Thread by @zcabrams, In 2011, I left my job in finance to start a company. [...]

In 2011, I left my job in finance to start a company. I didn’t have any experience in tech, didn’t know ppl in the industry, and in fact didn’t even really know what engineering, product and design were.

If I can make it thru this startup journey, anyone can. A thread

I worked in private equity. My dream was to be an operating partner at a distressed PE firm. We were buying auto cos in 2010. The epitome of 'distressed'.

After 2 yrs, I realized the job was *really* depressing

You improve margins by firing lots and lots of ppl

I decided to leave. I got great advice to try something dramatically different ... not a little different ... but wildly different.

Starting a tech company felt like the opposite of managing finance for an auto parts marker :)

So that's what I did

I thought the step 1 was to raise $. So I created a snazzy keynote and cold emailed VCs. (thx @Noah_Lucas for the help)

Shockingly some met with me (like @mattcharris) - non gave us money ... I had no lender, no customers, no code and no experience

3 mos in - after realizing my keynote would not wow investors, I decided I needed to learn to code.

And somewhere along the way, I realized lending was too hard.

So I pivoted to a p2p payments co focused on university campus networks (think: Venmo for student points)

6 mos in - After finishing codeschool, I was able to build a landing page

I started selling schools and emailing anyone I knew who coded. I was a staple on the NYC co-founder match matching circuit trying desperately to find anyone crazy enough to work w me.

9 mos in - I miraculously found @seansu4you87 (not on the circuit - through linkedin!). we both went to duke, the timing was right, and we decided to collaborate.

9 months into this adventure, we were finally actually writing *real* code. Evenly was born!

12 mos(!) - sean and I finally had a workable product. we were going to college campuses, knocking on doors, meeting with groups, and pitching fraternities and sororities. we had -some- traction ... but school admins refused to "approve".

14 mos - we finally raise (~1.5M), but from the *worst* investors. We still didnt have the traction needed to compel @dcstalder @mickymalka and others to invest.

But we didn't sweat it. Naively we thought all money was the same. *huge* mistake.

15 mos - our lead investor refuses to fund - they're sending ~20k every 2-3 wks. meanwhile, we've hired employees ( @joehankin and @justinbrunet), moved into an office, and continue to scale our product.

we've now got a killer logo though - thanks to @elirouss

18 mos - investor stops funding altogether. we can't make payroll, everyone stops taking salary. failure is looming - I asked @taytay to most to SF so I could start this company, we asked ppl to leave good jobs to join us, and now things are slipping away. I can't sleep at night

19 mos - we're on the verge of folding company and looking for other jobs. Randomly, on Halloween evening I meet w @forzley - he says western union might be interested in acquihiring us ... we have life!

So we start selling ourselves to anyone interested. Much to our surprise, there's _some_ demand. We end up selling to Square. Evenly is still probably @rishigarg's best deal ever :)

~24 mos in - we start at SQ. My first day is when I learned "product manager" is a real job .... and apparently my job

7 years later, 1/2 Evenly team is still at SQ. I make a career in the product thing. @seansu4you87 helps scale eng at SQ, Doordash and Airbnb.

So if you're starting or thinking about starting a co, your odds of success are likely 10000x better than ours - you'll do fine. We did *everything* wrong and it was still okay. And if you need any help along the way, let me know - im SO happy helping others navigate this journey

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