How'd I get here and where am I headed?

Hi! I’m Basil - from Big Tech, to venture studio, to acquiring a small business, here’s the full story of how I got to where I am today and where I plan to go in the next few years.

Let’s start at the beginning - I was born in Jersey City, NJ and lived there until I was six, when my dad decided to acquire a gas station in the middle-of-nowhere Iowa. Why Iowa? Long story short, after a bunch of failed attempts at acquiring businesses in other cities, his business partner found this opportunity through a friend. They bought it, left the rest of the family in NJ, and moved to Iowa to make sure the business could sustain their respective families. After a few months, they decided it was a good opportunity, so the rest of us packed our bags and moved.

To keep the story moving, I’ll skip to High School. Even though my High School didn’t have a CS program, I did First Lego League growing up. I wanted to be a neurosurgeon, so I always gravitated to the “brain” of our team’s robot, programming it to do cool stuff. But it never felt like real programming, so when a kid in my town got on the news for building a small gaming business, I asked him how I could learn to do what he was doing. He pointed me to a few books, and the rest is history. I still wanted to be a doctor (everyone in my family who had “made it” was a doctor), so like a lot of High Schoolers who wanted to do the same, I volunteered at a hospital. I eventually realized that a bunch of the time I spent there was helping visitors navigate the hospital - but if it was so easy to navigate the outdoors with Google Maps, how come nobody had built the same for the indoors? Along with my new-found technical skills, I embarked on a multi-year journey building an app I called “WayFind” and selling hospitals on it. Long story short, I didn’t make a penny off that company, but it made me believe that tech and tech entrepreneurship could be a path for me.

So when I went to college, I decided to double major in Chemistry (pre-med track) and Computer Science. Chemistry to appease my parents and Computer Science because I was personally more interested in it. I still wanted to be a doctor because I wasn’t convinced you could actually make a good living as a programmer. But after taking Organic Chemistry, I realized that I wasn’t studying for it because I didn’t like it as much as my CS classes. If I was going to do something for the rest of my life, I might as well like it. It was the late 2010s and tech entrepreneurs were getting rich left and right, so I knew I could make money pursuing this path. I dropped my Chemistry major and added a Business Finance minor because after my big startup fail, I knew I was missing something: I needed to understand how money works. If I wanted to do business, I needed to understand what makes a good business. And although I didn’t learn that from my finance classes, they did give me a good foundation for putting the pieces together when I later became a Product Manager.

I was always working on side projects that I hoped I could turn into businesses, but after a bunch of fails, I realized I was missing something: marketing. I took some time to slow down and educate myself, so I picked up a book called Blitzscaling by Reid Hoffman. To this day, I can point to that book as having completely changed the way I look at business. Previously, I always thought I needed to invent something novel and only then think about marketing it once it was built. But the right way to build businesses is to treat them like science experiments:

1. Start with a hypothesis (your business idea)

2. Write down what needs to be true for the business to succeed

3. Write down what needs to be true for the business to fail

4. Create a series of tests to disprove your hypothesis

5. If your tests don’t disprove your hypothesis, you MIGHT have something that can work

The name of the game is iteration. You need to build something that can get you customer feedback ASAP. Build something minimal, get feedback, then iterate, iterate, iterate.

I had my answer, this is why I had always failed. My process was all f*cked up. Over the next couple months, I spent countless hours reading/listening to everything I could about guerrilla marketing/blitzscaling. How did the web 2.0 tech darlings get going in the early days? How did companies from before the internet age do it? What was the through-line between marketing strategies of old-age companies and new-age companies?

At this point I’m still in college, but it’s COVID and I want to put my knowledge to the test. I call up a family friend’s dad and ask him if I can intern at his healthcare company. He said yes, so I flew to Dallas, TX and worked there doing marketing while taking my Zoom classes online. What did I learn? I learned how to “merchandise” a healthcare company and position our services in ways to attract our patients to come in and get services done. I learned how to cold call patients and update my script to get higher conversion rates. I learned how to take rejection after rejection on cold calls. I learned how to segment our customer lists by demographics and services used to make best use of our call center. It was a great experience: I got more creative and became a better salesman.

When I flew back to LA to walk at my graduation ceremony, I had a job lined up to be a software engineer at a startup in Palo Alto. But at the very last minute I got an email from a recruiter at Intuit Credit Karma who asked if I’d be willing to intern over the summer. Odd to intern after you graduate, but the timing worked out perfectly - my internship would end a week before my full-time job would start, so I said yes! Product was a dream job for CS students who wanted a mixture of both business and tech, so I wanted to learn more about it. After the interview process, I spent the next few weeks reading and taking as many notes on Product as I could.

