Welcome back to Consumer Startups.
Trying a new content format today. Let me know what you think :)
Read time: 1 mins 15 seconds
🎁 AI Fundraising Toolkit
I teamed up with my friends at Notion for Startups to drop a free AI Fundraising Toolkit, packed with agent workflows to automate your pitch, track investors, and organize data rooms. You’ll also get access to a list of 10K early-stage investors, 50 real decks from YC and a16z-backed founders, plus free credits from Framer, Supabase, and v0 to help you build faster.
Five years ago, I came across an idea that changed my life.
Back then, I was a clueless college student trying to figure out life. I knew I wanted to build startups one day and had dabbled with a few ideas, but I felt stuck.
By chance, I stumbled on a blog post about something called luck surface area.
The concept came from management thinker Jim Collins and was later popularized by writers like James Clear, author of Atomic Habits.
It can be summed up with a simple formula: L = D × T
L = Luck
D = Doing — taking action, learning new skills, working on projects that excite you
T = Telling — sharing what you’re learning and creating value for others
To get luckier, you have to expand your luck surface area by doing more and telling more. You build expertise in areas you care about, act on your curiosity, and put your ideas out into the world for others to see.
For years, I’d thought of luck as this mystical force, like winning the lottery. It either hit you or it didn’t.
This idea of luck surface area flipped the script. It suggested you could do something about it. You could build a bigger net to catch it.
I started thinking of it as serendipity maxxing, a mindset of engineering those moments of chance.
You can be serendipity maxxing simply by building more things and sharing your story with more people.
For me, that meant starting this email newsletter. On April 25th, 2020, I launched Consumer Startups and posted my first article on the story of Clubhouse. I sent it to 30 friends. I cringed at my own writing, but somehow my friends loved it. After two posts, three random people subscribed. I couldn’t believe it.
That one decision changed everything.
>> My writing opened the door to my first job out of college working at a Series A company.
>> It led to becoming a scout for a16z, a dream opportunity I never would have thought possible.
>> I’ve made some of my closest friends through this newsletter, from founders and VCs I interviewed to other writers I collaborated with.
>> Even my own startup, Pikes, was born from a random conversation with my friend Pontus Karlsson, who I met through this newsletter.
One of the core principles of serendipity maxxing is that you optimize for adding value to the world without expecting anything in return.
This is where I see many people trip up. They treat networking like a transaction, a tit-for-tat exchange. They go to events to collect business cards, not to make friends. They send cold, generic LinkedIn messages asking for favors.
Serendipity maxxing is the opposite. It’s about playing the infinite game. It’s about giving freely, sharing your genuine interests, and trusting that the right people will be drawn to your ideas.
That’s why I’ve never put a paywall on my newsletter, even after hitting 30,000 subscribers recently. Because every good thing that’s come my way started with giving something away for free.
The real return isn’t the money. It’s the random connection, the unexpected email, the conversation that might just change your life.
—
See you next Tuesday,
Leo
Thoughts on today's email?
📥️ Want to advertise in Consumer Startups? Learn more.