investor

“You are the biggest expert in your company. Don't let an investor convince you that you're further along than you are.”

“There's only one skill that an investor can iterate and improve on in the short term. It's hard to know whether you're a good investor for years, but it's easy to know whether you're good at this very quickly. And that skill is closing.”

“In reality, two things are different. Investors, I don't think for a good reason, significantly bias for second time founders. Significant bias towards second time founders. And there's something you have to understand. Second, if you've been in the valley for…”

“An A investor gives you money, signs paperwork when you want them to, and shuts the fuck up. That's an A. There's a lot of room below an A. There's not a lot of room above.”

“If you're in Lehigh, Utah, you may as well be in Bucharest, Romania when it comes to investors. Like, it doesn't matter. Once you're outside of the Bay Area, you're just outside, and there's nothing really matters.”

“When we went out and raised our first few rounds of funding a ton of the investors out there, you know, they would basically give us a feedback of, Hey, we think you're really, you know, you've built this really cool product. It's clearly, you know, required a…”

“If you go back to every, you know, time we've sat in an investor's office and raised a round of capital, you know, going back five, six years ago, the investors would say something along the lines of, you know, AI is not here right now for sales, but it will b…”

“What does it take to raise a pre-seed round? It's mostly about the team and the idea. Usually there is either nothing yet in terms of revenue or very little. It's usually pre-product market fit. So what investors really want to know at this very early stage is…”

“I always, my view of it is show your investors your board deck that you use to run your own company. And if you're not willing to do that, then that's a problem because you're running a company differently.”

“One is, when you're pitching take advice from people one stage investors that are one stage forward or back from wherever you're pitching. Just go, you know, you're pitching people for a normal B. Go, go talk to a few people that would normally be C and D rais…”

“I, my view is don't take money from people if you don't think you can hit their investment goals. If you're misaligned with your investors, that's gonna be trouble at some point.”

“Now, no one at the Series C level reads the cold email, okay, because they all assume that companies at this stage know everybody.”

“The investor really likes the platform story to be told, and you can keep talking about the platform for the right audience, but that's not how customers will purchase or fund the project.”

“They want to hear that voice actually if they're good investors. But if you don't take the opportunity to share that voice, you just take what they say and go run doing it.”

“This deferential relationship to your investors, it is It can be subtly toxic if you let it go on for too long. It can be, they don't know, and they will even many of them will even encourage it. They're used to it. They're used to this slightly Imperial relat…”

“I saw countless careers that were ended by 98, 99 by learning the wrong lessons. Yeah. And I think we have an entire generation of investors and some founders That need to learn new lessons about how hard it is to actually play this, you know, startup ecosyste…”

“Taking 40 K and getting into an early, you know, relationship with a research analyst firm, whether it's one of the big guys, or there's some really great, small, niche boutique firms that specialize in certain categories of software. It's really worth it to i…”

“If you're not growing at least two X year over year, it's pretty hard to get investors really excited. At least until, let's say, 20, twenty five million in, in ERR.”

“Investors get diversification by investing in 20 of you. You don't have to be diversified, right? Diversification is their problem, not your problem.”

“I don't think anymore that investors are so myopic That they're only valuing companies based off of ARR. You will get credit for those alternative streams of revenue as well, but it's important to clearly label it and not try to make it into ARR when it's not …”

“Investors prefer, actually, if anyone thinks investors don't prefer bootstrap companies, you're wrong.”

“When I say that fundraising is like hiring, what I mean is, if you can, try to apply the same logic I just shared about hiring a teammate to fundraising, right? This is someone that's going to join your company, Albeit part-time, not full-time. Although a lot …”

“And if your investors aren't helping recruit for you, I don't think they're doing their job.”

“You know, sort of, hey, let's tap into our investors, VCs, and they will help, but they're not going to continuously help because at some point they'll just say like, yeah, I made some interest for you, bro. Like, you know, the reason I invested in you guys is…”

“So when talking to investors about these rounds that happened and what we saw in the market, actually most of the rounds that happened have been more towards three to five X in growth.”

“Not so many companies will eventually exit at several billion dollars or even or even, even more than that. And I think that that is something that investors are starting to factor in more than they did that some years ago.”

“Any founder you talk to can remember every single investor who said no to them. And they hold a special kind of, I don't want to use the word hatred, but they hold a special something for those people and they desire to prove them wrong.”

“And one of the things very practically I wish I'd done is build a database of your addressable market. Now, I don't mean that BS slide you show to investors that says your addressable market is like ten billion dollars or a trillion dollars. I mean the real on…”

“At the sort of final, you know, kind of the terminal point of your business, it's to produce a certain amount of cash that goes back to investors. Like, if you just, like, why would you give a dollar to something? It's because you want cash back at some point.…”

“And so they're not gonna give you credit because you're profitable. They're not gonna give you credit for lower growth because of macro issues. But what they will do is they get a little blind to hyper growth. Like they're so deaf because fewer companies are h…”

“If you guys have investors, they're, listen, they're right on many things. They're almost always wrong on a VP of sales.”

“If an investor sees a company with 10 or 20 salespeople and they've never let go a salesperson, that almost tells you something Tells you that something isn't working because it's unheard of, that every single salesperson works out.”

“If you can show an investor a slide, that's just like how you're approaching your customers. I think it goes a long way. It's not, you don't need to automate it. You don't need a ton of processes, just like a simple concept of what you're trying to do.”

“No one, no matter what anybody says, the only reason any investor cares about AI is because they want insane growth. They don't really care.”