DeAngelo (Lo)

Why don’t you pay your traffic or parking ticket right away?

@MeekMill invest in my tech startup @paywithdriven. We’re like buy now pay later for traffic fines-huge for the bike community and drivers. Real trench baby turned tech nerd. I have $500K left in my round.

ain't shit outside that won't be there later get your shit together first

everything is programming

surround yourself with peers that reflect who you want to become

all a hustler really needs is an opportunity

At Driven we have a culture that fits our moniker and we’re all former athletes. We have our intangible advantages

Excited about this upcoming 2nd quarter. It’s important to go in the half winning.

Just make some money. The end.

Founders need a flexible-delusion mindset.

Venture Capitalist capitalize on ventures. Never forget!

@jayyeh I agree there’s tons of factors. Ultimately if I were to weight the key drivers in venture it would be relationships first then consensus

@drivenpay not that simple. investors invest in founders they trust. sometimes there's a relationship that they trust, sometimes it's experience they trust, sometime's it's a biased feeling they trust. not that simple

if you're pre-launch and struggling to raise right now, it's not just bad luck. The bar shifted. AI tools have made "I can't build without funding" a much harder argument to make. Investors know it. And they're expecting founders to be shipping. the ones getting meetings are not waiting for money to start moving.

just try to make $1 in MRR i promise you, you’ll be ahead of 90% of founders by just achieving that

@DexterTalbert @amarifields_ 🤣🤣 soul crushing truth

@amarifields_ If you want to know the truth I’ll go ahead and save you some time. Get cool with a few white guys who can make warm intros. Naturally SF isn’t going to fund dark skin people without a warm intro. Black founders represent under 1% of VC capitol.

raising a $500k pre seed. we have the team, execution, and deck. but what do you do when investors never even see the materials? can’t even get in the room for them to feel the founder.

@hpierrejacques Florida is crazy with tickets too. That’s why we built Driven: a way for drivers to pay their traffic citations in 4 installments with no interest. We’ve partnered with cities like St Mary’s GA (coastal Georgia) and exapaning throughout Georgia and into other agencies in public.

How can I get a ticket for not wearing a seatbelt but a motorcyclist doesn’t have a seatbelt or helmet 🤷🏽‍♂️

@jjen_abel 1000% and you were spot on with inside baseball analogy. I just landed a work session with a enterprise through iMessage 🤣

in enterprise sales, a deal is truly qualified if you are texting and able to call without calendar event …

there’s so much alpha in just getting shit done. it’s incredible how people miss this one

yes we over-hired during covid because i incorrectly built 2 separate company structures (square & cash app) rather than 1, which we corrected mid 2024. but this misses all the complexity we took on through lending, banking, and BNPL. and that we’re now targeting $2M+ gross profit per person, 4x our pre-covid efficiency, which stayed flat at ~$500k from 2019 until 2024. we have and do run an efficient company... better than most.

@paulg RIP Cookie cutters

For the foreseeable future, everything about starting a startup, both good and bad, will be accentuated. It will be even harder to figure out what to do, but the founders who get it right will be able to create amazing things even faster than they could before.

@pitdesi To your point there’s no one size fits all approach. Imo salary should cover your bills atleast and align with your city’s cost of living. For example, a founder with two kids living in suburban (metro) Detroit MI-$70-80K is cool.

There's no single right founder salary. Our best founders paid themselves very little early on-they stayed lean out of a desire to win (more runway, better talent). But don't underpay yourself! Being stressed about money is a distraction. $50k is probably not enough.