Sari Azout on Building Emotional Capital

Sari Azout is a seed stage investor at Level Ventures, founder of the startup database Startupy, writer of the newsletter Check Your Pulse, and the mother of three young children— and she still has time to fire off an insightful tweet now and then. 

I first became aware of Azout’s work when the description of Check Your Pulse, “a tech and startups newsletter designed to make you feel human,” caught my eye. My interest was further piqued by her essay, “From Winner Take All to Win and Help Win: the Original Vision of the Internet is Making a Comeback,” which she and collaborator Jad Esber minted as an NFT. And then I got fully on board with her work when she introduced Ghost Knowledge, a crowdfunding experiment intended to unlock wisdom from experienced operators. At a time when trust in technology is at an all time low, Azout’s optimistic insistence on mapping technological progress to tangible improvement in human lives is refreshing. What matters most to Azout is strengthening our ties to each other. 

A native of Colombia who was born into a family of entrepreneurs, Azout came to the U.S. for college. After a brief stint in investment banking, she left the corporate world to launch Bib + Tuck, an online marketplace for buying and selling clothes, which she and her business partner sold in 2015. Since then, Azout has been steadily introducing projects and funding companies that make good on her mission to “bring more humanity and creativity to technology and business.” 

Sara Campbell: It’s apparent when reading Check Your Pulse (and anything about Startupy) that you place a high priority on mental well-being. Were you raised that way? Or was that something you had to learn? Would especially love to hear about any events or lightbulb moments you've experienced that influenced you. 

Sari Azout: I wasn’t raised that way, but I learned early on when I was working on my first startup that poor emotional health kills more startups than competition or market forces do, and I was surprised by how under-discussed this was. Building a company is an inspired person’s game—you need to be happy, excited, and able to put forth your best self to do great work. Later on, when I started investing, I saw many founders struggle quietly with imposter syndrome and burnout. It became so clear to me that a healthy mind is an entrepreneur’s biggest competitive advantage.

In a recent issue of Check Your Pulse, you said, “What makes work good is time to read, think, slow down, and create a rich inner life. In other words, good work comes from slowing the fuck down and trusting that good ideas will come through if we give ourselves enough time and space to see them.” How do you make space to do this amidst all the competing demands you encounter as a parent, founder, writer, investor, etc?

It’s taken me a while to warm up to the idea that thinking is working, and that what is actually work can at first look lazy. I love Naval [Ravikant’s tweet], “Be too busy to do coffee while keeping an uncluttered calendar.” More often than not, spending two hours thinking about a problem is a much better use of my time than taking two calls without an agenda, which ends up fragmenting my attention. It’s incredible what you can do in 4-5 hrs a day if you’re working on the right thing. I think people need focus more than they need intensity.

You said recently that your guiding principle for building Startupy is to “strip away the bullshit.” You also said you’re “building the business at a pace that suits my sanity.” We’re so accustomed to startup founders who talk about building at breakneck speed that patience like this is radical. Can you give us a sense of what your way looks like?