Ideas, tools, breakdowns & field guides to help you build a profitable one-person internet business by @iampascio.
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Joined April 2023
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Internet Leverage ∞ retweeted
This is German healthcare:
- Mandatory health insurance
- Statutory sickness funds
- Private insurance alongside them
It doesn’t fit neatly into the American argument about “government healthcare.”
Here’s how the system actually works:
Internet Leverage ∞ retweeted
This ancient book contained a clue that cured malaria:
A Handbook of Prescriptions for Emergencies.
Written in 340 AD, it described a preparation involving sweet wormwood.
Centuries later, a scientist revisited it.
Here’s how that clue helped her win a Nobel Prize:
Internet Leverage ∞ retweeted
This is Rihanna.
She hasn’t released an album in over a decade.
Yet Forbes named her the world’s richest female musician.
Most of her fortune came from makeup.
Here’s how she became a billionaire:
Most of what gets called luck is attendance.
The break went to whoever was still in the room in year four, when the interesting people finally arrived and needed someone who already knew where things were.
Nobody writes that down. It doesn't sell as a story.
It's very important that you understand the goal is not to become someone through money, but to become free enough that you no longer need money to tell you who you are.
When trying to build a network, everyone swims up the river looking for the source, but the people who actually succeed with it turn around and give to those downstream, and as a result the current carries them all the way up.
Stop trying to compete with AI.
Instead focus on building the kind of knowledge that sits above AI.
The knowledge that's unique yours and that comes from doing, failing, fixing, and feeling your way through a problem for years.
Internet Leverage ∞ retweeted
Everyone calls healthcare expensive.
In the US, we spent 17.2% of our economy on healthcare in 2024.
Germany, the OECD’s next-highest spender, spent 12.3%.
The uncomfortable question: What are we buying with the difference?
(Thread)
Internet Leverage ∞ retweeted
Time for a reintroduction.
I'm Scott.
I’m building a VC fund in public and breaking down how creators and celebrities build empires, so you can steal their playbook.
• Dutch founder and investor
• Started out selling football phone cases, which failed
• Co-founded + exited Straise, helping EU startups raise money
• Personally invested in 15+ celebrity and creator-founded brands
• Now building HotStart VC, a fund investing exclusively in this space
Somewhere along the way, I went from selling phone cases to taking business meetings in celebrities’ hotel rooms because meeting in public attracts a crowd.
I’ve also been on calls where I had to ask which person was the celebrity (growing up in the Netherlands means you miss quite a bit of American television).
It’s been an unusual route into venture capital, and it’s shaped how I look at businesses today.
I’ve spent time helping founders raise money, bringing creators into companies as equity partners, and deciding which businesses to invest in myself.
A few beliefs have grown out of that work.
1. Distribution is becoming one of the biggest advantages a company can have. Having a direct relationship with potential customers changes how you can build a business.
2. Ownership changes incentives. How much someone owns, what they’re expected to contribute, and how they earn that ownership deserve serious attention.
3. The product and operating team deserve more scrutiny than the famous name. My investment process has evolved to reflect that.
Those ideas are behind HotStart VC, and they’re what I want to explore here.
Here’s what I’ll be tweeting about:
• How creators and celebrities turn their audiences into companies, and which parts of their playbook you can use yourself
• The ownership and deal structures behind those businesses, including how equity partnerships actually work
• How I evaluate an investment and what makes me walk away
• Why some products fit a creator’s audience so well, and how I assess that fit
• What founders can learn about distribution from people who’ve built an audience for a living
• What building a VC fund involves, from finding investors and answering their objections to earning their trust
• The decisions I’m making as I build HotStart, including where my thinking changes and what I’m still figuring out
I’ve become a creator myself while investing in this space. I enjoy the work, and it gives me another reason to pay attention to how an audience becomes part of a business.
If you’re building a company, growing an audience, or curious about the money behind the names you know, I think you’ll find something useful here.
Follow @Scottvdberg to not miss a single post.
I’ll link my longer breakdowns underneath this post so you can find them as they come out.
Most people who do business pick an identity at twenty-something and defend it until they die.
The marketing guy. The founder. The X guru. Whichever one it is, it works, so they never take it off, and by thirty the costume has grown into the skin.
Then the market resets and they're never to be seen again.
Wealth is having the options, but freedom is not needing most of them.
Which are you optimizing for?
The art of being bored is the art of becoming so clear about what matters that everything else stops being a temptation.
Entrepreneurship is really just one lifelong identity transformation that'll keep surprising you over and over again.
The money's cool, sure. But learning who you could be, as you become it, that sh*t hits different.
Think of someone who's built a real business.
Do you think they negotiate with themselves before doing the work? You imagine they do, because that's how YOU feel. But they don't. They've simply become someone who can't imagine life without building.
The work IS the enjoyment.
If you've ever called yourself lazy, please understand that all you're missing is a mission so strong that you can't stay comfortable without consequences.