“A Thiel Fellowship is like going into the ring with Floyd Mayweather without any training. But it’s Vegas and there’s bright lights and you have the best people in your corner. You think maybe Floyd’s getting old and that left hook isn’t what it used to be. So you start telling yourself that you might just have a shot. Then you get there...”

Mark Daniel got punched in the teeth.

He was 19, living in San Francisco and a long way from his hometown in Tennessee. After the initial $100,000 in funding from the Thiel Fellowship, Mark raised another $1.5M for Strut, a fashion app that was kind of like Tinder—swipe left if you like an outfit, swipe right if you don’t. A team of eight employees were hired to launch the venture, but it quickly became clear that things weren't working out.

“After we received the funding, it was like ‘Oh shit! Now I have to go build a company and I’ve never had a job before’… Looking back, it’s like, 'Of course it didn’t work.' Strut was a flawed concept and I didn’t know how to run a hiring process, design process, or how to manage people.”

But, Mark said with a grin, “The first pancake usually never works out. Luckily we had more batter.” 

The eight employees were let go and Mark brought on an engineering co-founder to build his next start-up, Estate— a home concierge service to help you with any home related requests from setting up your utilities to physically calling Comcast to negotiate down your rates.

When Estate lost it’s luster, his team started hacking on a social app called Ramble, but the idea was scrapped before Ramble launched.

Now at 22, Mark is zero for three, but he doesn't seem to be getting nervous.

“One of my favorite movie scenes is in Bridge of Spies where Tom Hanks’ lawyer character tells the Soviet spy, ‘You don’t seem alarmed.’ The guy responds ‘Would it help?’” 

Mark seems to be incredibly patient and full of analogies—likely because he reads a book a week. When he isn't quoting films and comparing his licks to boxing, the entrepreneur often references poker.   He thinks of his business moves as hands being played. As long as he doesn’t play the same hand twice and he feels like he’s learning new things, Mark likes his chances. 

Again, it’s all about patience. In an industry that glorifies the accelerated path, Mark sees the value in slowing down and does things that some entrepreneurs may never take the time to consider— like cooking himself three meals a day.

“You just never know. My next big idea might come from the way I cook these asparagus.”