Startup Founders, This Is the Only Good Reason To Raise Money
Don’t get on the venture capital treadmill for the wrong reasons
In over 20 years of doling out startup advice — free, paid, solicited, and random — I try really hard not to tell people when to raise money and from whom. But I have no problem jumping into the “why.”
Here’s how I look at that “why.” Imagine, if you will, a bell curve of startup founders.
On one end of that curve are the Elon Muskites, the ones who are just hell-bent on VC-as-a-metric and, to them, the amount of money raised means more than the value of whatever ill-fated product their startup is hawking.
On the other end of that curve are the Scientists, the ones who don’t care about the money at all. They’re just spending long nights trying to push an idea into reality, even if that idea is just batshit insanity disguised as a Rube Goldberg machine.
Most entrepreneurs fall in the middle, of course. And most of those entrepreneurs already know the dangers of handing over huge chunks of equity and control of their dream to someone they (let’s face it) barely know.
So on one shoulder, you’ve got the devil screaming “Raising money is the only way to succeed” and on the other you’ve got the angel whispering…
