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TL;DR: Founder had healthy startup, accepts VC money, acts surprised when VC wants rapid growth and returns. Who could have predicted this?
Lessons learned from that post: (1) "I was told to hire a lot of people. Put fuel on the fire they said. Bring industry experts who can move the needle. All this BS you hear all day. All failed. I hired VPs and bloated my payroll. Ultimately I ended up with a bunch of highly paid employees who don’t know how to do anything but to “build and lead amazing teams.” Imagine you hire someone to scale an area and their solu…
This is too real in big corp as well as the VC funded start up world. A bunch of bourgeoisie over-educated idiots, usually with MBAs, who don't know how to do anything except take credit for work that other people do.
The made sense.
They smelled good.
They made great leadership stories.
...but none of it actually mattered to the customer.
A riddle: how do you know that an anonymous Reddit post is exaggerated?
The reddit poster goes on to comment:
>15 minutes phone call to decide to file for bankruptcy and for them to take their money back (and then some) and shut down my company
What? In no world would that happen. Even a mostly failed company has quite a bit more value than $0.
No mention of the name of the company or even the vertical. 100% BS.
Honest question: if you sell 50%, then why do what the VCs tell you to do? Beyond gaining some sort of reputation for not doing what your investors want, is there anything else?
All I'm thinking is, you Americans are really fucking lucky. Yeah OK, VCs are greedy and difficult to work with, but at least they give you a chance and literally give you startup capital in the millions to build your own thing. That is mind blowing to me and definitely what sets America apart from everywhere else.
There’s a lot of information missing. All of his problems were caused by VC? Why did he raise VC if he had 7 figure revenue? 5 years explained in 6 paragraphs. I agree that hiring bigco people for a startup is a mistake, but otherwise you can’t learn anything here.
Some times your money printer won't scale, but other people will try to convince you that it's full of golden eggs?
If you're cash-positive you should see VC as supplicants begging for scraps?
At the point right before taking VC money, what's the safer alternative sources for cash? This is a serious question. The alternative I've seen work is another company in the same field make the investment with an option to further invest or acquire the company later on. Their expectations for growth were a lot more "down to earth".
That’s not an exhaustive list of course.
All I'm thinking is, you Americans are really fucking lucky. Yeah OK, VCs are greedy and difficult to work with, but at least they give you a chance and literally give you startup capital in the millions to build your own thing. That is mind blowing to me and definitely what sets America apart from everywhere else.
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