Allow Me to Introduce Myself

I’m glad and grateful you’re here. You can decide whether to run far away sooner rather than later. My blog exists to provide no-BS, and pragmatic educational resources to help you have a shot at achieving your dreams. It’s my goal that these learnings will help you flark-up less and succeed more. It’s hilarious, but I’ve helped millions of founders understand something they used to be super stressed about. Whether you are an aspiring entrepreneur or an accomplished one, it would be epic to help you too.

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Who is Alexander Jarvis?

Hey you! Happy chappy here. Let’s deal with my name first.

My grandmother insisted on Alexander. AlexJarvis.com wasn’t available. You can call me Alex if you want.

So now that is out of the way, let me tell you a bit about me.

1

Getting About

I grew up in Indonesia in the 1980s.

I went to boarding school when I was 10 years old.

To date, I have lived in 14 countries (if the definition includes working like a dog).

2

My Challenges...

I was that kid who was in ‘special classes’ so I have learning issues. I have dyslexia and ADHD.

The past is something that I have learned to deal with, the latter I think just qualifies me to be an investor.

I’ve gotten over any setback by just working harder than everyone else.

3

I've Always Hustled Hard

I’ve hustled my whole life as an entrepreneur, but I’m definitely weird as I wanted to be a banker when I was 10.

I worked in M&A and still wonder why I wanted that trauma!?

4

My Love for Startups

Startup is my spirit animal. It’s all I talk about. Which means I don’t get many dates.

There is so much I don’t understand, so I keep studying and I share what I learn on this blog so others can save time.

5

Done a Lot

I’ve built a lot of startups, the VC thing, venture built, if you can name it, I’ve at least tried to do it.

6

Why I Started My Blog

When I quit banking to start a company, I was totally clueless.

I was so naïve it’s not funny! I don’t want that for you.

Learning from your mistakes is okay, but learning from others’ mistakes, in this case mine, is even better.

Seriously. Another blog?

What You Will Find On this Site

1

Real Content

There is so much content these days.

The issue is that there is a lot of crappy SEO content too, or people who want to look cool by writing and saying nonsense.

The volume of recycled ‘wisdom’ is nauseating, and a lot of it is just bad advice.

2

We Go Deep

I like to think you will find something different here.

I pick topics I don’t understand and really try and dig into them in excruciating detail so you’ll learn everything on that topic in one blog.

To ensure this, I actually read everyone’s content and make sure I don’t miss any great thoughts, as well as provide you with new thoughts.

3

I Try to Make Learning Fun

I’m weird, so there’s that. I cover nerdy topics that you, unfortunately, need to know if you want to VC $.

I crack terrible jokes to keep you entertained along the way.

I write stream of consciousness so you’ll get dark insights into my twisted mind and sense of humor.

If you think you got to know me after reading, that’s awesome! I’ve always wanted someone to step up and be a stalker.

4

Focus on Fundraising

The vast majority of my content is related to fundraising. From how to run a process, to convertible notes, ESOP, cap tables, how dilution works, financial models etc.

I do write about a host of other topics such as culture, managing staff, scaling, doing board meetings, and whatever I feel like.

My view is, that if I think it’s worth writing about, it will benefit you in some pragmatic way.

5

I Sell Stuff

I focus on making the best in the world on things no one else is capable or willing to make.

Hiring smart people to help me ship updates is really expensive.

6

I Do Consulting

I’m an intellectual hooker, so if you want to ask me more than a question, you pay.

I mainly teach startups and investors to fix their business model, how to raise money, and basically anything really complicated that you can’t Google and ChatGPT has no answers for.

7

Zero BS Help

You come to me because I’m the one person who will not lie to you, and there are zero consequences in telling me all your allegedly shady things you got up to.

With ADHD, I get to the point. If you want to message me a question- get to the point too!

I have no filter, so enjoy the truth.

 

Is it for you?

