What Lifeguarding Taught Me About Startup Investing

A WORD FROM TURANT AI…

SCAMMED IN A CONFERENCE CALL

In Hong Kong, a director requested his coworker on a conference call to wire $25M to a bank account - which he did.

However, that wasn’t his director, and the money was now in the hands of scammers.

They used advanced deepfakes to imitate the director and run away with the cash. AI-powered scams are sharply on the rise, but there’s one company working on a solution.

Turant AI has recruited a world class team to stop AI deepfakes, offering 24/7 protection with their next-gen security software. Check out their raise page below to get equity in this AI startup.

NEW STARTUPS

Startups that you can invest in with as little as $100 right now:

🐕 Calviri - Preventing cancer in dogs (this is not a drill!!) (LINK)

🦴 Xense - Futuristic X-Ray Machines (LINK)

🏈 Upside - Sports betting app where the users own the house (LINK)

A LESSON FROM LIFEGUARDING

14 years ago, I was a lifeguard at my community pool.

I got paid $7.25 an hour - a whole day of working only brought in ~$50 after taxes.

And I absolutely loved it.

Good people and an excuse to spend all day outdoors.

Swimming on your breaks and smashing golf balls in the empty parking lot during storms.

Here’s the thing - it sounds silly, but in a way being a lifeguard taught me a valuable lesson that now applies to startup investing.

As a lifeguard, you’d spend hours up on the stand watching over scores of swimmers.

I did this for four years, so the hours really piled up.

I started to develop a sense for ‘normal’ body movement in the water. There’s variability for sure, but most people swim and play in the pool in a similar fashion.

I could scan a pool of a hundred people and know pretty instantly if everyone was okay.

What I had unconsciously done was create a baseline.

A baseline is a benchmark for normalcy.

Because I knew the baseline so well, I could very rapidly tell when someone was not acting normal.

Actively drowning people exhibit actions that are not normal - flailing arms, desperate attempts to reach the surface, unnatural body movements.

If I hadn’t observed the qualities of thousands of normal swimmers, it wouldn’t be so crystal clear when a person was deviating from those movements.

This was the ‘aha’ moment.

You cannot spot outliers if you don’t even know what normal looks like. 

ESTABLISH YOUR STARTUP BASELINE

In startup investing, only 1 out of a hundred startups amounts to anything special.

We are truly in the outliers business.

And like lifeguarding, I needed to get thousands of reps looking at startups to figure out what normal looked like.

To be clear, I don’t want to invest in normal - normal doesn’t create the next Open AI, the next Nvidia.

I just needed to establish a baseline.

I looked at hundreds of startups, and absorbed as much as I could.

The questions I was trying to answer were:

• What does a normal valuation look like at various traction levels?

• What does a normal growth rate look like?

• What is a normal cash burn?

• What is a normal amount to spend on headcount

…and dozens more. The point was, I was starting to gain a sense of what normal looked like.

Only then could I spot un-normal.

And it’s led me to invest in now 39 outliers, which you can see here.

Inevitably some of these will flame out and I’ll lose everything.

But with enough diversification you should be able to latch on to one or two big winners that make the entire portfolio profitable.

Even if you don’t have money to invest or don’t feel ready, you can start establishing your baseline now.

It’s 100% free to look at the deals on Wefunder, StartEngine, and Republic.

If you want to avoid normal like me, start establishing your baseline by checking out live deals:

StartEngine

Wefunder

Republic