When I first got into startups, I was confused.

Coming from tech, I thought the point of a startup was to build a business:
Solve a problem. Serve a customer. Generate revenue. Scale.

I’d already been side hustling for years.

I’m one of those immigrant kids, OFW mom, two kids, three jobs. The last thing we needed was more debt, even if it was for something like college. Not going to college wasn’t even an option. But debt? That sounded terrifying.

I lived at home. I cooked all my own food. I was helping take care of my mom while she had cancer.

Sometimes, building means keeping everything together while the rest of your life is on fire.

And I worked.

– I coached high school debate.
– Judged tournaments on weekends.
– Took notes for disabled students.
– Did so many hours at the chemistry library they had to pay me retirement.
– Signed up for every psych experiment that paid.
– Managed my mom’s multiplex.
– And still graduated with two majors and no debt.

(Guess who has two thumbs and a deeply underutilized degrees in political science and film theory? 👋)

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That mindset didn’t stop after college.

With no debt, $10K saved, and the political science knowledge that “Social Security will have gone the way of the dodo by the time you need it,” I threw everything into my first property in Merced.

I’d done my research. I was targeting college towns. I wanted to scale a real estate portfolio fast so I worked even more.

💀 Full-time day job
🚗 90-min – 2 hour drive
👩‍🍳 Night shifts at a local bistro
🍼 I even ran something called a diapercycle (that’s a story for another time)

But my most profitable hustle?

Recruiting.

I made friends with contracting companies, asked about open roles, rewrote my friends’ resumes, coached them on salary asks, and pushed for referral fees. Any time someone called me with a job I’d ask if they paid referral fees. BOOM instant resource. A lot of times, I doubled my friends’ pay.

I made $200–$2,000 per placement.

And I had one rule:
Blow the money.
Because when you’re working that much, if you don’t release pressure, you crack.
One year we went to Vegas so often, I started getting free dessert / drinks just from walking in.

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Anyway, because of all that, it didn’t occur to me that you could raise money off just vibes.

I kept buying properties.
Kept stacking.
Until one day I looked at my workload and said: pass.
I quit, alongside a senior manager and senior director, all in the same month.

So when I landed in startup land, I moved fast.
Because that’s what you do when you’re building something real.

And that’s when it hit me:

A lot of early-stage startups aren’t building businesses.
They’re building stories.
A vibe.
Sometimes even a cult.

And don’t get me wrong, brand, narrative, and vision matter.
But a lot of founders are confusing fundraising with business building.

They’ve got a killer deck, a bold thesis, and a ton of personality.
But no traction.
No repeatable funnel.
No signal the business will survive once the VC fuel burns off.

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You don’t need perfection to raise.
But you do need something under the buzz.

A GTM thesis.
A trust funnel.
A revenue path that works outside your pitch deck.

I specialize in pre-seed and Series A cybersecurity startups, and one of the most consistent things I’ve seen?

You can raise off vibes.
But you scale off truth.

Strategy matters.
But trust moves markets.

— Rhea Lynn Mascarinas
GTM Strategist | QuietConversion
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