Who is this Blog For?

Over the years, millions of people have had the misfortune of finding my site and learning something or leaving in disgust. Possibly. It’s fun to be a bit dramatic.

It’s pretty funny to learn who actually reads my content. It’s hilarious to post something from someone famous and for them to reach out and say thanks for sharing that!

But look, this is a teaching site, so 6 types of people get value from my blog, and they email me to say they did so. If you’re wondering why you should hang out at my super awesome clubhouse, I’ll tell you why.

Students

This is you: Full of energy and dying to learn the ‘good stuff’ you don’t learn in school. You’re smart but need to learn. You might have some ideas to make 5 figures now, but the plan is to do big-boy stuff

Ok, there are two types of students:

University

You’re in uni and thinking about starting a company. You have classes but they don’t teach you the real deal. On my site, you’ll learn stuff you probably won’t understand immediately but it will get you thinking about what matters when you need it.

I’ve some content on why ideas don’t work and how to find ideas that might. If you’re in uni, my advice is to build something simple that makes passive income. It will prepare you to get into the big leagues later. Get your degree.

Blogs to read now to kick start:

 

MBA

If you’re a grown-ass adult doing an MBA etc, then lecturers are more pragmatic, but you’ll actually learn what matters here as all the academic shite is stripped out. I know a number of profs at unis teach some of my stuff, but put in some time here. I recommend getting one of my financial models. You need to learn Excel and you’ll learn so much going through how I think about structuring a business in Excel. You have the time, so you’ll benefit a lot from reading broadly.

Blogs to read now to kick start:

 

One on one help with me now

I know you’re broke. I have live chat. If you send me a specific message I will respond to you and give you advice. I’m not going to tell you to quit uni and I might sound patronizing, but I will give you life advice on how to get to where you want to be in 10 years.

Contact Me

Executives who want to break free

You’re probably making the big money but I know you hate your job. It’s important to internalise that startup is very different. Before you quit your job, it’s worthwhile reading up to start acclimatising yourself to what your world will be like without air conditioning (office climate joke?).

My advice is to open up ten random blogs, flick through them and see if something engages you. Something will. Your goal is to start ‘getting it’ – that startup is different.

Blogs to read now to kick start:

 

One on one help with me now

Book a consulting call now even if you aren’t sure what your goal is. I will ask you questions and figure out the question you actually wanted to ask. I do calls on nebulous topics such as “should I quit?” and ‘what do you think of this idea I have been noodling’.
Book a Call

Startup founders

You’re probably making the big money but I know you hate your job. It’s important to internalise that startup is very different. Before you quit your job, it’s worthwhile reading up to start acclimatising yourself to what your world will be like without air conditioning (office climate joke?).

My advice is to open up ten random blogs flick through them and see if something engages you. Something will. Your goal is to start ‘getting it’ – that startup is different.

Blogs to read now to kick start:

 

One on one help with me now

Book a consulting call now even if you aren’t sure what your goal is. I will ask you questions and figure out the question you actually wanted to ask. I do calls on nebulous topics such as “should I quit?” and ‘what do you think of this idea I have been noodling’.
Book a Call

Emerging manager VCs

Between you and me, I know you don’t know as much as you need to pretend you do. Don’t worry, I won’t tell anyone. So most of the content I wrote for founders will be of use to you.

I have lots of technical content on cap tables, convertibles etc, for you to bone up on skills. If you are an aspiring investor, everything will help you to build the knowledge to be an investor.

If you are an experienced investor, I don’t have a ton for you. I’ve started making content around things like investment thesis’ and examples of pitch decks. It’s hard to write for you as other VCs don’t really want to share stuff publicly. I do however have ‘fun to read’ stuff, like collections of historic memos.

Blogs to read now to kick start:

 

One-on-one help with me now

I think about niche VC stuff such as investment thesis’, how to build deal flow, what value add makes sense to offer, and yes, I know your deck sucks. Come to me when you need someone to challenge you and will be confidential about it.

