Dan Hightower
@DanHightowerJr
Building Roll Up Vehicles (RUVs) and equity management for companies @AngelList | prev: founder (http://compscience.com), army special forces
Great to see! I was inspired to do this by having to early exercise my options when I left Airbnb (which was an unexpected outlay of cash). And from conversations with Pinterest and Sam Altman around that time. Glad we did it, and we should have made it 10 years.
I'm grateful Coinbase gave employees a 7 year window to exercise stock options after leaving. When I left I didn't have the capital to exercise (all of it went to starting my business). I would've had to take a loan out so this derisked a lot for me. More companies should do this
Everyone needs sleep. Before a 5 day patrol in Army, this big guy was bragging ab how he "he doesn't need much sleep". Bad ass, bro. We'll see. A few nights later, I heard someone talking at normal voice volume. A big no no while on patrol 🤫. Sounded like someone arguing?!…
our founding engineer is on her 3rd all nighter @humanbehaviorai never stops shipping ...
Feeling cute, might vibe code a blog CMS + Mintlify for myself this weekend. $150/mo feels like a lot.
1-click migrations from one b2b SaaS to an alternative will be a thing AI agents can do within a year or two for even the meatiest b2b apps. A terrifying concept for SaaS businesses and their investors.
"Roll Up Vehicles are on the same level as SAFEs now." - Partner at Gunderson
“Oh, you used Stripe Atlas...? Yea no, we had our counsel tailor our incorporation docs. It was a pretty penny, but you can't really put a price on maintaining control, you know? Bespoke classes, founder preferred, ironclad control provisions. The basics.” — Hotshot founder, 5…
I had just sold my startup. Burnt out from years of company building and months of M&A. Looking for a new direction. We had built software for hospitals—and that left me interested in treating patients myself. Medical school wasn’t realistic. Too long. So I looked for a faster…
Share a piece of lore about yourself
Telling a founder to find work/life balance is like telling someone going out in a storm to not get any on them.
Wild that RUVs have probably saved companies $100,000,000 in cap table overhead costs since launching a few years ago. $100M saved is a whole VC fund worth of capital that was being diverted from innovation to admin'ing round closes, managing stakeholders, and dealing with…
One day, we’ll explain fiat wire transfers to our grandkids, and that’ll be our ‘uphill in the snow.’
I'm just saying, I'd be interested in seeing YC cos break out their "we hit $1M ARR in only 3 weeks" slide by: - rev from YC cos - rev from not YC cos
If everyone in the room thinks your product idea is good then it's not.
My workflow for going 0 to 1 on meaty app ideas: 1. give @vercel's v0 the big idea. spare it the details of each feature 2. iterate in v0 until you're happy enough with the foundation 3. download the code and open it in @cursor_ai 4. create a new spec.md file…