Letter To A Potential Vendor: Fill & Download for Free

If it were my company, I would hire a lawyer and have the lawyer send a cease and desist letter. If it continued, I would sue seeking a restraining order to force the conduct to stop and I would also sue for defamation. Potentially tortuous interference.This would require an ability to show he is making things up and has caused you damage, as far as seeking financial compensation. You would have to be able to show he is lying to get a restraining order as well.Check in with a lawyer.

Here’s a ghetto grocery list of things you’re gonna need for the streets.Coming from the “whiteboy” that spent years in the toughest slums in NY…Here’s some time-tested examples of what it takes to be street smart:Learn the power of words. Words are weapons. The right words at the right time, strike with precision. Realize that words shape perception and reality. Master this, and you’ll discover the powerful magic of charms and persuasion.Money talks. Part of being street smart is knowing the power of money. When to use it. How to use it. E.g. a street vendor may have something priced at $6. Hand them $4 and wait. They may not like it, but it’s hard to give someone their money back once it’s in hand. Anytime I’ve ever bought anything on the streets, I’ve always made up my mind how much I’m going to pay, and I offer that amount (if I’m certain a deal will happen) or less. Offering less gives you room to bid up to your target price. I NEVER pay full price for anything from street vendors.See with your third eye. You have perceptions that extend far beyond your senses. Technically, it’s your brain that sees, not your eyes. Your eyes are the windows data passes through (deconstructed databytes of an image), that are then reconstructed inside your visual cortex. We describe the process as “seeing” and leave it at that. The revelation here, is, that your brain is a powerful force of perception. Knowing this about yourself, permits you to relate it to others. A more advanced understanding takes into account visualization and empathy. See the angles. Know the possibilities and “see” what others think and feel. In doing so, you can know the future. Your mind, the crystal ball.Know the confidence men. Otherwise known as Con-men, a.k.a. the Con-artist. They can sell soap to a pig. Salt to a slug. They’ll sell guns to a pacifist and crack to a cop. They have secret diet plans, miracle drugs, and if you buy their program of grand solutions, you’ll practically transcend space and time. The truth is they come in all varieties of skill and intent. The common factor is they are almost always inordinately confident, and “too good to be true.” People often “see” what they desire to see, so they are suckers for passive aggressive seduction. Exuberance and bravado are the spells cast over the weak mind by a scoundrel.One of the most powerful words. It comes as no surprise that words can be a force to be reckoned with. But pound-for-pound, what words actually hit the hardest? I can’t tell you who the heavyweight champ might be, but I can assure you that one of the title holders is the simple, two letter word, no. Ahh, the timeless rebuke of damsels. The very act of telling someone no, maintains your autonomy to outside forces. No, when repeatedly and clearly expressed, hits like a wave of rejection and repudiation. No, grants you the power of exclusion, and communicates in the simplest, streamline way, that you mean what you say, and you say what you mean. No explanations. No excuses. No shit… Just, no. Powerful…Keep your suspicions to yourself. If people are overconfident, and they think they’ve got you fooled, their intentions become easier to discern over time. In the streets, this can mean the difference between life and death.Know your value. Companies call it “human resources.” Like it or not, you are assigned a value based on your capabilities. You are a resource; biological stock exploited by corporate entities for the empires of the wealthy. On the streets, you have skills and knowledge that make you a person of value in some distinct way. Realize how to make this work to your advantage, and you will increase your street cred ten-fold.“..Never fail to be polite and never outstay the welcome.” That’s from the movie, The Beach (2000). This quote, is at the very heart of being street smart. Most everything about what will keep you safe in the streets, pertains to these words. Knowing and remembering just this principle alone, is like having an escape ladder and a safety net in your back pocket. This is at the top of the list of most important life maxims for street survival. Be gracious, but know your exits, and know them well….Other answers for your research and entertainment.Also, check out our Street Survival group, here on Quora:Street SurvivalBrett Tyler's answer to What are some street smart tips that could potentially help me one day?Brett Tyler's answer to What are some tips for people who are not "street smart," so they can avoid trouble in dangerous areas?Brett Tyler's answer to How can you protect yourself during riots?Brett Tyler's answer to What works in MMA but doesn't work in a street fight?Brett Tyler's answer to What is the difference between sport karate and street karate?Brett Tyler's answer to How does a street fighter’s punch differ from a professional kickboxer’s punch?Brett Tyler's answer to When cornered by multiple attackers, how do you decide who to attack first?Brett Tyler's answer to Honestly, how effective are the martial arts in a real fight, particularly against a guy who is a huge pro power-lifter, who can pull an entire train, and is light on his feet?Brett Tyler's answer to What is the best martial art for women's self defense?Brett Tyler's answer to In a street fight, how can you tell you're up against a novice?Why do people say Judo is a useless martial art?Brett Tyler's answer to What is the most practical martial art for a life or death fight?Brett Tyler's answer to What works in MMA but doesn't work in a street fight?Brett Tyler's answer to How can I tell if a martial arts school is a McDojo?Brett Tyler's answer to What matters most in a street fight, speed, power or technique?

