For years, I've been connecting with interesting people and documenting insights that might help my clients and myself. What was once private is now (mostly) public.

People often ask: "How do you know all these people?" and "How do you connect these (re: random) ideas?" The answer is simple: consistent relationship cultivation and thoughtful note taking. My north star is trusting my instincts, my maps are the constellations in these reflections.

This approach to multidisciplinary networking has helped dozens of clients, colleagues, and friends strengthen their networks and unlock new opportunities. Feel free to steal these ideas directly - that's what they're for! I can't promise you'll learn FROM me, but I guarantee you can learn something WITH me. Let's go. Count it off: 1-2-3-4!

Introducing... Danielle Strachman!

Do you know Danielle Strachman? She's the co-founder and General Partner of 1517 Fund, the person who helped build the Thiel Fellowship (which backed Vitalik Buterin, Dylan Field, and Laura Deming before anybody knew who they were), started a charter school with 450 students in San Diego, and now runs a venture fund that literally backs “dropouts working on hard problems & sci-fi scientists at the earliest stages of their companies,” aka irrationally passionate young people who want to test their intuition.

If not, allow me to introduce you. Danielle has spent two decades quietly rebuilding how we think about talent, education, and opportunity. She moves through the world asking one question: "What if we just gave resources to the people with the strongest conviction?"

I wanted to connect with her because she embodies something I value deeply: the belief that ROI isn't always visible, relationships matter more than credentials, and community building is the highest-leverage business model that nobody talks about.

Our conversation is LIVE now on the Just Press Record YouTube channel. Listen and you'll hear her story arc from Craigslist tutor to school founder to venture capitalist, her philosophy on hiring and education (spoiler: college isn't the only finish line), and why a foosball table at your office might generate more returns than your entire marketing budget.

THREE: That's The Magic Number of Lessons

In the meantime, I wanted to pull THREE KEY LESSONS from my time with Danielle to share with you (and drop into my Personal Archive).

Read on and you'll find a quote with a lesson and a reflection you can Take to work with you, Bring home with you, and Leave behind with your legacy.

WORK: Show Me What You've Finished, Not Where You Went to School

Key Concept: Danielle is articulating the seismic shift happening in how we evaluate talent. For decades, hiring has been proxy-based: college degree = ability to finish things. But that's a remarkably crude measuring stick. What if instead you looked at what someone actually completed? A finished novel. A shipped product. A community built. A business run. The legal system's historical fear of discrimination actually drove organizations toward this credential-proxy model, but now, with skills-based hiring gaining momentum in Fortune 100 companies, we're free to ask the real question: What have you made? What have you shipped? What did you see through? That's the portfolio approach. It's more work to evaluate, but it's infinitely more accurate.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: I’m a big fan of people who see the value in doing a lot of things well. Note, “well” is the operative word here. You can do a lot of things poorly, or too many things not good enough, but if you can do more than one thing at a high level, you are onto something. If nothing else, because what that combinatorial power communicates to the world.

There’s a number of names for this now. I’m long a fan of Marci Alboher’s “slash career” idea, as well as the transformative power of how Herminia Ibarra defines our working identity (and how it can evolve over time). Whether you’re a lawyer trying to become an artist, or a comic book nerd running marketing and comms for a finance company while you blog about music in your spare time - this is the work that explains how you work internally.

The common denominator here is they all think in portfolio terms. You have aspects of your personality that represent various attitudes towards risk. It sounds obvious - but when you’re trying to understand talent, you can’t just judge it on one factor. You also can’t be fooled by well-roundedness, as tempting as that might be in the modern corporate setting (yeah, people can do many boring things at a boring level, and boring + lame never equals cool!).

The compounding success of Danielle’s ventures over the past 15+ years is further proof. What puts Danielle in a league of her own isn't just noticing this - it's actually building the infrastructure where slightly weird people with niche ideas can thrive, while schools, jobs, and pretty much everything else still hasn't figured it out.

Work question for you: If you evaluated yourself (or your team) based purely on what you've finished rather than where you've been, what changes?

LIFE: The ROI Is In The Foosball Table, Not The Spreadsheet

Key Concept: Danielle just described the most important business model nobody measures. When she hosts an event - whether it's an ice cream social, a camp, or a summit - investors ask her the predictable question: "What's the ROI?" But the ROI isn't visible on day one. It's not in attendance numbers. It's in the unexpected co-founder meeting that happens three years later when someone says, "I met this person at your thing and we started a company." It's in the mentor who met a young founder at a foosball table and bought their product. It's in the girlfriends who met at her gathering and changed each other's lives. These stories don't fit spreadsheets. So she makes a choice: she stops trying to measure them. Instead, she operates on faith - not blind faith, but evidence-based faith. She's seen enough ripples that she knows the system works, even when the individual connections remain invisible. This is the operating system of someone who's genuinely building legacy instead of just metrics. She can't prove the ROI in real-time, so she simply chooses to trust it. And paradoxically, that trust is exactly why the Teal Fellowship has outsize returns by every VC metric that does get measured.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: As of the time of this writing, the Cultish Creative YouTube channel has a staggeringly successful 453 subscribers. While that’s way more people than you can crowd around a foosball table, it’s a teardrop in a bucket compared to the 55k subscribers we’re up to on Excess Returns. Part of me thinks I should care. But then I look at the conversations (and emails, and behind the scenes intros) I get to have for Just Press Record and…

So, I am happy I do both of these shows (and The Intentional Investor on Epsilon Theory too). But it’s all because I don’t need the subscriber metric to be the most critical to quantify detail. When Danielle talks about resisting measuring ROI in areas where she knew metrics would have killed the initial decisions, it's a detail you can't overlook - especially if you have consultants or advisors involved pushing for justification.

