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Drori: Early male VCs failed to understand Daily Harvest's frozen food concept

Rachel Drori · 20VC: Tearing Up Term Sheets and Writing Your Own, Why Founders Must Do "VC Dating" Pre-Fundraise & The Benefits of Capital Constraints in The Early Days with Rachel Drori, Founder & CEO @ Daily Harvest · Mar 30, 2018 · at 8:27

Rachel Drori, founder and CEO of Daily Harvest, recounts why she chose to bootstrap the company initially after receiving pushback from early investor meetings.

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“And the reason why is because I started speaking to people early on and I found that they just didn't get the business. It was mostly middle-aged men who I was talking to, and they would taste one of our first collections, which was smoothies, and they'd be like, it doesn't taste like Jamba juice. That's what I think a smoothie should taste like. I'm not sure that this is a thing. Frozen food, what are you doing? They just didn't get it. Like, when I kind of shared the big vision, they thought I was a dreamer.”

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Disclosure
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“So I actually decided to blow up the entire round and basically wrote my own term sheet and sent it back to everybody. And I said, Hey guys, little untraditional here, but this is how it's going to be. And I sent back the term sheet and I said, do you want to …”
Rachel Drori Mar 30, 2018 ▶ 11:01 20VC: Tearing Up Term Sheets and Writing Your Own, Why Founders Must Do "VC Dating" Pre-Fundraise & The Benefits of Capital Constraints in The Early Days with Rachel Drori, Founder & CEO @ Daily Harvest
Assertion Not checkable as stated
Daily Harvest raised Series B in two weeks pitching six VCs
“I actually went out for the round. I only went out to six VCs, and I'd already had relationships. I already knew that I wanted to work with them, and I ran a true process, but in such a short period of time. First, instead of that six weeks that the other two …”
Rachel Drori Mar 30, 2018 ▶ 13:19 20VC: Tearing Up Term Sheets and Writing Your Own, Why Founders Must Do "VC Dating" Pre-Fundraise & The Benefits of Capital Constraints in The Early Days with Rachel Drori, Founder & CEO @ Daily Harvest
Opinion
New York tech ecosystem lacks conviction investors at the early stage
“I would absolutely agree. So, you know, if you rewind to my story about raising my series seed, it was not easy. It's really hard to find people at such an early stage that will invest in a concept or an idea.”
Rachel Drori Mar 30, 2018 ▶ 16:28 20VC: Tearing Up Term Sheets and Writing Your Own, Why Founders Must Do "VC Dating" Pre-Fundraise & The Benefits of Capital Constraints in The Early Days with Rachel Drori, Founder & CEO @ Daily Harvest
Insight
First-time founders must project confidence and fake a track record
“If you've never done it before, you have to pretend that you know exactly what you're doing because you really don't earn points for being a rookie, so, you know, people are looking to invest in people who have a proven track record. Well, guess what? If you d…”
Rachel Drori Mar 30, 2018 ▶ 17:22 20VC: Tearing Up Term Sheets and Writing Your Own, Why Founders Must Do "VC Dating" Pre-Fundraise & The Benefits of Capital Constraints in The Early Days with Rachel Drori, Founder & CEO @ Daily Harvest
Insight
Work-life balance is impossible and founders must accept trade-offs
“I think before I had kids, there was this idea that you can have it all at some point, and I realized that that is just It's not possible, you know, and I think that it's an idealized vision that a lot of people have, like, oh, you know, I'll be able to do eve…”
Rachel Drori Mar 30, 2018 ▶ 20:19 20VC: Tearing Up Term Sheets and Writing Your Own, Why Founders Must Do "VC Dating" Pre-Fundraise & The Benefits of Capital Constraints in The Early Days with Rachel Drori, Founder & CEO @ Daily Harvest
Disclosure
Daily Harvest avoided hiring six months ahead of projected growth
“As I built Daily Harvest, I really looked at building it very capital efficient, not hiring six months ahead of growth, and just some learnings from the record speed Hit a peak and went down from there.”
Rachel Drori Mar 30, 2018 ▶ 3:57 20VC: Tearing Up Term Sheets and Writing Your Own, Why Founders Must Do "VC Dating" Pre-Fundraise & The Benefits of Capital Constraints in The Early Days with Rachel Drori, Founder & CEO @ Daily Harvest
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