Hi everyone,

Welcome back to the bi-weekly GENESIS newsletter👋

If you’re new around here, this is where we share some stories, advice, and resources for GenZ entrepreneurs in the GENESIS community - and plug our events too :)

In today’s edition…

• ✨ Launching our members Slack!

• 💬 An astronaut billionaire’s advice to young founders

• ⏪ Recap

• 📅 Upcoming Events

✨ Launching our members Slack!

While we love our intimate GenZ founders Whatsapp group, the GENESIS team decided it was time to say farewell and move on to greater heights…

So we launched a Slack channel.

If you’re a young entrepreneur, investor, builder, or hustler, please join by clicking this beautiful blue text.

The Slack is new and we’re still figuring things out. But here’s our goal for what to expect from it:

• stay up to date on events, including exclusive & intimate events ONLY PROMOTED ON OUR SLACK. This includes our private dinners & founder brunches in SF/NYC/Chicago/etc as well as informal events our members throw.

• access to our partner marketplace

• ~banter~

• opportunity to connect 1:1 with other young hustlers in your industry

• one-stop-shop to connect with other attendees of our events

• more to come…

💬 So I spoke with Jared Isaacman…

Last week I had the pleasure of speaking with Jared Isaacman - founder/CEO of Shift4 Payments and commercial astronaut with SpaceX who will soon command the Polaris Dawn mission.

Here's his advice to young entrepreneurs.

👉 cash is important, but not the most important. Too many early founders care only about raising.

“you can create some pretty extraordinary things if you identify the right problem and you have the right plan to solve it and the right talent who are motivated”

He started Shift4 two and half decades ago and they navigated every peak and valley of capital availability.

One thing I noticed is many young founders — especially in SF — only care about capital raised. Funding is important, but so is building a sustainable business.

👉 look to yourself as a leader.

“A lot of entrepreneurs look to the people around them, their board, their investors, their customers, their product - when probably the first stop [to solving the source of problems] really needs to be themselves”

Always be upgrading yourself. It's part of the job.

👉 Jared saves old emails to revisit his thinking. As your experience accumulates, most decisions resemble ones you made in the past!

This is his way of tracking his growth and improving his decision making.

👉 entrepreneurs are like gamblers.

He brings up his friend Elon who continuously gambles his entire company for a 10x potential return, and succeeds.

There are lots of off ramps for entrepreneurs. Settle for a job. Settle for a quiet bankruptcy. Settle for a $10M acquisition. But the most successful entrepreneurs don’t settle, they keep betting.

This can lead to high heights but also fiery explosions. Sometimes literally.

There are lots of inflection points in the career of an entrepreneur and what choice you make is up to you.

(side note: definitely check out Jared’s story if you have time. He dropped out of high school at 16 to start his company, start flying in his 20s, and is definitely still kicking a**)

⏪ Recap

We had a great outing to SF this past week, visiting TechCrunch Disrupt and hosting our own mixer:

Thanks to everyone who came - we had hundreds of founders, media reps, investors, and operators slide through. Truly blessed🙏

📅 Upcoming Events

➡️ GENESIS @ the Forbes 30u30 Summit in Cleveland, October 8-11

If you’re coming to the Summit, reply to this email. We’ll be hosting some private events throughout the week and want to invite you.

➡️ @ NYC Tech Week, October 16-22

Same deal. We’ll be cohosting some intimate events - including a GenZ founders brunch - with some others in NYC. If you want to get in the loop on those events just drop your info here.

If you want to partner with us on an event, drop a reply to this email :)

➡️ GENESIS Private Dinner for Chicago changemakers, October 26th

Join us!

➡️ Hauntrepreneurs Halloween party by GENESIS, October 28th

This one’s in Chicago. Would love to have you. Sign up here.

Thank you for reading this week’s edition of the GENESIS newsletter! See you next soon🙏

~ Toni Witt, co-founder/CEO of Sweet & co-founder of GENESIS