Book a Call

Lawyers

Loads of VC lawyers read my site. That cracks me up. You want to mainline onto my work on cap tables and convertible notes. I have a super advanced cap table to buy and mainly lawyers buy it to be honest.

Blogs to read now to kick start

 

One-on-one help with me now

I don’t talk to you guys much, but I do a bit. I can teach you some technical things, but normally calls with lawyers are about soft things, like how you can better build a content marketing strategy. I’ve had some bizarre topics to consult on.

Book a Call

Financial advisors

Since I teach stuff you charge to teach startups, I know you are lurking in Club Alex!

I recommend heading over to my financial models and buying maybe the SaaS and e-commerce model, not because I want money from you (which I do) but because you will learn a ton. It will be totally boring to dig in and learn, but it will be worth it.

If you want to keep up the geeking then cap tables, conv notes, etc are dull but useful things to know. But generally, all my blogs will teach you something useful you can learn to then go off and charge your clients.

I know this for a fact because you tell me you do on calls with me and you get help to solve your client’s problems and pretend the ideas were yours!

Hey, I don’t hate the player.  I’m delighted to teach you too.

Blogs to read now to kick start:

 

One-on-one help with me now

You have clients and I know stuff you don’t know. I frequently do consulting calls with consultants and solve your client’s problems which you then relay and pretend they are your thoughts. I don’t care as you’re my client. You pay me and what you do is your business. I’ve done this many times.
Book a Call

How do I know stuff?

I’ve Worked a Lot on a Lot

I’m always doing something related to startups even when I’m on a holiday. If I go to Italy, I will visit accelerators and meet new founders. Sad, I know, but it’s what I love.

  • I worked 100-hour weeks for around 12 years, so I try to chill on those hours if I can.
  • When I get into something, I’m a machine. I can afford to chill now but I still put in around 70 hours a week, though it’s mainly learning. I smash 3 books a week.
  • I’ve worked in M&A, built startups, VC, and venture-built startups, mentored all manners of folks, and continually do advisory on things like fundraising.

I know an insane amount now, but that’s the funny thing. The more you know the more you realise how little you really know and how humble you should be.

1

Venture Capital

  • I worked as a VC investing in South East Asia and India as a Junior Partner (Fund size is now $1b)
  • I’ve been a board member and advisor to a few VC funds in USA and Germany (Recognised with BaFIN)
  • I’ve advised a number of GPs on fundraising, investment thesis’, building an active platform, and other fun topics
2

Startup

  • I’ve built a load of failed startups over many years
  • I’ve built unicorns, including Delivery Hero, Groupon, and Lazada
  • I’ve almost set up a lot of companies too
3

Accelerators

  • Ran a venture builder for a number of years, and it’s hard work!
  • I’ve mentored a ton of accelerators. Something like 8.
4

M&A

  • I worked in FIG M&A at Lazard selling financial companies (Asset management and life insurance mainly)
  • Completed $12 Billion of transactions
5

Advisory

  • I’ve been an advisor to startups and investors for over a decade
  • Kinda lost track by now, but I must have given free advice to well over 2 thousand founders by now

How the blog got going

Why I Started This Site

The Early Years

I’ve always been an entrepreneur.  Not always good at it, but the desire’s always been there.

That started when I made a stall to sell my toys. I was 7. My Mother said, “Alexander what are you doing? Why are you selling your toys?”. I told her I want to make money. I’m sure I didn’t know what the money was for, it just seemed like something I should do.

The best business deal I will ever make was when I was 8. I sold a packet of Maltesers I got in Singapore to the son of the head of Mars Asia.

I got 20 Mars bars and 20 Sneakers. Supply and demand. Jakarta was ghetto in the 80s so you could only get cool stuff on trips to Singapore. My friends knew I kept them in my freezer and would sneak into my house and rob me regularly.

