founders

“To be a successful founder, you have to act as if you have to act as if you are so incredibly confident in yourself, even though inside you are walking that fine line between killing it and dying because of imposter syndrome and all of that.”

“It could be a very lonely journey being an entrepreneur, because everybody has a stressful job, and everybody's life is stressful, that's life, but there is a very special kind of stress that is reserved for a founder, and Even your spouse can't truly know wha…”

“VCs and founders are not always a hundred percent aligned, so being ahead of the curve in the sense of, like, understanding where VCs are coming from is very helpful for founders Especially later stages, especially when you try to effectively manage your board…”

“I encourage my founders to try to take money for at least 24, if not 36 months of runway, assuming that there is no significant increase in revenue.”

“And I think raising capital on the dream is probably one of the easiest rounds you're ever going to have, right? To raise as a founder.”

“Because the moment I enforce something to them, and that's not their nature, it will be destroyed.”

“It's so hard to flip that once you've, you know, once you're in that position of, I gotta, I'm paying salaries, and so the next thing I do is I gotta pay another salary, and you're thinking about growth through the expense of, through the lens of expenses rath…”

“I think focusing on those fundamentals that I was talking about and people, people to be patient and not here I'm speaking to founders more probably than investors, but not let the investors sense of urgency. Really affect you that much because that's not the …”

“And so I think it's a skill that's important for founders as well to learn how to not just build a thing, but how do you gracefully deprecate a thing and kill it.”

“I've, we've onboarded new clients where I've seen that they founders may have spent a disproportionate amount of money on legal expense. And I'd argue a bit prematurely until the point where they know they're at something that resembles product market fit.”

“A company can grow to a certain point, And because the founder thinks that he or she are the only solution or the only one that can make these decisions, it tends to peter out.”

“While I encourage founders to be really stingy with their equity at all times, but therein also is a great opportunity because the power of that equity should be able to provide you with the gunpowder or the working capital that you need to bring in additional…”

“No, my baby lives in my house. A company is a collection of assets and people that work together. To maximize shareholder value. And as a founder, remember that your value in a financial sense is really that the equity that, that you hold.”

“A lot of people over index risk versus reward or the loss of risk. Basically, if you make a wrong riskier bet and you lose something, usually it's not that bad. So people are always hesitant to make risks. They always under, they always take fewer risks than w…”

“They shared, hey, look, you know, you're going to pitch anywhere between like a hundred, you know, a 150 times, like, and you're not going to get good at it until you're like halfway there. And I think that that's pretty accurate.”

“One of the challenges of my business is founders are pretty poor. They're cheap. They're poor. They go out of business. There's a higher churn rate.”

“The founders need to be aware of is that likely your investors have seen a lot more than you think they have, and they understand more than you think you do, and if you're always presenting like nothing's wrong, they're gonna start to think something's wrong, …”

“And I think when you talk about actual thought leadership, it's founder driven, it's not VC driven.”

“A founder, they may not love doing sales, but the feedback that they get by getting in front of a customer in hearing what message resonates with them. Are they going to buy if they don't buy why? You know, what is their reason for not buying and getting that …”

“So a lot of the way you're defined in the market as an investor is how you treat those people you don't invest in.”

“The pitch meeting is probably the worst possible environment, in my opinion, to really get to know somebody, you know, and I'm sure everyone would say that it's a necessary part of the process, so that's okay.”

“Fundraising is such a big thing when you know, being an intrapreneur, I come across some founders just like, I just want to operate companies, and I don't want to raise funds, and thinking that fundraising is our job, which I don't totally agree with it, but, …”

“No investment happens right away on the spot. There are a few things that we need to do, including the due diligence, as you pointed out, so there's a process to it, but the very, you know, next step to an introduction is probably a good follow-up call, and th…”

“One of the, you know characteristics of a founder I guess is also the naivety, like, you know, not knowing enough to believe in your stupid visions of the future. And you know, if you knew enough, like, and if you knew every detail of what would happen, you pr…”

“And in all honesty, I don't think investors really want to be that involved in your company. And they shouldn't because they've portfolios to run, not a company.”

“Not just talking about what we, what has been done, which is such the playbook, you know, the sort of like the funding announcements are sort of like the we're in blank, and we're in X, and we're in Y, and well, so is everybody else. That kind of steady drumbe…”

“Ironically, for founders that are driving innovation in their own categories so magnificently, there's very little innovation appetite in the marketing formula, largely because it's not their purview. And because the folks, they don't have the sort of that the…”

“Most founders have wonderful brand instincts. They do, because they're, they've narrated, they know their plot twists, they know their enemy, they know the moral of the story, they don't articulate it that way.”

“It's a disastrous noise. Values can't come back. You have to start from the foundation, you know, once, I mean, we've heard of a lot of startup examples blowing up, you know, because once you reach a certain size, it's impossible to, you know, sort of revert.”

“We don't sell directly to founders. Founders have no money. Researchers who are trying to commercialize do not have money.”