investor

“Yes, 100, around 100. So we contacted a bit more than that, but knowing that some of them are mostly for the next round”

“Because it's easier being a female. At least they remember you know, and this is something I value very much. You know, at least you're in, you could be top of the mind because they know you.”

“You should be moving like groups of investors, not just one investor and another one individually, because they normally look for who else is investing or who is leading the investment round.”

“So this always irritates me that investors are not always aligned with the best interests of their companies and smart CEOs, I think are getting the message now and are a little bit better about pushing back with how they know their businesses should grow.”

“Why would I outsource tech when I'm a tech company? Like that looks horrible. I think to an, any investor be like, wait a minute, you want me to invest in something you have no control over. No, that doesn't sound good at all.”

“I think you create a shareholder agreement the first time you sell equity to someone who is not an actual operator. If, for example, I bring on a venture capitalist, there should be an agreement with that person where there's a shareholder agreement with them,…”

“What I've seen is like, if you show investors that people are voting with their wallet, that's the ultimate validation and will also increase your valuation massively.”

“If there's anything that stops it, probably that entrepreneur hits the limit on what they've lined out legally in the round, and they have to pause the process and figure out how to navigate that with investors.”

“If you go back and you look at the materials you put together to talk with investors about, if you take a look at it and it reads like a sales pitch for the product, it's time to scrap that and start again. Investors are looking for what the upside is. For the…”

“If I was an investor in a business and I wasn't actively part of the management, I probably would want an audit. You'd want to know that somebody is reviewing the financials for accuracy and reliability.”

“If we didn't give them stuff up front, what we would be concerned about was, well, they're going to come back and say, we care about ARR computed in this way, compute it in a specific way for us, which one is bad because that's just a lot of extra work. If you…”

“Anytime investors give you term sheets, sort of everything is negotiable. There are standard kind of boilerplate term sheets that are, you know, this is the types of shares they get. These are the voting rights they get. These are their pro rata rights, all th…”

“Investors are coming in and they're putting good money in. You can't be pulling out too big a chunk of your equity because They want that skin in the game.”

“In my experience with the investors is they don't really know what we do, nor do they care to on any specific level. They're very, very, very good at their craft around finance and operationalizing the business. They just want to know that they can bring in a …”

“I think a lot of investors as well want to see that a company can survive its founder. I think that's a measure of success for investors as well.”

“What I tell my investors is if we run out of cash and we can't raise more, I'm not putting another dollar in. I'm sorry. I'm walking away.”

“I mean, when speaking to a lot of investors, if you don't put your stakes in, people won't believe you.”

“I think there's three buckets in which investors value companies. They value your cash flows, your revenue, your profits. they value your data and, you know, your customer information and everything, the data surrounding that. And they value your technolog…”

“A role as an investor makes you extremely pessimistic cause your daily job is to say no to ideas.”

“Founders aren't super excited to build in the consumer space a lot. People are realizing that if I can't monetize a hundred million user base, might as well just wait it out because any B to C play requires you to spend marketing money and an investor isn't re…”

“I think partners screwing each other over or investors screwing each other and screwing over people they've invested in. I think that's a lot more common than people realize.”

“When you've raised money from investors, you don't have time to stop and fix your problems. You have to just keep growing for the purpose of making your valuation look like it's going up so that your investors can get new LPs into their next fund.”

“So, you know, 99% of people are ignoring ads in the world, which kind of transposes to when you're approaching interview investors and any sort of new thing in general is that you're supposed to have like a 99% failure rate, and so this concept of volume, goin…”

“Every time you play hardball, you are You're virtually guaranteeing that the person that you have played hardball with will have an opportunity to return the favor.”

