And that was, that was really hard to hear. I think her questioning echoed a voice that I hadn't listened to in a very long time. It was, it was the voice that I listened to when I first joined Twitter, when I started shitposting, when I was funny and light and just enjoying things. And I think like the dull roar of worry had overpowered it for so long that I feel like I'd kind of lost plot.
Paige of Behind Genius driving an AI electric train in St. Louis (Intramotev Visit)
