49 · Cold Steel Mail

I will reach out personally. Like, PERSONALLY — cold mailing, cold outreaching, cold calling millionaires and billionaires to advise me on fintech startups; hedge fund managers, asset managers, and more. This is a massive networking opportunity that deserves a dedicated part of every day, because you CAN and MUST create your own ticket into the rooms where your competence and intellect can actually shine. Same for the Imperial EFDS interviews. How can you get rejected from Imperial if you mail every single person studying there — through Instagram, LinkedIn, even the professors who run the interviews — asking for advice, asking for mock interviews, pre-building personal connections? That alone lets the Imperial pendulum pull you into its energy field. How can someone doing mock interviews with every student there get rejected?

One thing you did absolutely wrong: replies to the people you reached out to must be near-instantaneous. Be ready at almost all times.

Yo — it's so surprising, mesmerising, the power of cold outreach. The fact that LinkedIn has enabled this is absurd. To message Ivy League and Oxbridge students who will be future politicians, Nobel-winning mathematicians and physicians, venture capital angel investors, billion-dollar startup founders, macroeconomists, presidential advisors — and to network with them, hop on a call, have an authentic discussion and build a relationship despite totally different upbringings — is massive and life-changing. These are phenomenal people taking time out of their day at the biggest firms in the world, and they share great insights. It's amazing what you gain by being authentic, deep and personal.

I'm genuinely delusional — and "crazy" is an understatement given what I'm doing. Technically I'm a university dropout, unemployed, making less than a thousand dollars a month part-time at a random café. But I'm hopping on calls with JP Morgan quant developers, Oxford Statistics and Machine Learning DPhil researchers, QRT interns. Outreaching to fifty people a day, by the end of Q1 there'll be around two thousand students from Oxbridge, Imperial and the top Russell Group universities in the network — and it'll scale into the Ivy League, SF startup founders, all the wild stuff.

Then the expansion path: first, every EFDS student at Imperial — advice, calls, mock interviews, student life, careers, which societies quants join. FIRST THINGS FIRST. Then permeate other courses at Imperial, then Warwick, LSE, UCL, Oxbridge. Then build a community bridging students who want into these universities — connecting identified demand with identified supply. Something in university preparation, something in building human connection in the age of AI — I see potential there. Then scale into professors doing quant finance research, PhDs who trade, founders and CEOs of quant firms, the YC pool. Then global: the Indian, Russian, Chinese geniuses. And later — quantum leap straight into the good stuff: founders, CEOs, presidents of global companies and entities — the UN, Citadel, JP Morgan — and reach out to the VCs directly.

Okay, what's the bottleneck to that? Credibility and reputation. A track record — first class honours at a top university is the bare minimum; golds in maths, physics and coding competitions another layer; founder and CEO of a personal company another. Before all of it: a massive database. There is zero depth or breadth of academic excellence in me right now, so the first focus is knowledge ingestion, scaling that database, corroborating the knowledge. Then stack data communication on top — conveying ideas smoothly and coherently. That's level 0.1. Certificates? One or two, but that's still thinking in baby steps. I need to network with boards of directors, VPs, CEOs — and I need competence matching their altitude. Step zero: volume. Read, study, research, learn like hell — plus recording sessions to train conveying knowledge with coherence.