The 100x Payback.
Why advising and investing can supercharge your craft, network, and perspective.
There’s a quiet kind of magic in helping someone else win.
It’s not the kind that makes headlines.
Or gets you a bonus.
It’s the kind you feel years later when you hear that a 30-minute jam you had with a founder (or a student) helped them land a job, unlock a direction, or see something they couldn’t see before.
When I first started advising on the side, I didn’t think much of it.
A few calls here and there.
Feedback on features.
Some design guidance.
Hiring tips.
The occasional warm intro.
But something unexpected happened.
The more I deep-dived into other people’s products, the sharper I became at my own craft.
Advising and investing isn’t just philanthropy with time or money.
It’s a career accelerant.
Creative reps you can’t get at your desk.
A permanent zoom-out on your perspective.
A key to doors you didn’t even know existed.
And yes, sometimes it pays back 100x.
Just not in the way you think.
There are plenty of ways to lose your touch as a designer or builder.
One of them is keeping your head buried in your own hole for too long.
When you’re knee-deep in your own product, there’s no mystery left.
You know the flows.
You know what’s coming and you anticipate everything.
You know all the metrics.
But you’ve stopped stepping back.
Advising forces you out of that hole.
One week you’re talking to a founder building the next Gen-Z social consumer gem.
The next, that same founder asks you to invest and officially join as an advisor.
Different product.
Different vision.
Different team dynamics.
That cross-pollination rewires you.
You start spotting patterns in how different teams attack the same problems.
You learn faster because the context keeps shifting.
You stay plugged into emerging tools and trends outside your lane — often before they hit the mainstream.
I’ve felt that first-hand.
When I started advising and (modestly) investing, the payback was instant.
I walked away from those calls feeling refreshed, re-energized, and galvanized by perspectives I’d never see inside my day-to-day.
And the value went both ways.
What felt obvious and instinctive to me was exactly what the founders and teams I met with couldn’t see.
Even with years of experience, it’s not always easy to put words to what comes naturally.
I’m still learning how to deliver the sharpest advice in those sessions.
If you want to learn something, teach it.
The same is true in design and product.
When you advise, you have to explain your thinking.
Why a certain flow works.
Why a wow moment matters.
Why calling your users isn’t a waste of time.
That process forces you to confront your own blind spots.
Sometimes you realize you’ve been making decisions on autopilot.
And a founder’s fresh challenge makes you rethink everything.
Because you’re not stuck in their day-to-day politics, you have the luxury of objectivity.
You can push bolder ideas without worrying too much of some consequences.
And in turn, their context can spark creative solutions you’d never encounter in your own environment.
I’ve had advising sessions where I walked away with as many notes for my own projects as the founder had for theirs.
It’s not a one-way street.
It’s a feedback loop.
The more teams you work with, the faster your instincts get.
VCs call it pattern recognition.
See enough pitches.
Enough launches.
Enough post-mortems.
And you start to pick up on early signals. Both good and bad.
Founder traits that correlate with success.
Business models that scale cleanly versus those that burn out.
UX choices that delight versus those that quietly kill retention.
Advising lets you run dozens of mini-experiments through other companies.
You see what works in practice, not just in theory.
And when you’re back in your own work, you’ve got a library of reference points to draw from.
I can now spot certain pitfalls in minutes that would’ve taken me weeks to notice a few years ago.
That kind of instinct doesn’t come from staying in one company for a decade.
It comes from seeing many different games played on many different fields.
The benefits aren’t just intellectual.
They’re personal.
When you help someone win, you’re building a relationship.
Sometimes those relationships pay back in obvious ways.
But more often, the return is serendipitous.
A founder you helped years ago calls you out of the blue with an opportunity.
Someone in your network recommends you for a dream project.
A conversation over coffee sparks a side project that changes your trajectory.
It’s the compounding effect of goodwill.
You can’t engineer it.
You can only plant seeds and let time do its thing.
And the more you give, the more those returns, financial, professional, or purely human, show up when you least expect them.
Sometimes you get the first chance to invest.
Sometimes you get the first chance to join.
Sometimes you just get a front-row seat to watch a market shift before the headlines catch up.
That proximity isn’t just exciting, it’s valuable.
It keeps you from falling behind.
It sharpens your perspective.
It reminds you that while you’re building your own thing, the rest of the ecosystem is in constant motion.
You don’t have to be a prolific angel investor to get these benefits.
You don’t even have to write six-figure checks.
Start by advising one founder whose product you believe in or that you like.
Here is what my process on how I got started:
Asked around to colleagues, friends and VCs to send me some company names that would be willing to get some product design feedback from me.
Started capturing ideas, and sometimes mockups and prototypes in a Notion doc. Because I was lacking context and didn’t have any “big picture” history of vision of what I was providing feedback to, it was very naive. Which is the whole important, and which is also why it’s very valuable.
I mainly focused on where my core skills were. Providing feedback on a key feature. Suggesting new ones. Giving feedback on the look and feel.
I sent those Notion docs to the company founders. Without any expectations.
Some replied, thrilled to jump on a call.
I’m still talking to some of them, four years later.
Others ghosted me.
Either way, it was practice.
But your time is also very valuable.
If you say yes to everyone, your calendar fills with lunches, calls, and endless “advisor” slots.
That’s when you realize you should have said no more often.
At one point, more than half my week was swallowed by advisory calls.
It was addictive. And unsustainable.
Now I keep only a handful of slots open each week.
For my sanity, and for the quality of my feedback.
It’s also one of the reasons I write this newsletter. To create something evergreen that can help people without filling my calendar.
So get outside your own walls.
Reach out to a company you admire.
Send unsolicited feedback on what you love, and what you’d fix.
It’s also a great way to get hired.
But that’s another issue.
Happy Summer.
Julien.