venture capital

“You take ten million dollars from a VC, you know, you better be talking about, you know, a hundred million dollars at a minimum, you know, if you think you're going to get rich off the deal.”

“Venture capital, especially shrank up. But you know, and the markets were really rough there for a little while, but it actually forced more people into entrepreneurship than you might expect.”

“I think there's a huge reliance on outside funding now that's detrimental for the development of businesses in a sustainable way, because VCs, if they haven't been entrepreneurs themselves, may not understand how stressful it can be to grow that fast for long …”

“Depending on the type of product and the type of business that you're in, any good investor is going to want to make sure that you have proven your business first and you've grinded and you've sweated out and that, you know, the product, you know, there's a fi…”

“And you have more freedom because that's also another big difference from, you know, when you have business angels or private investors versus VCs that normally are more, you know, you have more limitations or you are, you have more rules to follow. And as an …”

“I cold emailed like a hundred of them. I would say about 75 of them. They didn't answer the first email. They didn't answer the second email. They didn't answer the third email. I stopped emailing.”

“The best introduction that you can get is from another investor who has co-invested with them and has been successful in that investment. Then the next is an investor, which they are close with, but you can also be introduced for sample by another startup. Whi…”

“More and more, I do see a lot of PE funds, a lot of VCs. I have friends in the PE industry, and they've also said, shared the same thing, which is that people are getting more comfortable doing deals without necessarily Making, you know, site visits and everyt…”

“So there's an uptick in folks, now that they have to stay at home, wanting to get their care, their regular care, their mental health, their chronic care, PCP care, care for their children. Pediatric care, right? From their home. When we were previously travel…”

“In order to raise that money, you have to pitch a story of like, how are you going to get this thing to a hundred million dollars in revenues? Like kind of the generic, you go raise a C round, an A round. One of the things that people might ask is like, what's…”

“We get more introductions from VCs when there's a specific utility, a specific use case that they want us to explore. So for example, if a B to B SaaS company has a growing receivables book, or if a hardware company needs, you know, more financing to for inven…”

“When you fundraise through venture capital there's generally a lot of caveats tied to you getting that money. And as a founder, you can give up a significant amount of control of your company. You generally have to give away board seats. You will likely have t…”

“The more I've gotten into the interviews, the more I've been like, damn, you know, raising money from VCs is just like, people think it's a good thing, but I I'm starting to disagree. I think it's not beneficial to have all that money thrown at you.”

“They need to generate high growth to justify a 10 X, 100 X return on their investment in these companies to go raise money for their next fund. Right. And it's like a lot of these investors, they're raising money too. And so, you know, they need to see you gro…”

“The investor's responsibility is to steward the investment. You know, the key word is like the investment, not the company, although they're very, you know, intertwined obviously in the success of the company is the success of the investment investor. Investor…”

“In SaaS where you feel that, hey, Funding from a VC is an optionality. If I do it, I will scale faster. If I don't do it, I will still have a path to profitability if I want to. And I think that's making SAS very exciting right now as well.”

“Good financing rounds are not happening anymore is what I've seen. I'm feeling that this will continue for another eight to 10 months as well.”

“I think the point where this is, you know, the most, the biggest threat that this happens, if you are looking at a company and you are in a due diligence process and you are not essentially have not signed the term sheet yet, or you have not essentially like s…”

“As a VC, you should support your portfolio company a thousand percent, but you should also not enforce You know, your thoughts or your DNA or what you think the business, the direction of the business should be heading onto the company either should be driven …”

“And nowadays Skype has real-time audio translation, so then you can talk to a VC phone in California in Spanish, and the other person will hear it in English because of Generative AI, and you don't even need to know English to pitch, and this will open a lot o…”

“As a founder, you're focused on one thing for a long period of time. But as a VC, you have thousands of companies coming to you every year and you get to see what trends are happening before they become a trend.”

“One of the things I realize is they are very hype driven. They are very I wish people were more different. They are all kind of operating the same path.”

“I think all VCs should be forced to start a company before they're allowed to be investors, because I think a lot of VCs who are just money people don't know what it's like to run a company, and so it's hard for them to align themselves emotionally with us, an…”

“There were times when I was in venture capital where we'd be making investment decisions, but I'd be conflicted as the board member representing the fund on certain decisions because, you know, I, you know, let's say we put in a million dollars and the next ro…”

“So the entrepreneurship and the idea with VC funding, you're compressing time into finding the success of failure faster.”

“The problem is in application, when you're given money too early before you maybe got your product market fit or other key customer listening metrics you are then trying to accelerate, because once you give the money, it's a timer. You have to get a return on …”

“And I'm a VC and I don't recommend a lot of people go VC. I do recommend people go bootstrap, or if you're not going to bootstrap and you want a little bit of money, go angel.”

