> “Yeah none of the partners here have a dog and [X head partner] actually really hates dogs”
Please, please, please name this firm. For the good of all founders.
How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co
31–40 of 251 posts
Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co
#32Can the title be renamed to the correct title, which is currently "How I raised a $11M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech moonshot"
If you try bookmarking the page, it currently says $5.1M, which was inserted by HN bookmarklet during submission, then manually edited to $5M to fit within the 80 character maximum. The sub-heading of the article says:
> In January 2020 I closed a $5.1M seed round, my first financing for my first company. I’ve closed another ~$6M since then. This is how I raised that first round.
Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co
#33Why was gender chosen as one of the key attributes that makes you stand out? Why not where you went to school, which country/state you're from? Your family income while growing up? Your college degree? There are plenty of things that make you more unique than your gender.
Please consider this recent story on HN, One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks [1] (methodology: searched HN for "man" and took the first story, sorted by date). Count the number of comments that focus on the subject's gender. I couldn't find any. Contrast that to this story -- well over half are about nothing but gender, and almost all mention it. Why is that?
Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co
#34Really good advice in this article; I don't see a lot of good intel on biotech moonshots.
What is the definition of moonshot? What are other startups that have this designation?
Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co
#35Why was gender chosen as one of the key attributes that makes you stand out? Why not where you went to school, which country/state you're from? Your family income while growing up? Your college degree? There are plenty of things that make you more unique than your gender.
Please consider this recent story on HN, One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks [1] (methodology: searched HN for "man" and took the first story, sorted by date). Count the number of comments that focus on the subject's gender. I couldn't find any. Contrast that to this story -- well over half are about nothing but gender, and almost all mention it. Why is that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2…
"Man" , in traditional usage, refers to any human being. "One man's x" is also a common phrase used to mean any single person struggling or striving towards a particular goal.
This is completely different to what is happening in this post, where the gender is being called out as an attribute of particular interest.
Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co
#36Why was gender chosen as one of the key attributes that makes you stand out? Why not where you went to school, which country/state you're from? Your family income while growing up? Your college degree? There are plenty of things that make you more unique than your gender.
Because unfortunately gender matters when trying to raise money to start a business. Investors factor it in to their investment decisions. Sometimes they do it on purpose (i.e. Are you going to have kids? Will men in ___ industry take you seriously to do deals with or want to join your team? If I give her money, will she sleep with me?) and sometimes they don't do it on purpose (i.e. Misgivings of whether she can "le…
Do VCs give women less money, or do women convince less VCs to give them money? Does personality play a role in your ability to convince somebody to give you large sums of money? Is there some kind of similarity between men that do not receive funding and women that do not receive funding? Interesting questions that would be worth investigating, instead of just accusing the majority of VCs of (even sub conscious) sexism.
Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co
#37This is a brilliant article, and gets better towards the bottom. I'm sure there are a lot of articles like this, but she's very honest about the process. It's rare to see people document what they wish they did better, when it's so expensive to make mistakes here.
There's some solid SOPs in here too, and it works whether you're doing an app company or trying to land a job, assuming you have the credentials.
Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co
#38Earlier quoted context omitted.
Please consider this recent story on HN, One man’s fight for the right to repair broken MacBooks [1] (methodology: searched HN for "man" and took the first story, sorted by date). Count the number of comments that focus on the subject's gender. I couldn't find any. Contrast that to this story -- well over half are about nothing but gender, and almost all mention it. Why is that? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2…
"Man" , in traditional usage, refers to any human being. "One man's x" is also a common phrase used to mean any single person struggling or striving towards a particular goal. This is completely different to what is happening in this post, where the gender is being called out as an attribute of particular interest.
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Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co
#39Sounds like they're just commercializing the work done by the Dog Aging Project: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dog_Aging_Project.
Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co
#40This article got a lot of user flags. That's bad—it's obviously a substantive article, squarely on topic for HN and not sensational, ideological, or predictable. Even a quick skim is enough to see that it doesn't break down along any of the obvious faultlines for this general topic. That not only means it shouldn't have been flagged, it makes it HN gold. If you've been wielding the flag club that indiscriminately...please stop! Accounts that do that lose their flagging rights.
It's not legit to flag an article just because you don't like the general category. There must also be something about the specific article itself that's demonstrably bad for HN (for example, maybe the article doesn't contain substantial new information, is gratuitously baity, or is mostly fuel for internet drama). None of that is the case here—quite the opposite. This is just the sort of article we should welcome, so we can have substantive discussions about relevant issues instead of hurling the same old nasty platitudes at each other yet again. (Can a platitude be nasty? or do I need a different word?)
A thousand thank-yous to the user who took the time to email about this while the thread was still fresh; I wasn't focused on the HN front page just then, but I got the heads-up. If you ever want to make a big difference to HN quality, emailing hn@ycombinator.com when you notice solid, substantive content not getting the attention it deserves (whether because of flags or for any other reason) is one of the highest-leverage contributions you can make!