41–50 of 208 posts
Is becoming ramen-profitable before you raise your first round a possible solution to this problem?
So if you can convince your entire team to eat ramen for an indefinite period of time between your first raise, and your second raise, you would have "solved" this problem for some definition of solved.
Is becoming ramen-profitable before you raise your first round a possible solution to this problem?
Is this because you feel it's pretentious to do so?
I feel like having a concise name for a concept is one of the most important steps to broad understanding of it and always try to come up with good names for concepts that I want to be able to talk to people about. You might be doing us a bit of a disservice by resisting this.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The climate has changed in that it's easier for startups to raise more, but even those that do not can still be very successful. Justin.tv or Weebly would not require any more money to start today than they did six years ago -- if anything it's gotten cheaper.
I remember David from Weebly noting that they narrowly avoided the pinch by becoming profitable (circa 2009?) Now AFAIK they are kicking ass.
"Although your product may not be very appealing yet, if you're a startup your programmers will often be way better than the ones your customers have or can hire." Is this really true? I'm very sceptical. Does anyone have any evidence to back this up?
Actually, it's more like this. There are good programmers in the enterprise (meaning, say, investment banks or large corporations or governments) but they generally fall, ambition-wise, into one of three categories: (1) those who want to become managers or software architects (or, in finance, quants and traders) and will define and oversee work but delegate the dirty bits. This would be fixable (they could oversee a…
And, while I do buy that all three of these developer archetypes exist in the real world, I do not buy that they are the reason that companies don't deploy talent aggressively to upgrade "support services". Rather, companies make straightforward buy-vs-build decisions based on whether projects are part of the focus of the business or not.
This is why I hate investing in startups raising $500k or less. You won't be able to raise again unless you have significant upwards progress.
Several of my best investments have been from startups raising less than $500k. Justin.tv/Twitch returned 97x my original investment, and Weebly will likely be even more.
Isn't the problem that the founders have to spend like drunken sailors to show "traction" to have any chance of getting more funding while their investors give them so little money that the runway is then incredibly short? There is very little room for error here.