shoutout to the guy at my old coworking space who tripled his team size with one weird trick: hiring a bunch of beautiful, 20-year-old women as unpaid marketing interns.
shoutout to the two other guys who saw these women come in for work, and who immediately posted ads for marketing interns.
shoutout to the guy at my old coworking space who stole my lunch. shoutout to the guy at my old coworking space whose great dietary predilection was in choosing foods that increased his testosterone levels. shoutout to his company, as he was the first person at our coworking space to get on Dragon’s Den.
shoutout to the guy who promised a woman founder from the same coworking space that he’d get her app done, took her money, and then did not ship anything, because he was an incompetent charlatan.
shoutout to the same guy, who still runs a software development agency, but has a beard now.
shoutout to the guy at my old coworking space whose proudest achievement before his seed round was in making a literal copy of Cards Against Humanity.
shoutout to the guy at my old coworking space whose startup was funded entirely by his parents to the tune of a million dollars, or thereabouts. shoutout to that guy for getting his parents to fund a second startup of his after the first went bankrupt.
shoutout to the guy at my old coworking space from the dotcom era, who was extremely bitter about the inevitable tech wealth that continued to avoid him. shoutout to that guy, who channeled his rage into scathing criticism of everyone else’s work.
shoutout to the brothers at my old coworking space whose business nearly failed before they got into an accelerator. shoutout to those brothers, who eventually did run out of money, but not before they could enjoy the social status commensurate with having their company partly owned by investors.
shoutout to the agency that called my old coworking space home, whose logo looked so, so much like an ovum being impregnated by a sperm.
shoutout to the guy at my old coworking space who left, and went to another coworking space, hoping it would be different. and then to another, hoping the same. and then to another city, though his hopes were fading and his startup had already failed by then.
shoutout to that guy, who now hopes for different, nicer things.
shoutout to the one guy at my coworking space who slowly, painstakingly built a novel business and kept evolving it as it grew, who also took the time to build an engaging life, and find a loving partner. shoutout to that guy, who shows every indication, from the outside, that he has built something meaningful and worthwhile.
shoutout to the four university students at my old coworking space who worked for a summer on an app, which didn’t work out, and who left at the end of it. shoutout to those guys, who left a nice goodbye message on the chalkboard walls.
shoutout to the three or four nice, smart, well-intentioned people who probably would’ve done okay if they’d had a little more luck.
shoutout to the guy at my old coworking space with a remote job, who asked Starbucks baristas to write Mortal Kombat character names on his cups so that he could win a challenge.