venture capital

“Cause as soon as you start doing that, your customer no longer is your customers, the board of directors, and you start making choices that don't really serve your customers as much.”

“Raising venture capital, obviously, as you know, is not for everybody. But you have to be in position to use that capital purely for acceleration. Like for us, it can't be just like experimental cash.”

“The general atmosphere for angel investing has become worse. And of course, VC is even more so like, I mean, they're trying to be really fast with following the market.”

“There's all kinds of academic studies that the returns are that are very comparable to the private equity venture in many cases, even better.”

“Like I don't want VC money or anything like that. I'm looking for actual people who can add strategic value. So whether it's entrepreneurs or people in like EO and YEC with myself or YPO and then, like, influences, partner referrals, and advisors.”

“Financial cycles are cyclical, but innovation is pretty steady, so you want to invest at a steady pace year after year, and you know, not kind of chase the financial markets in this business.”

“24.6 US million US dollars.”

“And I don't think this is the normal way to be an entrepreneur. I really believe a company should do money, you know before everything else.”

“I think that the space is extremely crowded, right? I can understand the reluctance that these people have because there are so many companies sort of trying to do something similar, it's really hard to predict who the winner is going to be.”

“I've turned down a lot of money in venture capital. Most recently half a million.”

“I think there's an inversion of risk, and here's what it is, if you have Other sophisticated venture capital, super angels, high net worth individuals in your round, and something along the lines of what you described occurs, where there's an exit, but for som…”

“Yeah, I would say for most of the VCs I met, and it's also the case for us, we are looking at somewhere around 100,000 dollars at a monthly recording revenue which would translate to somewhere around a million ARR.”

“Nobody, nobody invests like that. The shark tank one hour, I'm going to make a decision on the spot. It doesn't happen. So people make investment by committee.”

“I think you find that a lot of a lot of players in the venture space in South Africa are looking for post-revenue opportunities, you know, typically series A.”

“I think I've raised about 20 rounds of venture capital over the last 20 years. I've participated in every round and will continue to participate in any time I ask outsiders for money, I tend to think I should be putting my own money alongside it.”

“It's not as though we don't have sales goals and but we don't have to do Short-sighted, stupid things with big customers, you know, because we're trying to hit a number for the day or the month or the week or the quarter or whatever.”

“They kind of break down our customer set into two different persona types. They're the types that are like VC later. They just kind of want to put off raising equity. And they're the types that are VC never. They're just like, they just want to run the busines…”

“So out of 10 investments, you needed two, you know, home runs or like two, 10 axes. Basically you needed six to kind of get your money back, you know, kind of math kind of things. And you knew that you were going to have at least two that were just complete wa…”

“And so this one, we have about a hundred and ten million from venture capital. In the company over the last 10 years.”

“Raising a VC, a big VC round will not be healthy for us. It will put some pressure on the company, which will kind of push us into growing in a non-organical way, because we've built this very delicate balance between the team members and how we grow.”

“Our Customers pay for a fair point of our growth and we can use venture capital really to accelerate and not to sort of, yeah, exactly to support.”

“For the longest time, almost a year, I self-financed it. And then we, we've now raised three million of traditional funds from VCs and folks like that.”

“And so, Q-three of 20 15 was just the tail end of a period when valuations of growth tech companies were inversely correlated with cash burn. The more you burned, the higher you were valued, because there was almost an exclusive focus on growth. Now it's about…”

“We sold that company to the nation's second largest medical transcription firm in for how much? Yeah, it was a fifteen million dollar exit. That was a company that had no venture capital.”

“This is liquid venture capital. So these tokens represent not even equity in most cases, but they represent kind of an exposure to a startup project.”

“Frankly, most of them lose money. You know, and you'll, you're reading a lot of layoffs and stuff in ad tech. That's because a lot of them signed up with a venture capital fund wanted to grow really fast and sell it. And so there was never profit built into th…”

“So over the last four years since launching, I, we've raised over forty million in VC funding.”

