Live data from Hacker News

How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

celinehh.com

91–100 of 251 posts

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#91
I don't understand the comments on this post. Are we seriously pretending that in 2021 with a nearly universal push for diversity and inclusion, that being a women (or a minority) isn't a massive advantage for raising funds (or getting a job, or getting into college...)?

Are we still conflating lack of proportional representation with discrimination, and completely ignoring the pipeline problem for qualified and/or competent candidates?

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#92

> I heavily prioritized male investors. Every time a female investor converted, I asked them to help me find male investors. Does the above statement seem bigoted?

Pragmatic probably. Might just be easier.

Over decades I’ve Seen lots of sales people target demographics in illegal ways. Mostly insurance and age. Basically impossible to prove unless your put it in writing.

Still one does normally advertise such things.

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#93

>Loyal is developing drugs to extend dog lifespan and healthspan. Wow this is a huge undertaking. I wish you luck and I don't mean that sarcastically! If you can do that to a dog, it seems trivial to extend to humans. Have any drugs or supplements extended dog lifespan in the literature? Rapamycin I guess?

It's extremely expensive and complex to try to do this for humans, due to huge regulatory and ethical costs. So solving the problem for dogs first might be a clever way round much of that!

not really, if your goal is to have a therapeutic research base you can reorient to humans.

we’ve cured MS and sepsis in rats like 20 times now. Doesn’t mean much for us.

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#94

> I heavily prioritized male investors. Every time a female investor converted, I asked them to help me find male investors. Does the above statement seem bigoted?

> I heavily prioritized female investors. Every time a (male) investor converted, I asked them to help me find female investors.

This is the text I'm seeing on my chrome /mobile android browser, would be funny if we were being shown different versions, but it seems as if you might have made a mistake there.

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#95

>It’s a VC’s job to keep the door open. Many were ‘blown away’, then passed before the second meeting. This is normal. I'm sometimes working with US-Americans and not being US-American myself, I feel like this is also a US-cultural thing? In important meetings with US stakeholders I struggle to read the room because everything is always 'awesome' and 'amazing', there's rarely upfront criticism. Honest feedback has to…

It's a pretty common flow. Many people are "impressed" or "blown away" or "love the team" etc etc.

The responses are all platitudes and I've learned to ignore things that are "positive feedback".

Today, the only thing that says an investor is in when they sign and send the money. Up until money in the bank, it doesn't matter how nice or how tough a potential investor is.

Unless you're the hottest startup, this is probably the most realistic way to treat all meetings and understand that it really is a grind.

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#96
post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How can you tell how many flags a submission has received?

That information isn't public. I'm a mod here (in case that wasn't clear), so I looked at the private data. Edit: if you meant what you can tell from public information: (1) sudden drops in rank, as walterbell points out downthread—(edit: but it's important to know that sudden drops in rank can also be because of the flamewar detector, which is unrelated to flags), and/or (2) the [flagged] annotation, which appears w…

Oh I see. It seems that it would be difficult to report a big drop in rank unless you’re frequenting tho.

I guess I should turn on the show dead to see flagged posts

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#97
post #84

>It’s a VC’s job to keep the door open. Many were ‘blown away’, then passed before the second meeting. This is normal. I'm sometimes working with US-Americans and not being US-American myself, I feel like this is also a US-cultural thing? In important meetings with US stakeholders I struggle to read the room because everything is always 'awesome' and 'amazing', there's rarely upfront criticism. Honest feedback has to…

No, it's famously a VC thing, and it causes problems for ordinary US people as well.

To expand on this (for Non-YC situations):

1) VCs want to keep the door open for later by not outright saying "No.", since there's no incentive for them to do otherwise.

2) VCs follow the herd (need social proof), so they will often wait for that area to blow up, or wait for another VC will be the "lead."

3) VCs today would rather be late investors after the concept is proven and they can move hundreds of millions of dollars around to get even more hundreds of millions.

Also note that VCs like to imply that they have integrity, but that's often not true:

1) They've had meetings to collude against YC (documented in the press.)

2) Silver Lake Partners revokes employee shares if you leave before 4 years ("In it to win it.") (documented in the press.)

3) Shocking personal anecdotes.

Re: How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co

#98

>It’s a VC’s job to keep the door open. Many were ‘blown away’, then passed before the second meeting. This is normal. I'm sometimes working with US-Americans and not being US-American myself, I feel like this is also a US-cultural thing? In important meetings with US stakeholders I struggle to read the room because everything is always 'awesome' and 'amazing', there's rarely upfront criticism. Honest feedback has to…

They don't want to be wrong. And their reasons for not investing are usually "haven't seen enough proof" or "don't have conviction about the market". Reasons you can't respond to and are, usually, safe.
Post reply on HN