Blake Resnick couldn't quite process what he was seeing on his screen. Like many entrepreneurs, he was struggling to find money, in this case for his tactical drone company, Brinc Drones, which he founded in Las Vegas in 2017. As a 17-year-old. He already had a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship, funded by the PayPal co-founder, so he could pursue his vision as a college dropout. And he had proof of concept for his drones from early customers, including the Las Vegas Police Department.
But by 2020, his business was seriously hungry—enough so that Resnick accepted an invitation to a video meeting from the manager of some TikTok influencers because he claimed to know somebody who knew somebody. When Resnick tapped “join” on his laptop, he saw a couple of men, sitting on a bed, half-naked. Their informality was a bit jolting, but Resnick started pitching, without much enthusiasm, thinking, “This is 45 minutes of my life I'll never get back.” The TikTok manager was interested, though, and said he'd like to introduce Resnick to some friends. Whatever.
Several hours later, the manager's buddy called, and he seemed rather more promising. “I'm Sam Altman's ex-boyfriend,” he claimed. “I want to introduce you to him.” Altman, the former head of Y Combinator and current CEO of OpenAI, would appear—fully clothed—on a later call, and apparently liked Resnick's pitch: Brinc had developed tactical drones that could radically improve SWAT team outcomes, replace police helicopters, and make policing safer and more efficient, and he needed money to ramp up operations. Altman had to hop off the call—he said some guy named Elon was ringing—but when he and Resnick later connected via email, Altman told him that he would take Brinc's entire $2.25 million seed round via OpenAI's investment vehicle. Resnick had progressed from an iffy TikTok manager to landing one of the more famous investors on the planet.
In a subsequent round, he also landed one of the most infamous investors on the planet: Samuel Bankman-Fried, the FTX founder, who invested $40 million. Resnick flew to the Bahamas for that pitch and had dinner with Bankman-Fried and the FTX crew. “The team was a lot smaller than I expected,” he notes. But he liked the idea