“You'll anything that a VC touches or like tech crunch, which they basically use to lobby, they'll articulate and say, yeah, you want a 12 month payback period. Why? Well, if you don't focus on getting your money back instantly, guess whose money you then need …”

“In every round, you know, think of it as a 30% dilution event because your investor is you know, they want to own a certain percent of their company. That's usually about, you know, again, people give ranges of the series A level about they want to own 20% aft…”

“And while most people think these guys invest with the primary goal is to show a big win, the primary goal is not to look stupid.”

“The other people who show growth do it by spending tens of millions of dollars to grow ten million a year. In other words, their sales and marketing budgets tend to be bigger than their revenue.”

“And fight for a VC five years from initial investment to halloworld, not an IPO, but the first product built on the platform is way too long. And of course the VCs are calling us now that we've developed it, but they tend to have a very short timeframe.”

“If the venture capital or PE is involved, then they're going to want to protect their interests and get paid. And there's almost always going to be a pretty big lawyer and CP, CPA bill attached to it.”

“I would say stop listening to VCs.”

“With the exception that no business you cared about was ever built that way. Like every business, every, all the top names in the industry are built through word of mouth. And, but no one talks about that because it's not possible to be funded with capital. An…”

“Your investors are always telling you to grow and telling you, okay, you know, spend that money down. If you have venture backed and venture backing they want signal on that money. So that money needs to produce Drastic results for them for the model to work. …”

“First to raise money from venture capital, you need to have a focused business, you know, just doing software development.”

“We've grown to a point where we're not dependent on venture capital. We're not dependent on outside revenues or outside funding sources. And we've built a profitable growing business that no longer requires that kind of funding.”

“It also is a, I feel a job that maybe is a better fit later in life. When you've had enough experience where You're, as opposed to the startup world where you're working 120 hour weeks you just don't have a 120 hour weeks in, in BC world. So if you're ever goi…”

“So we want to kind of steer clear of doing it the VC way and, you know, try and maintain control and keep it that way.”

“You know, we know there are some major competitors that are getting 30 and forty million dollars in VC.”

“VCs typically only invest in white males from Stanford.”

“We're in fact, we're kind of anti VC at this point. Everybody else in our industry is sold out and we're the only ones that haven't.”

“Maybe take venture capital. I don't know. It's, it was hard. Bootstrapping was fun, but I could have accelerated a lot quicker.”

“VCs aren't typically telling people to do that, but it's a really great option for companies that are sharing enough capital where they don't need to worry about being diluted.”

“Most people don't realize that once you take venture capital, you are stuck. You're going for an exit, and that's what everybody wants.”

“About several months ago, we passed about forty million dollars in annual recurring revenue, and most companies that have gotten to this point, you know, they've raised 80, 90, a hundred million dollars in capital. We've only raised about fourteen million doll…”

“You've got a business that's doing, say, you know, three to ten million. Private equity aren't interested in them, in that they're too small. Venture, venture capital aren't interested in them, in that, you know, if they're 10 years old, if they haven't hockey…”

“VCs have to sell the story, like the ego story associated with raising capital. Otherwise, no one would raise capital because the economics rarely make sense.”

“There are many, you know, I would say way too many companies outside Sort of being funded by venture dollars that will never break even. You know, it's kind of ridiculous that you can order an ice cream, pay one dollar for it. It'll get delivered to you in 15 …”

“There's a lot of pattern matching people talk about in venture, and that pattern usually is in people like themselves, right?”

“In Brazil we have lots of VCs and early stage money, and we don't have more funds specific to growth money or to stages that are later stages.”

“Marketplace solutions are really a combination of the two. So you might be looking at an exit that's more like, Two to three times two to three times revenue or three to five times versus the 10 X that most VCs are looking for.”

“Oh, never to raise VC money. I would have bootstrapped this from the start.”

“Once you start raising capital, you either better be raising capital every 18 months, or something or it sends off bad, bad, bad signals.”