“They have felt like that if there was any crack in their armor, any reality in what they had to say, That they lose support, investor support, team support, whatever. Right. And so they oftentimes not only found themselves drifting into a lot of not so great m…”

“Lots of search deals are perceived as MBI's historically. They have been. Now the more attractive ones for investors are actually where you have at least a very good tier, second tier management. So while someone may go in to run the business, there is still q…”

“I learned a lot about how to not do business and how to not invest in companies and why I should never have investors and why I should never have a team.”

“And you usually get stressed out or panicked or whatever, because you think society is expecting something from you. Oh my God. What will my investors say? They gave me all this money. They're expecting X or Y. What will my parents say? Or my friends, I have a…”

“And I feel like transparency is not really the norm in early stage startups because the goal is to pretend publicly that everything's fine so that you can make your investors happy. You can get more clients, but privately, typically things are shit show.”

“I do see a lot of entrepreneurs that look at that relationship as I need to sell something to the investors. I need to show them always that everything is, is good. And that's, it's, I would say it's actually a small part of it.”

“And so if I can't explain it to your grandmother or you can't explain it to me, you're never going to be able to explain it to an investor.”

“People like myself are building MVPs in days for back practically free so that investors are not necessary anymore.”

“I will never raise from investors again.”

“But I'm not looking to get investors because I've done that before, and that, I think, was a huge reason why my business failed. I give it fifty-fifty. 50% was my fault. 50% was the investors because they just didn't give me the money that they signed the cont…”

“I could very easily launch another software brand, but I've learned the lesson that I don't want investors in my life because investors were half of the reason why my business failed.”

“As you put the energy into talking to investors, you're not thinking about growing your business. You're not thinking about how you can make better pictures, how you can have better posts, how you can get a higher percentage of people that, that that stay with…”

“And just because you go for investors doesn't mean that that's going to get you out of stagnation. Just because you get money from other people doesn't mean you're going to magically hit those 30 doors or you're going to become the number one in the country.”

“It's good to be conservative while you're presenting, but be much more aggressive when you're Actually delivering. So obviously you need to have plan A, plan B, plan A to, you know, present it to the investors and obviously doing much more than that as your re…”

“Being a founder is so much harder. Investors have their own worries. We've done both. You got to raise money. You got to create a product that invest, that entrepreneurs like, but the existential dread of being an entrepreneur, of waking up and not knowing whe…”

“Between you and me, investors are really good at ruining businesses and your life, but some people need investment money to be able to scale what they're doing.”

“The thing about investors is they will change your business, whether you like it or not.”

“Saying we've grown organically. Doesn't mean anything for a B to B SaaS founder that's trying to raise money from investors because those investors want to see that you have the potential of being a billion dollar company, right?”

“Once you start to raise your entire day for weeks or months on end is going to be going and reaching out to investors. So you won't be able to talk to customers and you won't be able to have meetings with your team.”

“There's such an excitement and frenzy today to invest in those companies that are generating millions of dollars of new revenue out the gate that before wasn't considered possible until a company got to the seed or even series A level.”

“One of the ways that this really bubbles up is when your investors are not happy. They invested the money on you and now they're not happy with how the company's being run, that the company is not making money and so on. And that's when all this could surface …”

“The only annoying thing that impacted us that ended up killing us was that one of our investors signed an agreement and then didn't pay us all of the money he promised.”

“Some of those investors are not just great pickers. They have the ability to create great companies. Because they put their full weight behind them.”

“And I think they're probably in all honesty, more people that are cut out to be investors than there are entrepreneurs”

“Most investors say they hate the idea of a middleman who's taking a success fee, but then they still go and take all of those messages from the middleman and instead of the founder who wouldn't have to pay a fee if they didn't need a middleman.”

“So if you just rely on your experience from 10 years ago, even though you may have been successful, I think that's actually makes you like really dangerous because now you're like credible and wrong. It's one thing when you're just wrong and you don't have cre…”

“We started pitching the deals to investors, you know, all, they all came to the DC area and everybody that saw it was so impressed they wanted in, so we got to choose which team we wanted to work with, and that's what we did. Took nine months, by the way.”