· Mike Wystrach
The Advantage #16: Raise Like a Closer, Earn Your Future Self, Build a Factory for New Projects, and the Surprising Edge of Creatine
Welcome Note
Thanks for tuning in to the sixteenth episode of The Advantage. A short, weekly note where I share what I am working on, something worth watching, a lesson from history, and one practical edge you can try right away.
The Seven Must-Dos in Raising Venture Capital
This week, I am sharing something I wish someone had told me before I started raising capital for Freshly. Over the course of building and scaling that company, and now investing through Cutting Horse Capital, I have been on both sides of the fundraising table. I have raised over $300 million in venture capital and listened to hundreds of pitches. The patterns that separate founders who close rounds from founders who stall out are not subtle. They are repeatable.
So I wrote down the seven rules I would follow if I were raising again today. This is not a theoretical framework. It is what I have seen work in practice, from friends-and-family rounds all the way through growth equity. The through line across all seven: fundraising is not a storytelling exercise. It is a sales process, a timing game, and a selection decision, all at once.
Whether you are raising your first round or your fifth, I think this one will sharpen how you approach the table.
The McConaughey Way
This week's watch is a 20-minute clip of Matthew McConaughey, and I liked it more than I expected to. Not because it is polished motivation, but because underneath all the usual framing, there is a much sturdier idea: your life does not get better when you feel better about yourself. It gets better when you take authorship of yourself. He keeps coming back to responsibility, character, earned self-respect, and the discipline of moving forward without waiting for perfect clarity. In a culture that keeps confusing confidence with image, I thought it was worth your time.
What stayed with me was his distinction between belief and delusion. He is not arguing for blind optimism. He is arguing that belief should cash out in behavior. Own your mistakes. Make amends. Turn the page. Put your hands on the wheel. Figure out what is in your DNA, work on it relentlessly, and do not choose a version of success that costs you your soul. That is a much more durable message than the usual "dream big" content. Less glamorous. A lot more useful.
I also liked his point that it is often easier to figure out who you are not before you figure out who you are. That feels true. Most real progress is subtraction before addition. Stop pretending. Stop outsourcing responsibility. Stop drinking the Kool Aid of popularity, comfort, and cheap validation. Then you can actually build something solid. His "hero is me in 10 years" line works for the same reason. The goal is not arrival. The goal is to stay in pursuit of a self you can respect.
Belief Should Change Behavior: McConaughey's core point is not that belief is magic. It is that belief should produce action. Own your mistakes, make amends, and move forward. Guilt and regret are only useful if they lead to responsibility. After that, turn the page.
Self Respect Is Earned, Not Performed: One of the strongest ideas in the clip is that too many people are not actually full of themselves enough. Not in an ego sense, but in the sense of studying themselves honestly, holding themselves accountable, and giving themselves credit when they do the hard thing right.
Success Has to Be Defined Carefully: He makes a very clean point here. Money, fame, and recognition are fine, but not if they antagonize your character. A good ambition is one you can pursue without jeopardizing your soul. That is a standard more people should use.
The Right Goal Stays Ahead of You: His story about his hero always being himself 10 years in the future is the part I will remember most. It is a simple way to frame growth: not as something you finish, but as something you keep chasing. That is a healthier target than perfection, and a much better antidote to complacency.
The Venetian Arsenal and the Factory for New Projects
In the 16th century, Venice ran the Arsenal like an industrial system centuries before the Industrial Revolution. Work was broken into stations. Parts were standardized. Specialists did one job fast. Ships moved through the yard instead of craftsmen rebuilding the process from scratch every time. The Republic could outfit war galleys at a speed rivals couldn't match, not because Venetians were better artisans, but because they had a repeatable machine for output.
New work fails when you treat it like art. The Arsenal treated "new" as a production problem. They didn't chase heroics. They designed a system where the average day produced extraordinary throughput. Standard parts, clear handoffs, and a single operating rhythm turned chaos into capacity. That's the real advantage: not ideas, but a factory that can ship them.
Most companies start "new projects" the same way: vague mandate, bespoke process, too many dependencies, and no standard for what done means. That is not innovation. That is waste with a budget. If you want new projects to compound, build your Arsenal: one owner per initiative, fixed stages, standard templates, hard interfaces between teams, and a weekly shipping cadence that can't be negotiated. Kill anything that requires custom exceptions to move forward. Good now means your next three projects get easier, not harder.
Creatine Is Not What You Think It Is
Most people hear "creatine" and picture a 22-year-old in a tank top shaking a bottle at the gym. That mental model is fifteen years out of date.
Here is the basic science. Your brain is 2% of your body weight, but it burns 20% of your daily energy. That energy comes as ATP. Creatine gets converted into phosphocreatine in the brain, which acts as a rapid reserve system for regenerating ATP when demand spikes. Think of it like a backup generator. When your brain is under load (complex decisions, sleep deprivation, sustained focus), it burns through ATP faster than it can produce it. Phosphocreatine fills that gap almost instantly.
This is not a marginal effect. In people with genetic creatine deficiencies, the result is severe cognitive impairment and developmental delays. When those patients receive creatine supplementation, symptoms can be partially reversed. That tells you how foundational this molecule is to brain function.
A 2024 meta-analysis in Frontiers in Nutrition pulled together 16 randomized controlled trials with 492 participants aged 20 to 76. Creatine supplementation significantly improved memory, with the strongest effects in older adults and populations under cognitive stress.
A separate 2024 study in Scientific Reports found that even a single dose of creatine during sleep deprivation improved cognitive performance and replenished brain energy substrates in real time via brain imaging.
The detail I find most relevant for operators: the cognitive benefits scale with how depleted your system is. Sleeping well and under no mental load? Modest effect. Chronically underslept, making hundreds of decisions a day, holding ten projects in your head? That is where creatine appears to have the biggest impact. The research calls these "metabolically demanding conditions." I call it a normal Tuesday.
Vegetarians and vegans see the largest cognitive boost since their baseline brain creatine stores are lower without dietary intake from meat and fish.
5 grams of creatine monohydrate every morning, stirred into water. Creatine monohydrate is the only form with robust long-term safety data. Skip the expensive designer versions.
No loading phase needed. 3 to 5 grams daily saturates your system in about 4 weeks without the bloating that comes with the traditional 20-gram protocol. I noticed the difference most during high-output weeks: board prep, investor meetings back-to-back, and early mornings, when Rhett (our new infant) gets me up at 3am, and the day starts. The days where my brain would normally fog over by 3pm, I was holding sharper through the end of the day.
Safety profile is as clean as it gets. Long-term studies at 5 grams daily for up to 5 years show no adverse effects in healthy adults. Harvard Medical and the International Society of Sports Nutrition have both confirmed the safety at recommended doses.
Thanks for reading.
Mike Wystrach
Founder · Operator · Investor
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