“What's happened in the ecosystem is that just the external optics of raising, you know, millions of dollars look so good that people like, okay, I'm just going to do it just for the heck of it. And that, that puts you in a trajectory that is not natural to you…”

“If investors are sinking all that money into one industry, they're growing the industry and making it easier for you to find new customers. You turn their resources into your resources when you join the space that they're pouring money into.”

“Look in a second, it doesn't matter if you raise a dollar or a hundred million. The second you've raised was someone else's money. They can tell you they're patient. They can tell you they love you, but ultimately when their LPs come knocking and saying a deca…”

“It's not necessarily something to be proud of. It just means that you didn't actually generate enough revenue yourself to cover the costs that you had.”

“As VCs invest, they get the next, they get the top priority of share class. And as you go down that ladder of Priority with VCs, you find that the founders are the second to the bottom, and the team members are at the bottom, and that's ridiculous to me.”

“Either I'd have an amazing conversation with an entrepreneur and just be really jealous that I wasn't doing that. Or I'd have just a horrible conversation with an entrepreneur and say, man, where did that hour of my life go? And I'll never get that back. And s…”

“We are interested in taking small sips of capital and small sips of outside leverage to grow the business rather than, Kind of take the traditional venture capital approach. And we want to build a business that is aligned around disrupting this business and bu…”

“So I think if you are in a category where there's a lot of competition and if some of your competition already funded, it's probably a better idea to get funding and scale rapidly because VCs are going to look for other players in the category. And if you are …”

“We have owners, and we do not need money from venture capitals. We pay everything out of our, of the money we earn.”

“If I were to go out and raise money now, you know, I would be sort of resetting the goalposts for what it would mean to be a successful exit, right? You know you can do some quick math and figure out roughly where our valuation is now. And if we were to raise,…”

“But I think the problem when money pours into markets like that is you get actually companies concentrated more on how can they raise money and how can they drive sales and less concentrated on how can they actually deliver value to their customers.”

“It's hard to make the jump from angel to series A now is almost impossible because the VCs have all moved downstream to the big money place.”

“At the moment, the discussions are still going on with us, for instance, and nobody has said that, okay, we will postpone or something like that.”

“Right now, you're basically it's impossible to raise money right now, because all that, you can't, you don't have the in-person and whatnot, so we're in a position, we're not worried about raising capital.”

“Venture capital allows you to do is act irrationally in the marketplace, and that ability is what gives you the competitive advantage. Because we have this capital, we can do experiments and developments not tied to a more traditional bootstrap model.”

“I think the expected value, probably the highest expected value is working in venture. Then it's probably working at Google. And then it's probably starting a venture back to business that has the potential for a unicorn outcome.”

“And I think it's the right path also for 99.99% of businesses. There is like the basis point of businesses where it makes so much sense. You've got a huge market. You can have a high return on capital into sales and marketing, et cetera. But for most businesse…”

“If you're coming in at one and a half million pre, Then a 50 X return is, is the company sells for 75. Now those kind of outcomes are much more doable and much more frequent than you know, you, I, something selling for seven hundred and fifty million or a bill…”

“They're sort of levered for growth, right? It's like they raise as much money as we can as quickly as we can. And in order to grow as much as we can and like, let's not, let's forget about, you know, profits or sustainability or really anything. It's just the …”

“Like if you take a high valuation, 1012, fifteen million dollars, and you raise a bunch of money, that's, that closes off your opportunity to exit for 10, 20, 30, forty million dollars. You simply won't be able to. Like there'll be, usually there are restricti…”

“But as a first approximation, if you're a venture partner in a firm, you tend to tend to have economics primarily in the deals that, or exclusively in the deals that you lead. Whereas when you're a general partner, you have economics in the entire portfolio. I…”

“The idea that in principle, you could fund a, the development of a protocol through selling some of its currency that is, Then integral to the running, to the integral to the operation of the protocol I think is a really fascinating idea. And I think it will b…”

“We were pitching probably 400 VCs, basically.”

“Don't ever listen to the feedback that VCs give you. It's mostly optimized for you to just leave them alone and refer other people to them. It's not real advice. Like mostly don't take it.”