Just Press Record has a tiny chance of being the most successful thing I do over time, but like Danielle, I’ll never bank on that. I already know it’s the most personally fulfilling thing I’m doing, and the random magic of pulling strangers from my disparate spheres of interest and influence to meet each other, has produced some crazy encounters, as well as started some new stories.

When you pull spreadsheets into your decisions, you raise the bar on what you’ll say yes to. The more conservative the risk attitude is in that portfolio life we were talking about above, the more important it is to do a proper analysis before you take silly risks. Once you know where you must have strict metrics, that's when it's time to mess around and find out in everything else - without the math making you sweat.

Life Question For You: What relationships or communities are you building that you can't justify to a spreadsheet - and what would change if you simply decided to trust them anyway?

LEGACY: Trust Your Instinct, Give People the Leash, and Watch What Happens

Key Concept: Danielle's entire investment thesis is visible in this one insight: don't back business plans, back hunger. Don't fund ideas, fund the person with the unshakeable conviction who just needs resources to move. She calls it "dog on a leash energy" - you can see it immediately. The person doesn't need motivation, doesn't need validation, doesn't need obedience school. What they need is the leash cut. A small grant. An investment check. Permission. Once you give resources to someone operating in that mode, everything changes. This is how the Teal Fellowship backed teenagers who became billion-dollar founders. This is why her team constantly debates whether naivety or knowledge matters more (conclusion: both matter at different times, but hunger matters most). Her business cards literally say "Professional Fairy Godmother" and that's not irony - it's the whole strategy.

Personal Archive Note-To-Self: There is no good business reason for me to publish a daily note on the internet for almost 8 years straight. At one point it was a cry for help, as if somebody would read it and say, “Matt, just do it THIS way.” But, candidly, when you’re writing anonymously for a long time nobody knows your name, and - with very few people finding me for a long time, I had to figure it out myself.

If you want to figure something out yourself, it helps if you’re hungry. It helps if you can find something you need to do, even when you tell people and their reaction is, “Ok, but why?”

What’s happening in that moment is your internal risk assessment (yes, I’m taking it back to the portfolio idea one more time) is being challenged by the outside world’s risk assessment of your activity. This is where you have to A. remember that risk can also be defined in terms of variance, i.e. opportunity to the upside and risk to the downside, equally, and B. your hunger to do something and either prove others wrong or be proven wrong will determine how long you can stay that course.

Your ideas need hunger first. Then community - at least one other person to push back, build with, think alongside. It can be a fan or a collaborator, but you need to know somebody else cares, and that communal detail is so critical. Then comes the action and iteration that proves it's real. Only then do resources matter. They're never the spark - they're the fuel that takes a spinning creator’s flywheel and makes it spin faster.

That's where people like Danielle excel - recognizing which flywheels are already moving and giving them what they need to accelerate.

If you can’t see that whole portfolio process and how it moves over time, you’ll be mystified by how other people do it. If you look really close though, you’ll realize you can do magic too.

Legacy question for you: Who in your life has "dog on a leash energy" that you could cut loose by giving them resources, belief, or permission?

BEFORE YOU GO: Be sure to…

• Connect with Danielle on Twitter or LinkedIn or reach out to her directly at [email protected] (she answers)

• Check out 1517 Fund and their work backing (pre-college!) founders

• Read about Innovations Academy in San Diego - the charter school she co-founded that's still going strong

• Check out my long form interview with just Danielle on The Intentional Investor (we get way into her backstory, which makes all this make even more sense)

• Take a moment to think about the people you know who need the leash cut

You have a Personal Network and a Personal Archive just waiting for you to build them up stronger. Look at your work, look at your life, and look at your legacy - and then, start small in each category. Today it's one person and one reflection. Tomorrow? Who knows what connections you'll create.

Don't forget to click reply/click here and tell me who you're adding to your network and why! Plus, if you already have your own Personal Archive too, let me know, I'm creating a database.

Want more? Find my Personal Archive on CultishCreative.com, watch me build a better Personal Network on the Cultish Creative YouTube channel, and listen to Just Press Record on Spotify or Apple Podcasts, and follow me on social media (LinkedIn and X) - now distributed by Epsilon Theory.

You can also check out my work as Managing Director at Sunpointe, as a host on top investment YouTube channel Excess Returns, and as Senior Editor at Perscient.