VC Money

“The VC money that we raise is not coming from fat cats. It is pension funds. It is university. It is teachers union. These are for our case, you know, so it is our responsibility. This is not like money that we just burn and then, you know, no, no, no blame.”

“You basically get funding for your ideas in the form of engineering, design you know, cross-functional resourcing, right? That is, you should consider that VC money that's been invested in you, and your CFO, your CPO, your CEO is expecting a return.”

“What I can tell you is like, archives is very profitable. We are like bootstraps. We are like, not like relying on VC money to fund the paid ads and the growth.”

“The process of talking to angels has reiterated my feeling that you should only raise VC money if you absolutely have to, if you are optimizing for the freedom to pick your path as a business long-term.”

“Because if when you raise VC money, they make you burn it. You can't hold VC thirty million for seven years.”

“If the funding continued to flow without real assessment of whether or not a company is doing a good job or bad job, I think Lime would not be the global leader right now because it would allow our kind of worst managed competitors to continue to scale and gro…”

“We're a profitable company, we're not dependent on VC money or anything. We're a self-owned company.”

“Most VC money is going to support a lot of excitement around AI and actually not do better than the S&P 500.”

“VC money is, I think, the best marketed money in the world.”

“It was easier for us to reject VC money because we didn't live in that world. We lived in the Midwest and that's not how people do things over there, you know? And we also didn't go to the parties and didn't go to the events and didn't like get influenced by t…”

“As soon as you take VC money, right? Like you have decided a trajectory to follow for your business. You know, you can't then say that, okay, I don't want to grow this rapidly or I, you know, want to probably, you know, build this a different way. You have to …”

“I think it's a false dichotomy though to say that if you take VC money, you're going to have a terrible culture.”

“None of the businesses I've ever built, which are between six and twenty-five million in yearly sales, none of them have involved any type of angel funding or any type of VC money.”

“Less than five percent, though, are getting VC money every year. That means that the vast majority of them are chasing after something they're not going to get.”

“How many great concept that we've seen over the years that, you know, just got crushed because VC money got in and pushed it too hard. I mean, there's dozen of example.”

“We bootstrapped. So we did not take VC money. Our team is all we hire based on the cash we bring in.”

“So we're kind of thinking about VC money as a growth, you know, this thing continued to grow and we need to expand and accelerate You know, so VC money will be useful, but of course there's, you know, string attached, right?”

“VC money is just always around the corner, and if you need more money, you just go and ask for it. It's a dangerous assumption to make, and we've already seen companies that have raised tens of millions of dollars just disappear overnight because they thought …”