“I look at most most very successful exits They'll still go and raise from the biggest venture companies on their next one. Rarely do they self fund from the observations I've had.”

“The value of the network is then given programmatically to whoever helped us build it, right? Like not some employer, not some, you know, stooge VC, you know, sitting back collecting all the value, right? It's the most fair way to build a two-sided marketplace…”

“But the second you take a million dollars of investor money that you've got to be growing at your stage way more than a hundred percent year over year. I mean, you should have taken three grand a month up to 30,000 dollars a month in a 12 month period.”

“The idea is that the service revenue feeds the beast in lieu of venture capital while we build up the recurring platform revenue”

“The dilution and the strings that can come with the early funding, It can be very dilutive to founders, so I would advise against that if you have the financial wherewithal to not have to do that.”

“If you can go as long as possible and eat as much dirt, if not more dirt than we did I think that you'd be far better off as a business and as a human being than just succumbing to capital right out the gate without an MVP or initial idea.”

“We also know that 90% of all tech acquisitions are sub hundred million, and we're cognizant of getting in bed with a VC that would Make us grow or force mandates on us from a hiring standpoint that would move a little faster than we're ready for.”

“And I mean, if I look back, I think we sold too early. Yeah. Or we could have raised more to a fairly good valuation at that time. And back then in 2017. And I think we have grown much, we could have grown faster with more VC money inside.”

“And there were three VCs who I did not mention. I love these people, but I did not mention them. And the three VCs said Hey, look, love it. It's very emotional. You should know you will be dead to Sequoia. When you write this, you'll be dead to a VC”

“VCs in general, as a macro point tend to make money by convincing entrepreneurs to give up everything.”

“Raising capital is, in my opinion, is not something to be celebrated. You're diluting yourself and you're becoming more of essentially an employee, right? For your VCs and the board that you're building.”

“We're saying no, pretty much daily to all these VCs and there's no current plan to raise any”

“Cause I don't have a formula for growth where X dollars equals Y customers. I need to figure that out before I take any more serious money.”

“So in the past few months, we talked with I guess, Over 60 of the top VCs in in US and in Europe.”

“So we actually held a webinar for all the VCs that wanted to invest in us, but we didn't ever really talk to them.”

“I think, like, what this is like is when you come with, like, a strong narrative, which is not about, like, creating a new product, but, like, creating a new category.”

“A bootstrapper who only spends what his customers pay him or her is sustainable. They will outlast the VC back competitor every time, and they will probably win every time.”

“You're going to raise two million out of 10 pre. Whatever your buddies that you, but you take your buddy, your old boss's money, whatever. Great. Great for you. Then you're going to keep growing revenue and you're going to get a six million dollar acquisition …”

“If they put me on a billion dollar track, you know, billionaire bust, I think it's still okay. As a first time founder, solo founder now you know, if I'm put on that track and, you know, what are the odds on day one, right? Like 90% of going bust and like, I d…”

“I'm still, I still have very much an advocate for bootstrap as long as you can, until you get product market fit through, through getting product market fit after your product, product market fit, raise capital and efficient means when, you know, unit economic…”

“We've raised about a three million dollars to date. So no VCs, you know, more kind of friends and family and industry insiders.”

“I think raising money in my mind is a form of de-risking. A venture. I think some people think that it like increases the risk, but for us, I see it as like a form of de-risking.”

“I mean, if you're going to say what are the different approaches, it's a lot easier to go raise money from VC than it is to go and pre-sell customers on a product. That's like, you know, a straight up answer on that one.”

“So like when we started the company, we did speak with VCs to think that maybe we can fundraise on a deck before we have a product or traction or anything. That was obviously a big fail. So we ended up raising form angels.”

“Tyler's, it's way easier and less risky to build a five million dollar SaaS company than it is to go try and raise five hundred million and build a billion dollar business that you own like one percent of at the time you try an IPO.”

