yego.me
💡 Stop wasting time. Read Youtube instead of watch. Download Chrome Extension

YC Founders Made These Fundraising Mistakes


3m read
·Nov 3, 2024

Processing might take a few minutes. Refresh later.

If you look at why the Google founders are the Google founders and still have all this control over their company, you can look all the way back in time to the moment of the earliest fundraisers. They were not desperate for cash and load leveraged.

Hey, this is Michael Seibel with Dalton Caldwell, and welcome to Rookie Mistakes. We've asked YC founders for their rookie mistakes so we can share them with you and help you avoid them.

Okay, so here's the next note that a YC founder wrote: "The easiest way to fundraise is to indeed have a good metric that's growing." When I ran a startup that wasn't growing, I spoke to 140 investors and only got two angel checks. Now I'm working on a startup that is growing, and almost every well-known VC is trying to figure out how to talk to us. It took us one week to raise our seed round.

I don't know, Michael. I've heard rumors from around the world that the best time to fundraise is before you have any metrics at all, right? Because once you have any revenue, you will be judged on the revenue. In all, like, 97% of the time, the demo, the product, the MVP, the MVP with customers gives you so much more leverage when fundraising—97% of the time.

Well, we talk about fear-based decision-making a lot, you and I do, and we talk about this with a batch. I think a lot of times this is a case of fear-based decision-making. If in your heart you believe that your product is bad and that you will fail, it makes a ton of rational sense to fundraise before the world figures it out and before the world realizes. You know, investors see that you launched it and no one actually wants the thing that you're making. You know that no one wants the thing you're making in your heart, right?

So rather than go and try to sell it and get what you're expecting to be really hard to sell—yeah, you know it's gonna be a hard sell—so, hey, let's just raise before we go try to do it. Not the best play.

You know, the other common failure path that we see is people putting the investor as the kind of center of this game, as opposed to the customer. People think the investor is almost the teacher, and their job through a pitch or a deck is to get an A from the teacher, and the A’s money. I think that looking for validation from authority figures is a lot of how we are constructed to look at the world. If you've been an employee or you've gone to school your whole lives, a lot of the way you get ahead in life is to figure out who the authority figure is that you need to please. If you please that authority figure, it's the path to greatness.

So again, like if you're like a level three engineer at some big company, the way you get ahead is to impress the bosses. Why not kind of pattern match that onto startups? Not true. If I could redirect that energy towards pleasing people's customers...

Yeah, people call this customer obsession; like it's a buzzword, "we're customer obsessed," but take—let's take that literally. What does it literally mean to be customer obsessed? What it literally means is most of your waking hours. Who are you thinking about pleasing? It's your customers, and you're trying to solve problems for them.

I think this is a neat trick for an early-stage founder: audit the amount of time you spent last week talking to your customers, building product. Right? If that amount of time in your waking day is like 80 to 90 percent, you're probably doing it right. If that amount of time in your waking hours or the last week is more like 20 percent, you're probably doing something very, very wrong.

All right, so here's the next note that a YC founder wrote: "Raise what you need and nothing more. You will find a way to spend all of the money in your bank. Stay lean and get your fundamentals right." You know, a lot of founders think money is like oxygen and you need it to survive.

You know, one of the things that, um, Brian Chesky at Airbnb told the batch recently is maybe money's more like food. You definitely need food to survive, but in a lot of places in the world, including America, people are dying from too much food as opposed to too little.

More Articles

View All
Who Is Responsible For Climate Change? – Who Needs To Fix It?
Since the Industrial Revolution, humans have released over 1.5 trillion tons of carbon dioxide or CO₂ into the Earth’s atmosphere. In the year 2019, we were still pumping out around 37 billion more. That’s 50 percent more than the year 2000 and almost thr…
Addressing treating differentials algebraically | AP Calculus AB | Khan Academy
So when you first learn calculus, you learn that the derivative of some function f could be written as f prime of x is equal to the limit as the change in x approaches zero of f of x plus the change in x minus f of x over the change in x. You learn multi…
Fire in ZERO-G!!
I’m about to experience weightlessness for the first time. Oh my god! Oh my god that is so strange. Oh my god this is totally freaky; this is way better than I expected. I’m just gonna say that right now. Um I’m going up to the ceiling, and here we are. I…
Homeroom with Sal & Eric Schmidt - Tuesday, November 17
Hi everyone! Welcome to Homeroom with Sal. We have a very exciting show and a very exciting guest today, Eric Schmidt. But before we jump into that conversation, I will give my standard announcements. First, a reminder that Khan Academy is a not-for-prof…
15 Wealth Killing Mistakes Parents Make
Why hello there my friend. Now, I hate to break this to you, but many of you are in a toxic relationship with money. If you’re not careful, you’re going to pass on that toxicity to your children. Your actions are teaching them how to behave with money, an…
Warren Buffett: All You Need To Know About Investing in 6 Minutes
When we buy businesses, whether we’re buying all of a business or a little piece of a business, I always think we’re buying the whole business. Because that’s my approach to it. I look at it and say, what will come out of this business and when? What you …