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Emmons: Swept wasted months chasing VC over business fundamentals

Shane Emmons · Building Trustworthy AI: Navigating the Challenges and Future of Agentic Software with Shane Emmons · Nov 4, 2025 · at 33:37

Shane Emmons, CEO of Swept, discusses early strategic mistakes and how focusing on core business execution proved more effective for fundraising than chasing investors directly.

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“We started out bootstrapping, and then we got it in our minds that we're a startup. We need to go get raised venture capital, and I think we spent Three to four months too focused on trying to raise venture capital and not enough focus on building good fundamentals in the business. Once we recognize that and went back and built good fundamentals in business in the business, we had investors pull us in and get excited about us”

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