“We see people raising money right now on very little revenue. Compared to, you know, what was going on during the pandemic for sure.”

“A product where you need to grow really fast and there's going to be a clear winner in the market, and you need a lot of money to get there really fast is a venture-scale business, and that's where Cobalt fits. To get all of those suppliers onboarded and to bu…”

“We are thinking about raising, but we want to get to four to five million as soon as possible. Then we start to be interesting for VCs, which are interesting for us as well. So, that's our first milestone, four to five million ARR.”

“We were able to raise twenty million dollars the first year, just based on hype and the internet, and back then, VCs were not so critical. Like, there were no metrics, there was nothing. You just kind of had hype and a vision.”

“So as the agency, I'd lived that problem for 20 years, and more funding wasn't going to help me You know, define the problem any better.”

“I think the most important factor is to get VCs on board that open doors that have a portfolio of companies that we can plug the solution in. I think all those factors are much more important than only the valuation.”

“It's almost a problem that you have revenue because then people want to harp on you about how low the revenue is when really you should just eliminate the revenue and just focus on user and engagement growth”

“The second you raise, you go on an accelerator, and you go on the VC path, I mean, it is on. It is growth at all costs. It's like, you've got to hit it, and if you don't, your optionality is like nil. It's very small.”

“Well, we have never raised venture capital. I mean, we had some like family and friends.”

“Two things happen when you raise a lot of money early. You know, one is you lose real control, operational control of your business but two, you really, you know, own a small fraction of that business, and in all likelihood, You know, you're going to continue …”

“We had everything from everyone from angel investors, single angel investors, all the way up to angel funds, all the way up to micro VCs, big VCs. We even had SBA lenders, government organizations”

“I'm about 10 X lifetime.”

“What I learned at the end of it, by the time I went and raised money was boy, I could have got a lot done a lot faster. Had I just gone out and raised money to begin with.”

“The talent density goes up astronomically after you've raised money, you know, with some big valuation numbers or big checks because people want to come and work. Your firm, and you are inviting your friends as well.”

“Because what they're going to do is give you a pile of money, and then they're going to tell you, go fast, and they want you to either fail fast, or keep on piling in more money, and take away ownership.”

“Like the economy right now, everybody's puckering up. It's like seven times revenue is, is where they want to kind of max out at.”

“They will always look at the prior term sheet. So if you've already set precedents that you did a small secondary already, it's way easier to get a bigger one the next time. So like, I would argue as soon as you can ask for, even if you're only raising a milli…”

“You will definitely get nowhere close to the value on the services. Right. And we went through this at vanilla when we were talking to VCs. They're like, listen, like 40% of the businesses services, not SAS. We value it at zero. Right. In, in, in the fundraisi…”

“I think before you really take on venture capital, you really have to know your business model. Your business model has to be repeatable, and when I say business model, I'm primarily talking about Demand generation. Can you reliably, repeatably generate demand…”

“I think that the rule is debt before equity. If you can get it, it's cheaper. Equity capital is super expensive. You can't get debt until you already have revenue. Once you can get debt, you should get debt. You stack equity on top of it. But even if you just …”

“I think if you're nailing these three things, then you can keep growing sustainably. So the first thing is having the right people. We've got the right people around you. You're not over headcount, and you're cool. Having solid unit economics. If you don't hav…”

“Angels have, we found, have been the most helpful in terms of helping us figure out what to do with the business, and just being there to support as you go down this list, less helpful more cash, less helpful, so, and also more expectations as you go down”

“I've seen so many times where they say yes to you at first, and then they will retrade you, so your terms get worse at the very, very end, right? So a yes is never a hundred percent.”

“For the vast majority of SaaS founders, they're not the right fit, right? They only want to invest in a very small slice of the world of SaaS, right? The super high growth, you know, huge companies you know, and there's the, that 90, I don't know, you might kn…”

“So the more money I have, you know, it's the less risk, I think, for the company.”

“Significantly more risk, the more money you raise. Significantly more risk. You have to grow faster. Everyone burns more. You lose your creativity because everyone wants to throw money at problems. I would argue it's way riskier to raise a lot of money.”