Disclosure: I'm writing a book on this question, titled "The Currency of a Founder". What you're about to read is a summary.I didn't start wondering about how to pay the bills when I started bootstrapping a startup. I started having it in childhood, while observing my parents struggle with paying the bills.They were not poor or uneducated, but we lived in a country where criminal-level inflation and lack of production had turned a wealthy nation into a kleptocracy of corrupt morals. I couldn't even deal with the sandwich vendor at my school when I was seven without having my money stolen.So I spent the first three decades of my life chasing money. I started from the bottom and ended up working at the best companies in the tech world, at the highest tiers of salary that at least I could imagine. But something wasn't right. Looking at my peers signing 30 year mortgages, I couldn't come to terms with chaining myself to the desk and throwing the next three decades away to be able to pay the bills. I felt like instead of money, someone was now out to steal my time away.So I jumped off the cliff (Forbes republished my Quora thoughts on that) and spent all my savings on a startup. It was going to work, I knew it. And that exact egotistical attitude caused us to make some bold but bad decisions. My cofounder who had come up with the idea arrived from his house across the bay one day to tell me he could no longer face the bills coming in. He was a father and the sacrifices were affecting his children. He walked away. I saw no remedy. The startup failed.Without money and back at step zero, it felt like I had been asked to hold my breath for 120 seconds to get out of a life sentence, only to discover that I had to hold it for another ten minutes. My face was going blue. The silent failure devastated me. It knocked the lights out and put me in a dark place. I started writing to let the frustrations out and organize my escape plan. The first pages of my book, (which turned out to be chapters 5 and 6), ended up being written then.I started meeting a few potential cofounders for the second startup. The startups would churn so fast due to the terror they'd feel once they noticed their own financial free-falls that I went through one cofounder and startup concept a week. Out of pity, my wife asked me to focus on writing instead of engineering for a while. I asked "but what do we do with the bills"? She said "I make enough for the minimum essentials. We'll figure out the rest." We used some of our emergency funds to get out of Silicon Valley for a while and "smell the roses." It's important to realize in retrospect that the love from one's family is the first "Angel" investment one receives.I hit a lucrative contract during the time I was spinning my wheels writing. The contract paid more than a full time job. But it was short term: long enough to breathe for four months. Before the term was over, they asked me to become a fulltime employee. I insisted to keep things the same, but they wanted to own my time. So I said goodbye. Shortly after, due to having the freedom to look, I met the cofounder with whom I started the second startup. We were going to "pay the bills for schools"! (Corporate sponsored school fundraising)It's important to call out that pivot. Your first startup fails because you're solving for an egotistical need (paying your bills). The surviving startup pivots toward empathy (paying bills for others).San Francisco rents started rising at the pace of 10% a year while my wife worked outside the city (lower pay grades) and I was still building from scratch without funding or pay. We moved in with friends. But shortly after, their incomes improved, so we developed a conflict of interest. My wife and I projected our cashflow to be exactly zero with a much lower rent outside the city. We geared up to move. During these times (in the third year of zero income for me) I'd speak every week on the phone with my father about the startup. I'd always insist on the difference we were making, and he'd always press on how I was going to pay the bills. I cried alone many times before the move, because as a child, I had to move often; I had somehow brought about the same circumstances for my future children.One week before the movers arrived, we had packed up everything. All I had was an exercise ball, in an empty office room of our three bedroom mostly vacated shared apartment. It faced the Sequoia retirement community on Geary street in