Through high school and university, I always had a hustle. From bootlegging CDs to running parties (great way to be the centre of attention and make solid cash!). Despite all this, from the age of 10, I decided I wanted to be an investment banker like my uncle.

The Hard Years

Fast forward a decade or so and I quit M&A during the financial crisis to ‘do startup’. There was a slight problem though- I had no idea what I was doing.

In the mid-2000s, there was not nearly the same amount of information on doing startups as there is today.

I knew how to sell billion-dollar insurance companies, what did I know about online marketing? I was so naïve I thought it was something that just happened. I jest not.

I found this site called 500Hats run by this guy called Dave. He swore as much as I did and was a bit bonkers. I loved his site, but there was still so much I didn’t know that I didn’t know.

In 2007, I bought a site called OpenSourceStartup.com. I figured out that 70% of startups had to be largely the same.

Understanding that so many startups failed, I couldn’t understand why there wasn’t a site where failed startups would upload all their docs, processes etc so that other founders could reuse their work.

Why make HR docs if someone has them already? Great idea, but I was the blind leading the blind and had zero network at all. I was not the right person to make this a reality.

I went back to hustling to fund myself. I taught myself to day trade and did pretty well. I almost sold a $200m building. I sold prom dresses (and my partner screwed me over). I got into HIV testing in India, a property marketplace, a research online buy offline platform, etc.

The key issue was I just was not learning fast enough. It was only when I joined a VC-backed startup that I started learning rapidly.

My difficulties of wanting to learn, but not being able to get the information I wanted never sat well with me. It left a bad taste in my mouth with a desire to revisit “OpenSourceStartup” again when I was in a position to help others.

The Year I Started Blogging

Let’s skip a few unicorn startups and get to when I started to work in VC in Asia.

It’s also worth knowing that there are a lot of people blogging now, so there is a ton of information available.

There’s no course to be a VC. You learn by doing. And if VCs are pretending like they know it all, I assure you that they do not!

I always planned on being a VC but only when I’d turn 50, and it would be what I did till they wouldn’t let me come to the office anymore.

I knew that I’d need to know a lot to be any good so I started reading every single day, so that in 20-something years I’d be in a great place.

I knew what people said they didn’t like about VCs and I didn’t want to ‘be that dude’.

I love talking to founders so it was easy for me to start getting my own deal flow immediately. But haha! It doesn’t take long to understand why some VCs are the way that they are with how they respond to founders!

Your job as a VC is to say no. I learned that quickly, but how you say no matters. I would respond to emails with helpful advice, but helping founders over email is like feeding a stray dog.

You feed it once, and it keeps coming back! I really rapidly learned I couldn’t scale giving a lot of feedback to every single founder who reached out to me. I hate emails so I had to figure out how to be the person I wanted to be and ‘not that dude’.

The question was how.

I figured out every founder’s pitch deck had the same sort of issues. So I wrote two Word docs and I would attach them to my rejections and say “Here’s some advice“, and founders liked I tried to help.

Just finding the stupid attachments became annoying. What else could I do to be even faster to keep up with all these fricking emails and still not go Sith lord and ‘be that dude’.

So there is this thing called the Internet! Why not put those two blogs on a WordPress site, and then I just need to give the founders a link? Even faster! Founders didn’t complain so Kool and the Gang.

Getting to Today

As a founder, you need to be a bit naïve. I got the idea in my head that I could easily raise my own big ass fund and innovate in how VC is done.

Nope. I quickly realised I again didn’t know what I did not know.

But I knew a lot more so this time I was able to figure these things out myself.

Trust me, there is a reason the big US funds do things the way that they do. Also, haha, raising funds is way harder than raising for a startup!

Through the process of learning what I didn’t know about VC and then how startups fundraise and scale, I said why don’t I just write everything I am learning? So, I started blogging a lot more.