“And that was the difference I think, by the way, between a PE and a VC approach in these last several years, PEs are much more disciplined. And I think that, That serves things well now in a slowdown.”

“I think we were one of the fortunate ones that got approached by quite a lot of VCs since we didn't raise anything prior to that date. And for them to kind of like sweeten the deal, they suggested that themselves.”

“I always tell them you got to get secondary, even on your first round.”

“That million dollars can get to about ten million dollars reasonably with, we have really good confidence that we can get to ten million where we're really going to need our venture backers to get behind us is growing from 10 to a hundred.”

“Because at the end of the day, as a software engineer, I was building too much. Because ultimately when I went and put this in front of VCs, I had an app. I had a text messaging system. I had a payments company. And what I was being told was, You have too…”

“VCs try to give you too much money because they're basically trying to run down the fund. They're trying to write big checks. If they tell you they're going to give you a million, they're going to try to make you take five million because they're just basicall…”

“My strongest piece of advice, try to delay venture capital or any kind of capital raise money as far as you can. Sometimes it's hard. One way to mitigate that temporarily is, is by selling PS, right?”

“If you think it's going to take you six months to raise funding or nine months especially in today's environment, double it. It's not an easy environment to be raising venture, venture capital in today.”

“The odds that a VC alone is going to change the trajectory of your business is close to nil.”

“If you're gonna meet with VCs, you're, you are pitching. Whether you think you're pitching or not, you're pitching. VCs, private equity, whatnot. There's no, like, coffee chats. Like, they're making an evaluation of you down the road or now as to whether they'…”

“If you really genuinely think that you could build a hundred million dollar business, then you're probably going to want to go out to venture money because you're going to need to raise two or three times. And debt probably won't help you do that over the long…”

“Venture capital is not, For everyone, I'd say, in fact, for a very small percentage of founders and companies, I'd say a lot of SaaS can be built without venture capital and should be built without venture capital.”

“Term sheets are much less favorable now, so expect a lot of things in there. If you see anti-dilution, for example, things like coupons as well, it's basically investors just trying to protect from that downside risk but one of the ones we still clear from is …”

“I don't think that SaaS companies are always a good fit for venture capital. And I'd say a lot more often than not, they're not a good fit for venture capital. There's so many small problems in the world that don't have, aren't, just don't have the explosive g…”

“When someone starts a company, if someone gives them five million bucks, I think they make poor decisions. If the only way to hire people is through customers paying you on contracts, that means you have to actually build something that people want.”

“If I had raised venture money, I would have never been able to do the cool and fun stuff that I currently do now, me and my co-founder, because we can't just go fuck off to, you know, Fifi Islands for two months.”

“We always knew that we wanted to remain undiluted and keep as much of our shares as possible and also make sure that anybody that we brought on and offered equity to would feel like really bought into the company. And so that was a big part of not taking on VC…”

“After the seed round, we pivoted ideas and had to raise a million dollars in safe kind of funding, and we made a conscious choice to not, you know, work with VCs, not work with other entities, and raise from users of the product, so top real estate teams”

“The single greatest mistake that founders make is TAM. They overestimate how big their opportunity is, and then they go raise super diluted venture capital money”

“What we learned the hard way is that VCs are always less active, in our case, based on our experience, than they claim to be, and in the end of the day, they care less about money that they spend on you, and they care more about the potential profits, and even…”

“Because I value the equity far more than I value the debts. Very simple. Like, why would you do that if you think your business is growing and your equity is growing, arguably your amount of equity you're going to be giving up is, is far, is worth far more tha…”

“What I actually am saying is, if you're going to go give up control, get, take, Cash as well. Don't give up control and cash.”

“The most difficult is to convince a business engine that work in the industry because you have so much learning and perceptions about your company rather than VCs are just Passing deals.”

“We did double track between VC and NP, and P was much more adapted for the next phase of the dummy, doing more and more M&A, consolidation,”