“We raised about four and a half million and we have combined that with bootstrapping and a lot of our raises. So we have never done classic, You know, A round, B round, C round, because we'd have no VC money at all in the company by design. So we used family o…”

“Founders who go and take a bunch of venture capital in the beginning, it's amazing because it's a lot easier to grow quickly in the beginning with that. You can hire the right people. You can start off on a good foot. You don't have to Bootstrap. There's a mil…”

“No VC is writing a check to a startup that doesn't have financial advisory in intact. Like you have to, as a founder, you have to have a financial model. You have to have thought through your Revenue streams and the business plan. There has to be some like kin…”

“I think that like every experienced VC or investor can really grasp it, like from two or three slides, just like skimming them through. And you're spending maybe 10 seconds.”

“One of them being that you being able to convince them that this is a VC business. It means that this is, this has the potential to become a billion dollar company at some point. Even if it is like it's a 10% chance, that's what they are probably looking for. …”

“From what I understand talking to VCs is that they are also not trying to burn bridges. So even if they have some feedback for you or they don't think you will be able to take it positively, they'll hold it back.”

“I definitely think it's a global issue. I mean, there's Razio in North America. They've raised, I believe a hundred million dollars and it's the same thing, right? They don't have consolidation. When it comes to categories on their e-commerce brands, all aggre…”

“Venture capital is like you built the company. And then at the end you get the waterfall, you get tons of money. Well, people, if you're a small company, that's pretty much not going to happen. So you actually have to pay yourself.”

“It's not something I want to be involved in anymore. I did it once and didn't see the success I thought I would see, and I learned my lesson from that.”

“And also when it comes to venture, I think venture's heyday is kind of over, at least for now. I think there's too much money has entered the space, so too many companies that shouldn't have been funded have been funded.”

“If you're an early stage startup and you're a new founder, they're going to spend more time doing due diligence that, and you need to be prepared for that. You know, you're a founder of a startup that's had several successful exits and have had several success…”

“If your end in mind is to have a, you know, a lifestyle business or a business you know, give to your family or a business that provides you the income and the freedom that you want, don't go raise capital.”

“If you are fortunate enough to be a venture capitalist, it's the best business model ever. You get paid a fee to manage the money and you get a piece of the upside, typically, 20% after you return your capital.”

“The vast majority of the founders are bootstrap to profit. They're mostly doing 10, 20, 30, forty million dollars a year with no co-founders and no investors, and they get to do whatever they want with that money. And a hundred percent of those people that I'v…”

“These guys are having a little bit of a hard time raising money, even though they are great business people running interesting businesses that AI is not necessarily based on tokens, but it's essential to what they do for the services they provide.”

“It took probably two years for that new product to kind of be. 50% of the revenue and that those were You know, two pretty difficult years of like flat growth. We were not able to raise money from VCs.”

“I think one of the thinking is that you'll see an astronomic inflation, economic value in the stock market. If you can get money in there, there's a chance you can be okay. Furthermore, if you can get money into private listings, so venture, angel, and you can…”

“Because if you talk to VCs, they don't care about traditional SaaS with AI on top. They want AI native. So, if it's gonna be a fundable business, it has to be an AI native type of system that's agentic and fully automated and all this shit, or nobody cares.”

“Every VC wants to see profitable unit economics, but the vast majority of companies they invest in don't understand their unit economics until way after the investors have given them the money.”

“The truth is that, you know, the first check in are usually the friends and family or the angel investors that are willing to take a bet because they know the founder personally. And, you know, those are the really the high risk investors that are willing to g…”

“The best VCs do not bat a thousand, right? You know, in baseball, if you're hit 300, you're on the all-star team and you might be taking your team to the world series and venture capital is something like that.”

“I would not discount the fact that there is a race among VCs to know who is investing in what, because there's a lot of signals and not just noise in that.”

“I think in the VC, probably the influence of luck on ultimate outcome is probably as high as in any other, as any other industry that I know, probably the highest.”

“I actually think the best founders have just as much called outreach that they ignore from VCs as VCs have called outreach from the founders that they also ignore.”

“In fact, it's very rare that VC wins, but founder doesn't. I actually don't know any, I actually don't know many situations like that, like where.”

“So if you're counting on liquidation preference, then probably nobody's really making money. Maybe founders doesn't make anything, but VC is also not generating much returns.”

“Why don't you call their founders and find out and not the ones they tell you to call. Here's the trick I tell my founders. You have a VC like, okay, great. Give me some references. Great. Here you go. Okay. Now give me the list of the founders you funded, or …”

“If you're a scammer bank, your bank's going to be the most beautiful bank in town. And if you're a scammer VC, wow. Are you going to have a nice website?”