venture capital

“So a lot of entrepreneurs in the venture capital mode is basically they're incentivized to own more of the company. They're incentivized to exit quickly. And we didn't take that kind of money. And I'm very glad we didn't. I think that was a key piece that let …”

“In 1988, we decided we couldn't grow as fast as we wanted to grow from just our retained profits. Tapped out all of our friends and family, and there was no angel network, so we needed to raise some venture capital.”

“That wasn't one investor, that was most. Let me talk to my wife, my daughter, or my admin. Those were the three, you know, target customers that we would hear.”

“I, through the process of building Rent the Runway, was sexually harassed by one individual, and I'm happy to share that experience. However, I will say that I've had interactions with dozens and dozens of venture capitalists at dozens of firms, and this was j…”

“We talked with a lot of VCs around the country. And they say, hardware's not quite as hot as it used to be. We're more into software now. Figure that out. Get profitable as a hardware startup. Then we'd be interested in helping you scale as a software startup.”

“You tend to be able to raise money from venture capitalists if it's either the current hot thing or something that's wildly different so that some VCs might think, oh, that's really interesting. I should take a different bet, and that tends to be how you shoul…”

“I mean, it was hard to raise money for anything that was female-centric in the digital space.”

“I live up in Tahoe, and like, you know, entrepreneurs, they come to me, and like, they come and hang out with me in Tahoe, and they like, drink beers in my hot tub, and like, I get to know them and their businesses, and like, you know, there's part of that tha…”

“And I think the, there are elements of it that just feel structurally unfair that I don't think get solved unless you change the proportion of men and women that are in leadership roles in venture capital.”

“On the other hand, I was a little bit, honestly, a little bit risk-averse, and I thought that I did not want to raise venture capital again because I Had had some bumpy experiences in the first go round. So I thought I need to find a business model to apply th…”

“So a lot of entrepreneurs in the venture capital mode is basically they're incentivized to own more of the company. They're incentivized to exit quickly. And we didn't take that kind of money. And I'm very glad we didn't. I think that was a key piece that let …”

“Four percent of venture capital deals last year went to female CEOs. So four out of a hundred deals went to women.”

“So we have a mismatch where men who don't understand women or how women shop are trying to decide how to make investments, and only nine percent of VCs are women. So it's a fundamentally misogynistically wired system.”

“Subscription in the beginning. Yeah, that was the thing that actually got me to get the funding that I needed, because a lot of these VCs were subscription, subscription, subscription.”

“Raised thirty nine million dollars, and the story goes, and I tell a lot of entrepreneurs this, I wish I didn't raise a cent of it.”

“Everything was about, like, you know, the growth and the traffic, and there was no discussion or talk about revenue. And then the bubble burst, and all of a sudden, all anybody could I could talk about was, oh my gosh, all these companies are bleeding money. H…”

“I got to hold on to a lot more of my company because we couldn't raise for a while, but the result was you know, we were, I think, in a position where we could better absorb those financial resources, so there wasn't risk of other investors coming on and sayin…”

“And being a development executive is not unlike being a VC, I guess, of several stages. So, you know, you start with seed, where you're cultivating talent, and you're taking a lot of pitches, and then you help to cultivate the idea, and then you get to a place…”

“The thing I learned back then is it's so important to give a fast no rather than nothing at all, because certainly not 27 VCs did not call us and say, hey, you know what, it's not for us for these reasons, or not right now, but would love to see this, and this…”

“So what we did was we left our 2009 operating plan with every VC that we met with. And that was sort of seen as, you know, a little risky. Because nobody knew what 2009 would hold. And then our plan B was to take a more lean approach to scaling in 2009, go bac…”

“They're gonna have some really tough metrics that I've gotta meet to give them the returns they're looking for, and then they're gonna want out in five or seven years, and I'm gonna be right back where I am today, but in a worse place.”

“Well, you know, with VCs, you don't really hear no, which is the frustrating part. You hear you're too soon. You're too late. Let me think about it. Check back in with me. You know, no one really wants to tell you no, that's stupid.”

“I remember, you know, we had a spreadsheet of target VCs. I think there are 40 names that we put on that list. And literally we went to number 40 before we were able to raise money.”

“I think that the farther you are away from the coast, the more they the more investors value revenue. Whereas when you're on the coast, I think they care more about growth.”

“One of the ways that bias can show up is in the things that venture capitalists ask founders when they're in a diligence meeting, and so we've taken a really hard look at that, and I've actually begun to script out our, you know, the key questions that we want…”

“The second question, if founders are interested in venture capital, is to really do the diligence on the fund and the partner who is leading that deal, because there's just a wide variety of outcomes that funds are shooting towards, and stylistic differences b…”

“What we're doing differently is really building a venture firm that is designed around access and transparency. That's not what venture has traditionally been known for. And it's what has really underserved women and underrepresented founders.”

“I really think if we had grown up in Silicon Valley and had venture capital around us, that we would have built a very different company that wouldn't have been as disruptive as ours has been because we didn't have venture capital.”

