PILLED Fitness

When I first got into Crypto Twitter, everyone kept telling me the same thing: if I was serious about building a career and making a name for myself, I needed to start showing up IRL. I had $600 to my name. But deep down, I knew they were right. So I borrowed a few thousand dollars from my dad, booked a hotel in Miami during Art Basel (NOT cheap), and flew across the country to meet a bunch of strangers from the internet who traded pictures of monkeys. I got to Miami and found out my hotel had DOUBLE BOOKED MY ROOM. No rooms available. No alternatives. I was officially homeless and broke in Miami. Naturally, I went on Twitter Spaces to freak out because the only thing scarier than being stranded in Miami was calling my Italian father to explain that his loan to meet my internet friends had resulted in homelessness. I would never survive Christmas. A girl listening to the Space said she knew a guy who could fix just about anything. Enter @XicoSR This man, who had never met me in his life, showed up at my hotel in an Uber, picked up my luggage and my very sad self, and brought me back to his hotel. He gave me HIS room and went to sleep at the Solana Hacker House instead. That was the first time I’d ever heard of a Hacker House. He invited me to check it out and also brought me VIP to a massive FTX party at ToeJam. I need you to understand how absurd this was. I was a kindergarten teacher who had accidentally gone viral on the internet and stumbled into crypto. Now I was sitting in bottle service next to Dave Portnoy, meeting executives at huge crypto companies, and being recognized by people who’d listened to my Twitter Spaces. But what stuck with me wasn’t the party. It was how many people genuinely wanted to see me succeed. People gave me advice, made introductions, and believed in me before I’d really figured out what I was doing. Then I went to the Miami Hacker House. I saw what people were building, listened to conversations I barely understood, and realized there was an entire world beyond Crypto Twitter that I desperately wanted to be part of. A month later, I was showing up at side events around Chicago Hacker House. By LA Hacker House, I was FULL SEND. And I pretty much never stopped showing up. Without Xico, I genuinely don’t know if I’d be here today. Without Hacker Houses, I don’t know where I’d be either. Years later, I get to help other people find their way into this industry, and I think about that first trip a lot. Sometimes all someone needs is for someone else to open a door. TL;DR: Befriend Xico. Go to Hacker House London. You have no idea how much your life could change just by showing up.