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

Investors don’t validate your startup — users do.


less than 1m read
·Nov 3, 2024

You don't need every investor to like what you're building. You just need a few of them to believe. The reality is that no matter how great your product is, how much traction you have, investors are going to reject you, and that's okay. In fact, it puts you in great company.

Here's a great example: Envision. Envision is a medical device startup for cancer detection, and it was started by Sir Bisarna, who's a YC group partner. Today, when Serbia started building Envision, she was rejected more than 50 times by investors to just get the first money for the company.

The way that she was able to convince someone to write that first check and to help her get this company started was she told them she was going to bet on herself and take no salary for the first two years if the investor was really into betting on them. That was for a $25,000 check.

Her first round of funding for the company was only $500,000, but she got it done even though she got rejected over and over again. Since then, the company was acquired for $275 million.

More Articles

View All
Desining from Day One: Artists as Founders: Multiverse (S20) - YC Gaming Tech Talks 2020
Um, so we’re Multiverse. We did YC W20, so that was from like January to March of this year, just before Corona hit. Um, so, you know, Multiverse, we’re making next generation tabletop RPGs. You can think of us like a mix between D&D and Roblox. We wa…
Meet Madeline, the Robot Tamer | Short Film Showcase
[Music] I’m really passionate about inventing better ways to communicate with machines that can make things. For a long time, industrial robots have been the culprit of automation and replacing human labor. Basically, all the easy tasks to automate have …
15 Skills You Need to Thrive in The Next 15 Years
You know what? It’s the rule breakers who’ll be the most successful in the future workforce. Those who stick to the guidelines are going to struggle; machines can do that. If you want to be competitive in the workforce, well then, you need to add value be…
Using probability to make fair decisions
We’re told that Roberto and Jocelyn decide to roll a pair of fair six-sided dice to determine who has to dust their apartment. If the sum is seven, then Roberto will dust. If the sum is 10 or 11, then Jocelyn will dust. If the sum is anything else, they’l…
Nietzsche - Follow No One, Trust Yourself
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in the chapter called The Bestowing Virtue, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote something surprising. Zarathustra—a sage who is also the central character of the book—tells his followers to stop following him. He says, “I now go alone, my…
Jessica Livingston at Female Founders Conference 2014
I’m Jessica Livingston. I’m one of the founders of Y Combinator, and I’m so happy you’re all here today. I’ve been reading; like some of you have come from so far away. It’s just thrilling. I’ve been in the startup world for nine years now, and this is th…