#312 Mark Twain

**David Senra** (0:00)
So I have three things that I want to talk to you about real quick. Number one, I've made something that is exclusively for enthusiasts of Founders Podcasts, for people that completely understand the benefit of this intense studying of great people that you and I are doing. It is for people that want to go deeper and continue to apply all the lessons from the podcast to whatever it is that you're working on. If that is you, I highly recommend that you sign up for the Private Founders AMA feed. I have been making these short episodes every week based on questions that I get from other members. So if you become a member, you'll be able to ask me questions directly. There's actually a private email address that you get access to in the welcome email. And I read every single one of these emails myself. I do not have an assistant. No one else looks over them. I read every single one myself. The questions that I get from these emails, I then turn into these short AMA episodes. So that allows members to learn from questions of other members.
And you can also add your name and a link to the website, to your website, with your question, so that other members can check out what you're working on. And that feature alone is worth the investment. I've done 29 of these episodes so far. I'm recording another one tomorrow. And I plan on making several episodes every week. If you consider yourself an enthusiast of Founders Podcast, I highly recommend that you become a member and you can join by using the link that's in the show notes on your podcast player, or you can go to founderspodcast.com. Second thing, I was chatting with Andrew Wilkinson, who is the founder of Tiny. Tiny buys businesses. They have lots of money to spend right now. And Andrew said that he's putting every dollar he has into doing more deals. And he wants you to know that he is specifically looking to partner with companies that have raised venture capital. Typically, there's been two outcomes for these kind of businesses. You can either sell, you can IPO, or you can shut down, fail, or whatever the case is. There's a third door. You can pivot to profitably partnering with Tiny. Many of the businesses in the Tiny portfolio were formerly hyper growth VC backed companies. In every case, Andrew and his team have been able to pivot them from cash burning machines to money making machines. The startups they've helped pivot now make millions of dollars. And so Andrew and his partners at Tiny, they want to buy out your investors, restructure your cap table, and pivot you to profitability. Tiny will make sure that every party in the transaction is happy. You and your co-founders, your staff, your investors, and then you can either stay and keep running the business or you can sail off into the sunset. It is totally your call. If that sounds like something you're interested in, make sure you get in touch with them. You can email them at high at tiny.com. And the third and final thing before we get into Mark Twain, I told you about this episode last week. If you haven't listened to it, make sure you listen to it now. It's one of the best podcast episodes I've heard all year. It's my friend Jeremy. He went on Invest Like the Best. It is episode 336 It's called Special Situations in Private Markets. I'm telling you, just you have to take my word for it. Press play. It is going to be 90 straight minutes of insight, unique insight after unique insight. I'll leave a link to the episode down below, but it's probably just easier for whatever you're listening to this on. Just search for Invest Like the Best. Look for episode 336 and make sure you listen to it.
In the very last paragraph of Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckaberry Finn, Huck reckons that it's time to light out for the territory ahead of the rest. It's a decision Huck's creator already had made a quarter of a century earlier. He wasn't even Mark Twain then. But as Huck might have said, that ain't no matter.
With the Civil War spreading across his native Missouri, 25 year old Samuel Clemens suddenly out of work as a Mississippi riverboat pilot, gladly accepted his brother's offer to join him in the Nevada Territory, far from the battlefields of the war.
A stagecoach journey across the Great Plains and over the Rocky Mountains was just the beginning of a nearly six year long odyssey that took Samuel Clemens from Missouri to Hawaii with stopovers in Virginia City, Nevada and San Francisco. By the time it was over, he would find himself reborn as Mark Twain, America's best loved and most influential writer.