A page for Shaan · everyone else, this is the back room
Hi Shaan.
You either scrolled to the bottom of misfits100.com and clicked “another Irish guy,” or you saw the yellow banner. (“Another” because you interviewed Will O'Brien from Ulysses — yes, he's my friend, and yes, we're a small country, and yes, you've already proven you have form here.) Either way you went looking, which means something caught you. Here's the rest.
Who I am
The Irish guy
Ultan O’Rourke. 27. Irish.
Day job: I use AI to do other people's go-to-market work for them — mostly Clay-heavy automation for US companies. Clients pay because we ship in a week what their team would ship in a quarter.
Below is a list of things that, if you squint, look like a CV written by someone who'd be a useful person to build the Misfits 100 with.
Things that are technically on the record
- →Hacked Revolut's referral system as a teenager. (Revolut is the European answer to Cash App / Venmo — peer-to-peer banking on your phone.) Built a little operation using Facebook Marketplace plus a bit of ingenuity to harvest referral codes at scale. Revolut was less amused than I was. I was, very briefly, liquid.
- →$620,000 in college scholarships unlocked. For me, my family, and friends. I wrote the application essays. Everyone got in. The schools didn't notice the pattern.
- →Slept in a two-time unicorn founder's office for six months. August 2022 to February 2023, straight out of MIT. Talked my way in cold. Spent the six months in California hacking on a different business idea every two weeks, sleeping under the desk. He never charged me rent.
- →Top 0.1% of the national exams in Ireland. The Irish Leaving Cert — basically the SATs but worse. That score is how I got to MIT. (Yes, the one with the dome and the nerds.)
Why I think I'm the energy
You said you had the network and the money.
Here's why I'm the rest.
- 01I run a GTM agency. My entire job is finding weird people, qualifying them, and putting them in front of other weird people. Doing it for misfit teenagers is the same muscle, lower stakes.
- 02I've cold-emailed my way into every important room I've been in. MIT. The unicorn founder's office. Clay's partner program. Cold-emailing the world's #1 Yu-Gi-Oh player's parents is a Tuesday.
- 03I have no kids and no boss. I can be at a hackathon in Berlin tomorrow, in Seoul next week, hosting a gala in California the week after. I am the freest unit of energy you can spend on this.
- 04I read your weekly email. I've been watching you build for years. The kingmaker move isn't new to me — I just hadn't heard it named that way before.
What I'm not asking for
- — Money
- — A job
- — You to manage me
- — Equity
- — A retweet
What I am asking for
15 minutes.
Zoom, phone, DM thread — whatever's easiest. We can talk the rest of the plan if you want, or we can just shoot the breeze about whatever else happened that day. No deck. No commitment. If after the 15 you're out, you're out.
What we'd talk about in those 15 minutes
- 01Sourcing the other 90
I have a process. Partially automated, partially calling random esports forums, partially watching obscure GitHub repos for prodigies who haven't been picked up yet.
- 02The first gala
Where, when, who pays for the kids' flights. I have a strong instinct on venue.
- 03The J.D. Power model
Sam pitched it in the same episode. License the Misfits 100 brand to companies who want association. Recurring revenue. Sam's framing applied to your idea.
- 04A revenue model that doesn't make the kids feel like product
The thing that breaks 30-under-30 lists is when they monetize through the listed people. We don't. We monetize on the side and the list stays clean.
If after 15 minutes you say “interesting but not for me,” I keep building it anyway.
You'll see it again in 18 months and remember this page. The list will exist. The gala will happen. The only variable is whether your name is on it.
Nothing in that paragraph is a threat. It's just what I'm going to do.
Reach me
P.S.
The line on the homepage — “borrowed from Shaan, he told us to”— that's the kind of thing I'd say at a dinner.
I have not been to that dinner. This is a hint.
— Ultan (it's like ‘Sultan’ without the ‘S’)