HackFactory

When I was an undergrad at @Cambridge_Uni, I poured my heart out pitching at the annual college startup prize. The brightest minds came together from the university that gave birth to household names like Newton, Turing, Hawking, and billion-dollar companies like Arm (which powers every smartphone). This was the absolute pinnacle of entrepreneurship at Cambridge. The prize? £2,000. For one winner. For a whole year. I’m not kidding - that was it. I could never have imagined that just a few years later, in 2023, I would give away 500x that. $1,000,000. In a single year. Equity-free. No strings attached. All because of one thing which @Dom_Kwok and I did: we co-founded @EasyA_App, building it into one of the world’s fastest-growing startups today. Wild. YouTube legend @itsalasdairmann calls us the @MrBeast of Web3. I love the name, but there’s so much more to it… Where does the story begin? Why did we do it? What’s the lesson to be learnt? I wrote this on the flight to a meeting before New Year, and I took advantage of the extra time without WiFi to dive deep into the photos from my time at Cambridge. I haven’t looked back at these in years, but I stumbled on the one which was the start of it all. This is a picture of me in my college’s library as I was graduating. I was looking at the books whose spines I had broken in from reading them over and over again. Memorising every theorem. Every breakthrough. Every framework. It was the last time I would open those books again. It was time to start a new chapter in my life. I didn’t quite know it at the time, but my life was about to change forever. I would no longer be reading chapters. Instead, I would be writing my own. They say you must be the change you wish to see in the world. If you see something that should be different, you have the power to make it different. Just £2,000 in funding. To one winner. In one whole year. It’s obvious founders need more than that to succeed. So with the resources we’ve created through EasyA, we created the change we wanted to see. That’s why we upped it to an unparalleled $1,000,000. In school, they teach you to follow the path well-trodden. To do as you’re told. In other words, to take the chapter that’s already been written for you. “Today, class, we’re reading chapter 5. Page 67. Then we’ll do task number 3”. Sound familiar? If you’re reading this and wondering what 2024 holds for you, stop. It’s not a chapter to be predicted or read to you. 2024 is yours to be written by none other than you, yourself. This is the post I wish someone had written for me many years ago. I was lucky though. I found this out earlier on in life. So why am I writing this now? Because I can feel it again stronger than ever. The next chapter’s coming. And it’s going to the biggest we’ve ever written. To everyone looking ahead to next year, let’s write this next chapter together. Whether you’re pitching your startup idea, fighting your own battles, or anything in between, I’ll see you in 2024!