Hostile Email Sparks Growth

A story about how Suleman Ali received a harsh email from his co-founder after selling their first company, which he used as motivation for growth.

"I started my first company with a friend of mine from college. After we sold the company, we got into a fight and he sent me this email that was like '50 reasons this company succeeded despite your existence.'

He got to like 25 good reasons and then at 26 he was like 'you get the gist.' For a little while, I read that email every day for the first year that I got it. Then after that, I've read it once a year every year to just be like 'what is it that he said and what was the truth to it?'

What's crazy is later when I was raising our Series A from Andreessen Horowitz for TinyCo, he found out and sent them an email saying 'you shouldn't invest in this guy, call me.' They called him and he basically read that list of 50 things. It almost killed the deal because they were like 'yeah, we're worried about investing because of this.'

The funny thing is somehow 10 years later we're great friends again. He got married and I was the best man at his wedding, which is insane."