San Francisco from its Eichler architected floor to ceiling windows. The retirement community stared me in the face every time I thought about my poor father being trapped with rising bills in retirement age. That same fate was coming for me.I was looking at my reflection in the window, sitting on my meditation ball, staring back at me like my dad when he had to move us. Then I started rolling with the ball and was thrown straight into the window. It shattered like 17 daggers, with the quality of a 1960's untempered glass. And all I could think while I was rolling into what could be my guillotine execution was "goddamn it, that's going to cost a few thousand dollars I don't even have."A few hours went by. The spider crack in the glass window has taken away my reflection. It was as if I had gone through a mirror of mid-life transformation. I called a glass company to quote me a price. $600? I wrote a check. That was that.I texted my wife to say I had broken the glass before it got fixed. I expected her to say "well, time to look for a job." But instead she asked "Are you okay? Do I need to come home?"I spent the remaining days until the move to write the first half of the book. Why? I'm not quite sure. I believe I'm writing a letter to the past, to let that child know "it's okay. Not having money is okay. Moving to a cheaper place is okay. It's all going to turn out okay."My wife didn't expect me to go back to a job, but the jobs started coming to me. Their offers were extravagantly high, because I experienced this transformation that was basically "I already died going into the window glass. This is someone else. He doesn't need your money." In one such instance, a job offer turned into a negotiation with the higher management team at a billion dollar market cap company. Every "no" I threw out there would increase the job offer by another $25K. They went up four times. But all I could think of was "if you monopolize my time, how will those schools who are my target customers pay their bills?" I turned down the highest pay job offers of my life, to get paid nothing.One time I ran into a friend who asked "how long have you been doing this startup?" I said two years and a half. "Oh, not for that long then" he said. I wanted to kill him. People don't understand the concept of time in a startup. If you can hold your breath for two minutes, talk to me then.But interestingly, a founder also doesn't understand that same time scale. The friend was right. It really hadn't been that long. Time frames during which I'd go insane and exclaim "we're not ever going to find funding" were only 20 days long. For a founder, that's eternity because the landlord will be knocking again. For an employee, that's a few coffee breaks. And it was in that spirit that when I finally wrote the check for the broken window that put me essentially in red ink, I had a realization:If this startup kills me, I'll still do it. Because others are suffering more without it.Every angel investor that we had talked to and got nowhere with started following up with us suddenly. Why? I suspect they didn't think we'd live this long; or perhaps all other prospects actually died. It started with one angel who referred me to another, who referred me to a friend, who referred me to another founder who had recently sold his company, who referred us to his mentor, who ended up committing to give us 10% of the funds we were planning to raise. But that chain would not have worked if we were still on the timescale of desperation. When we decided "even if this kills us we'll make it work", the perception of time went away. And we might finally be at step 1.I'm meeting this 6th degree angel next week. But I don't expect his check. I expect for the meeting to be short, because one way or another, I'm heading back to my laptop to work on the product.Empathy: becoming one with the humanity you're working for - that's the currency of a founder. Humanity comes to your rescue in your darkest hour, if you've been stepping into its path through the trials of failure. It's no coincidence that we call its manifest representatives "angels". The prison of ego is a life sentence. The only way out is to hold your breath long enough.This was a brief summary of the first half of my upcoming book about early stage startups, "The Currency of a Founder". You can keep up with the coming chapters at my book page:The Currency of a Founder (book), by Amin Arianahttp://www.aminariana.com/books/early-stage