I Almost Died While Fundraising

A few years ago I almost died raising money for my project.

And that's not a metaphor. I passed out, fell backwards, split my head open on a flowerpot, and ended up with an ambulance at my door.

The project was called Sonata, and launching it was one of the most beautiful experiences of my career. We presented it at FarCon, in Los Angeles, with four friends who were my partners.

It crossed crypto with music culture, and we'd built an online community on Farcaster, people who were music nerds like me. My vision was for Sonata to be a kind of new Napster, something that would change the music industry forever and bring crypto into the mainstream.

That's the story I started telling some of the biggest venture capital funds in the world. And part of me was building that vision not because I really believed I could pull it off, but because ever since I got into tech I'd read that great CEOs have a reality distortion field. That they pull off impossible things, and that's exactly why they pull them off. I was trying to be that person.

Trying to manifest something outside of me that wasn't inside of me.

As Sonata moved forward, one of my partners started thinking that to raise capital we had to give it more crypto mechanics. He had a fair point, it was hard to turn into a business, so I went along with it. And from there I started feeling a bit uncomfortable because that pulled it away from the Sonata built for music nerds.

When the moment came to raise, it fell to me, as CEO. And I wasn't sure I wanted to. Part of it was not wanting to let down my partners, who are also friends. The other part was that this was supposed to be what I'd been waiting for since I got into tech. Being the founder, raising capital and making it big, that's the holy grail. What you're supposed to do if you're any good.

So I built the deck and went out to raise. The first people I talked to were angel investors, friends of mine in crypto doing very well. Most of them didn't even reply. A few said no. And then one, a close friend I've always admired as an entrepreneur, told me: look, the deck is good, but I'm not going to invest. I don't see you as a CEO. I think you're someone with a different role in crypto. If I were you I wouldn't raise, because it's going to go badly. It hurt a lot. And it hurt more coming from this friend, who told me not to raise at all.

And when he said it, something inside me started to wonder whether I actually wanted to be a CEO. I was living inside that contradiction, anxious, feeling awful, caught between I have to do this and I don't actually want to, and I'm not even sure this is me.

And one night, having dinner with a dear friend, everything just went dark. My blood pressure dropped, I stood up to move to the couch, and I went down backwards. I cracked my head on a flowerpot without even feeling it. The next thing I remember is my neighbor holding me up, pressing a cloth to the back of my head, which was bleeding. My friend thought I was dead and had started screaming. The ambulance had come.

What I realized in the days that followed was that my psyche had shut down. The contradiction between what I was supposed to want and what I actually felt was so strong that it said enough, and collapsed.

And from there, I feel that I did die. I died to the person I was trying to be, the one chasing all these images of who I was supposed to be. And I started to accept much more who I really am. I also understood something.

I didn't raise the capital because deep down I didn't want to do it. It wasn't what I truly desired. If something isn't inside you, it won't manifest outside. The outside reflects back what lives within you, and in seeing it, you get to integrate it and become freer. It brings you closer to who you really are.

So I moved on from Sonata. I had the hard conversation with my partners, and gave myself a few months to figure out what I actually wanted. It was painful.

But it also set me free in ways I hadn't imagined, and those lessons still echo today.

Finding your true desires, to manifest your true will and become who you really are, is the only holy grail I care about now.

As within, so without.