The Hiding Test

I heard about this test from people who survived World War II.

The question is simple. Would this person hide me in their home?

Not retweet me. Not take a meeting. Not "hop on a quick call."

Would they risk something real.

It's an extreme question. Most of us will never face that version of it. But I think the underlying idea applies to everyone.

And I think most people — especially founders, especially people who've spent years building their network — have never actually asked it.

The collecting years

Years of startups taught me to collect people. That's literally the advice you get.

Grow your network. Always be connecting. Get warm intros. Go to events. Have coffee chats. Follow up. Follow up again.

I did all of it. Investor calls with people from upstate New York and Los Altos.

Getting past receptionists and executive assistants. A CIO at a Wall Street bank who took my call once and never again.

And somewhere in all that collecting, I started trusting less.

Not all at once. Gradually. You see partnerships dissolve. You see people who smiled in your face work against you behind closed doors. You watch someone promise something and then pretend the conversation never happened.

So you build a wall. It's not dramatic. You don't announce it. You just stop letting people in as easily. Every new relationship starts as a transaction until proven otherwise.

The wall protects you. But it also means you wake up one day with five hundred connections and no one to call at 2 am.

December

When I killed most of my businesses in December 2025, the scaffolding came down with them.

No meetings filling the calendar. No partnerships to maintain. No co-founder dinners or investor updates or the comfortable illusion that all those work relationships were real ones.

Just me and whatever was left.

I sat with a question I'd been avoiding: without my employees, my team, and the people I work with — how many real people do I actually have in my life?

The answer was smaller than I wanted it to be.

The modern version

You don't need World War II stakes to use the test. The modern version works fine.

Something happens tomorrow. Not something dramatic — just something real. You lose the business. The money's gone. A geopolitical event tanks your industry. Something you didn't see coming hits.

Who do you call?

Not who you'd post about it to. Not who'd comment "DM me if you need anything." Not who'd share your GoFundMe.

Who picks up the phone. Who comes over. Who figures out what you need before you ask.

That list is shorter than my followers count. Yours probably is too.

What I missed

The thing about collecting people is that it keeps you busy enough to ignore the people who were already there.

The ones who showed up when it wasn't convenient. The ones who stayed when things got hard. The ones who know me — actually know me — and are still here despite all the versions of myself I've put them through.

I spent years chasing warm intros to strangers while the people who'd actually hide me in their home were right there. I just wasn't paying attention. I was too deep in the game to notice who was real and who was just nearby.

Where I am

I'm 27, about to turn 28. I don't know if this is an age thing or just the natural result of the last few years.

I don't have this figured out. I'm not writing this from the other side of some revelation. I'm writing it from the middle, where the question is still uncomfortable and the answer is still forming.

But I know the test is right. And I know my list is too short. And I think that matters more than any business decision I'll make this year.