“It was in 2009, 2010, Like, nobody wanted to invest in media.”

“That was the only term sheet that we got The only yes that we got from the VCs that we pitched that round, and he's still on our board to this day.”

“I knew the second you take a dime, we're starting a clock. We're starting expectations. It kind of changes the nature of people when they even come for a job interview. You know, the question is, how much stock do I get, you know?”

“You can't run your company the way you want if you take someone else's money, and I wasn't about to let anybody ruin my vision”

“The VC model for the most part is if you win, we win, but if you lose, we still kind of win in this process.”

“So we have a mismatch where men who don't understand women or how women shop are trying to decide how to make investments, and only nine percent of VCs are women. So it's a fundamentally misogynistically wired system.”

“Like startups, the thing they don't really tell you is when you raise VC, it's like, you have to sell it. So you're building this thing. You put your blood, sweat and tears into it. And your job is to, if you're successful is you sell it. I mean, it's like, yo…”

“We talked to 40 VCs, everyone turned us down.”

“I didn't, like, have a ton of respect for the career path. And so there was, like, some sense in which it was an admission of defeat about, you know, I just, I can't run a company, so I'm gonna go do the easy job, or I'm gonna go do the retirement job or somet…”

“So whenever I would bring up to my board, hey, should we be doing direct-to-consumer anything? Should we be charging one dollar for premium content that people could not get enough of? The answer immediately was absolutely not. You cannot disturb those numbers…”

“We didn't raise our first venture capital money until after we had fired that first engine”

“We had to raise money that was available to the individual buyer to invest in their home to help them with a down payment. That was. Kind of one stream. The other stream was we need money to run our company. And that was the operating business, the opco, and t…”

“The reality is, guy, black women are starting businesses faster than any other group of people in this country, but we're not getting funding, and also, because we're not getting funding, we can't really grow our ideas, so if we really wanna, like, reduce the …”

“We asked them if we could buy them out. They refused.”

“They had set it up that we couldn't get more money beyond a certain amount without their approval”

“I stopped counting the no's after I hit 50 on venture capitals”

“And we cut down growth by taking our marketing and bringing it down pretty close to zero for almost a year before we restarted it while we rebuild the infrastructure. The hard part was that this year of no growth Ultimately meant that to get a real funding rou…”

“Couple of VCs I talked to, he said, hey guys, if you did something in database, we'd, you know, look at you, but consumer, I mean, stay away from it, you know, and again, you have to remember, we are just coming out of dot com, so consumer is still not a very …”

“And I think VCs, especially that early stage, when they see that you've got a tiger by the tail in terms of growth, they want in.”

“The other big benefit was that had we had VCs they didn't care about the mission. So their focus would be, how do you make the business model work? And I think they would have looked at that in a very short term way. The influencers cared only about the missio…”

“First of all, venture doesn't, wasn't touching food at that point, and so it was entirely friends and family we were looking for.”

“I think it meant you're, you come to that fork in the road of, if you're taking venture capital on, you're now deciding to build a different kind of business in a different way.”

“When we did the relaunch, you know, my first instinct was obviously to, like, go raise money. So I was talking to every VC, but no one would give me money.”

“I was strung out, and at that point, you know, going to VCs and getting rejected by 95% of them.”

“As I used to say in venture, a great venture capitalist position themselves to get lucky. You know, they hang around in the right places, and they talk to the right people, and they know enough relationships, and they have the capital, but most of the time the…”

“You know, for the first two, I started to think about it, because I really believed their pitches, and then by the 10th one, I realized they were all saying the same thing, they were all using the same playbook and it was always a scare tactic, like, if you do…”

“Because then VCs and bankers were funding people to make a lot of money, and there's not the kind of money that they're talking about in classifieds.”

“And so I knew that sort of like going the venture capital private equity route was something we wouldn't do because of what we wanted to do with the brand, how we wanted to do this forever. We didn't really want to sell it.”

“There's a lot of prestige in raising money, but the truth is you'd rather not raise money if you can get to the next level without it. And so even if that means you might move a little slower, often that's a better decision. And when the time is right to raise…”

“That type of return on an, on a lifestyle brand, I don't think fits the VC sort of paradigm. And so with Knox it was, it's been bootstrapped this whole time.”

“Most VCs don't actually want to do risky things. They want everything de-risked. And then they just wanted to invest on the upside.”

“I mean, 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.”

“What I'm going to tell you is to ignore your VC no matter what they say. If they tell you to chase sales, ignore them, because they'll be right in saying this is the only way to get huge, but you don't want to be in the position where you lose control of your …”

“If you've ever been a VC pitch, they're really weird things, because they're basically, the VCs are up there playing defense. They're like goalies. And the entrepreneurs, the people who are pitching are just lying to them.”

“We did not take venture capital until year eight.”

“I took the investments knowing that I'm going to be raising the clock to either go public or get sold. That was the duality of outcome. And by the way, this is true for every person who sells shares in their company.”