Pretty much every blog on my site is a fraud. I had absolutely zero clue what I was talking about when I wrote them (is it that obvious!?).

I would pick something I didn’t really understand, research then build on first principles. SAFE notes? Yeah, I just read the docs and built the free calculator. Same for convertible notes, viral modelling, cap tables and the list goes on to everything else you read.

So, if you read something and call BS on me, do it, you’re right! I had no idea when I wrote them.

But here’s the thing. If I don’t understand something in detail, there’s going to be at least one other person that doesn’t either. So, most of my blogs go into a lot of detail because I was teaching myself something and just sharing what I had figured out.

Now my site tools sell well. And it came because of one reason. I couldn’t find something so I made it.

Financial models, yeah, there were no detailed ones and now there are. When I was in Bali I had an idea, if I made something cool, would someone buy it? So I made the ecommerce model, and someone bought it. LOL. Free money.

Everything I do now comes because the founders ask for it. I only do consulting because someone said “Could I pay you to have more access to you?” So I said yup.

Going Forward

I’m at around 1,500 blogs now. Holy crap, I have no idea how I even got here.

My plan is to keep putting out content to cover everything fundraising-related and a few other important to founders of startups. I also plan to do more for emerging VCs.

I have a number of courses to create as well as a lot of other great resources. I am also going to write a few books.

I would love to get you to start helping me create high-quality content too, so we can cover all the bases founders need more comprehensively.

I just don’t scale like I would like to.

I’m itching to do investing again and be hands-on with startups, and I have a few SaaS startups I want to build (one is in relationship building). But for now, making this content is a full-time job.

I appreciate your support in the meantime.

Personal time

Random Things About Me

I’ve no filter and honestly, people end up spending a lot of time reading my blog, so why not overshare with you? I’m a real person after all. So here are a lot of facts and possible lies in case of deniability.

1
Spent 4 Years Nomadic

"Pre-COVID, I lived out of two bags and a backpack for years. Totally nomadic. I lived in Airbnb for around 4 years.

2
Expats Get One Another

My most hated question is “where are you from”, this one still confuses me.

3
F*** Limits

I spent a year learning to wiggle my ears as I read it was a hereditary trait. If I could give two fingers to genetics, then there would be nothing I could not accomplish through hard work.

4
I'm Grateful to Live

I was born with an umbilical cord around my neck and almost died at birth. I was in intensive care for 2 weeks. Probably explains some things.

5
I Like Learning

I ‘used’ to prefer to make complex Excel formulas than partying on a Saturday night. I still do (sort of). Who am I kidding, I’m always studying to learn more. The more I learn the more I am freaked out by what I have to learn next. Cough, blogging.

6
Get Over the Hand You're Dealt

I have dyslexia and ADHD. Yes, I was in ‘special classes’. I deal with it by always working harder than everyone else.

7
I Love Music

I was in a band (briefly) when I was a teenager. Ok, it was a 'boy band' (I once was allegedly good-looking enough for a gay talent manager to spot me on the street...).
I went through this national talent competition and had to sing Boyz II Men.

Love it all?

How Can You Engage With Me or Help Out?

Want to Help Out?

Everything on the site was made by me. There is no team. I would love to have more pragmatic no BS resources to help founders. If you're an expert on something and want to contribute free resources, please reach out to me.

Message me

Have a Quick Question?

I have live chat on my site. It feels right to make myself available just in case you're stressed, and I can help you. Just be respectful and ask a specific question. I'll give you a specific answer if I am awake and available.

Message me

Need Real Help Now?

The blog is to help lots of people. If you want one on one time then I charge because I can play tennis instead. I cover anything complex where there are no clear answers, and it's high level. I don't teach Facebook ads.

Book a call
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Socials

Be Social With Me

If you want to ‘follow’ me, have another platform to discuss, or just make me feel more popular than I am, then add me.

You can always defend me when I inevitably get cancelled for being honest, lol.

 

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