Building a startup is an entirely different experience from raising a child. There isn’t a pre-seed or seed round for the baby to help get you off the ground, despite the fact the product has been built already and there are over 7 billion examples of product-market fit. Yes, you can hire people to help care for the baby but you’re not going to be able to bring on hundreds (or thousands) of talented, capable and experienced people, aligned on the mission and vision, working together with a shared sense of purpose, to help take care of the infant. Incidents in the middle of the night are always a shitshow, and there isn’t a diaper-ops team in India around to take care of it. On top of daily stand-ups there are lie-downs, tummy time and crawl arounds. One on ones are impromptu, with unclear agendas. Conversations are one sided instead of collaborative, and most of the time you wonder if the other side understands what you’re saying in the first place. And bored meetings are more mind-numbing than you’d expect.
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Fundraising: A dating game
Late last month I gave a talk on fundraising to the Startup Chile community in Santiago. I offered some high level thoughts and tips I have gathered around raising money based on my time in venture. Folks have asked me to share the slides, so I wanted to post them here. It is the basis of a (roughly) thirty minute long presentation, with Q&A.