Over the summer of ‘21 I interned on the Lightbox team, which is an internal team at Credit Karma that builds a tool for data scientists at our partner companies to host their underwriting models directly on the CK platform. It allowed us to tell users their probability of being approved for a financial products before they apply. At the time, 20% of applications submitted through Lightbox were duplicate applications, so the main project I worked on that summer was reducing that number. Duplicate apps were bad for lenders because they pay every time they did a hard credit pull on a user, and it was bad for users because their credit score takes a ~6 month hit every time they get a hard pull on their credit report.

Although I loved my internship, there wasn’t full-time headcount on the team, which I was ok with because I already had a job lined up. I ended up working at my startup job for a total of 7 days before my CK manager called me up and told me they spun up a rotational program for early career PMs - I jumped at the offer. I started the rotational program, where I worked on three six-month rotations before I got to pick the team I wanted to work on full-time. I ended up working on the Auto loans, Personal loans, and Insurance teams. At the end of my rotations, we went under a hiring freeze, so I was told I’d be staying on the Insurance team full-time when my rotations officially ended. It was a great experience because I got to work on some very interesting products like Karma Drive (a usage-based insurance product), our life insurance marketplace, and I got to play a significant part in integrating our auto insurance marketplace with Progressive and GEICO’s rate APIs, which was harder than you might think because the whole company was going through a total app redesign at the same time. We had to work with a bunch of stakeholders to make sure we were shipping features and ramping our tests at the same time as the rest of the company.

Anyway, towards the end of my time at CK, I was feeling very unfulfilled. I got to work on cool projects, but I didn’t feel in control of my own destiny and honestly I was getting bored. For the first 18 months my learning curve was massive - I was learning a ton and loving every minute of it, but the learning curve definitely plateaued, and I wanted to continue that trajectory. So I started supplementing my time making TikToks and learning more about how I could acquire a business by helping out some people on Twitter.

I was coming up on 2 years full-time and I wanted to start a company, but I didn’t have any ideas that I had a lot of conviction on, so I started looking for new roles. I saw that Jesse Pujji was hiring people at his new venture studio Gateway X, so I jumped on the opportunity to join as Chief of Staff. I took a huge pay cut but I thought if I could work with a guy who’s successfully started and sold a company before and work with a portfolio of businesses, that the exposure to multiple industries and the network I’d create would be helpful in starting a business a year or two down the line. So I packed up my bags and moved from Los Angeles, CA to St. Louis, MO. My last day at Intuit Credit Karma was Oct 9, 2023 and my first day at Gateway X was Oct 10, 2023.

Long story short, although I met some cool people and learned a lot about content creation at a massive scale, I wasn’t really getting what I wanted out of working there, so I left on Feb 10, 2024.

For the first month after I left, I wasn’t sure what to do: buying a small business was on the back of my mind (I was thinking about it during my time at CK too), but I didn’t really know how to raise capital and thought I’d be foregoing long-term growth by starting without banking/consulting experience. Most of the people I saw take this path had an MBA and some kind of banking/consulting experience, so I thought I should consider doing that first. But after talking to a bunch of people, I realized that it was more correlation than causation. People in banking/consulting help buy/sell businesses in their day jobs, so they’re most familiar with how it works. Tech people, not so much. They also tend not to be too interested in running landscaping businesses when they can build AI agents and make #wifibread 🤑. I even reached back out to a VC recruiter I had been talking to before leaving CK about joining one of her portfolio companies as a PM. But after looking at job description after job description I don’t know what else to say other than I wasn’t feeling excited about going back to another job. Maybe it felt like I was giving up on taking my own path, maybe I need life to kick me in the face before getting another job again. Whatever it is, I need to do something on my own before going back to a job.

So I decided I’m really going to do it this time - I’m really going to acquire a business and see where it takes me. I went home to Iowa for a month and listened to hours and hours of podcasts on how to acquire businesses and met some people online who I could raise capital from. I spent way too much time listening to cautionary tales of acquisitions that went wrong and taking notes on how to avoid that outcome. When I realized this could be a viable path, I went on the hunt for a business. I wasn’t sure what industry to focus on, but I looked at anything even remotely interesting to me. After a few weeks, I narrowed in on industries that attract me more than others and recently came across a business that I hope to go under LOI for soon (more on that later). I even moved to San Francisco, CA a couple weeks ago to meet interesting people and increase my surface area of luck.

I’m not sure where I’m headed from here, but I know that I’m still interested in tech and product. After gaining some domain knowledge by acquiring and running a small business, I hope I can translate my experience to building technology and tools for other industries. I want to meet cool people, I want to build cool companies, and I want to have fun doing it. Let’s see what happens - we’re just getting started, baby.