if Gabriel had so much trouble, I can just imagine how tough the process is for everyone else.
What I learned from raising venture capital
21–30 of 34 posts
Re: What I learned from raising venture capital
#22Thanks Gabriel, this is great.
Re: What I learned from raising venture capital
#23IF Gabriel is reading this: How did you meet the VCs/Angels you already knew?
--Angels mainly through angel investing myself, which I realize most people cannot do. --Entrepreneurs who have been funded before from going to events and getting intros through other people over the years. --I really didn't know many VCs. I met a few through entrepreneurship events in Philly. One through an angel friend a while back. And one I worked for 10 years ago.
Would you say that doing an angel investment (with no prior experience and no ties into the angel community) is a hard or risky thing to do? I've been considering trying it, but basically don't know where to start...
Re: What I learned from raising venture capital
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
--Angels mainly through angel investing myself, which I realize most people cannot do. --Entrepreneurs who have been funded before from going to events and getting intros through other people over the years. --I really didn't know many VCs. I met a few through entrepreneurship events in Philly. One through an angel friend a while back. And one I worked for 10 years ago.
Would you say that doing an angel investment (with no prior experience and no ties into the angel community) is a hard or risky thing to do? I've been considering trying it, but basically don't know where to start...
This is a detailed topic, but basically you have to expect to lose all your money, and if you want to be serious about it (with a better expected value) you have to do a lot of deals over a long period of time.
That being said, you have to start somewhere, and the best way to do that is to co-invest with people. I would meet local angels and hook up with them.
Re: What I learned from raising venture capital
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Would you say that doing an angel investment (with no prior experience and no ties into the angel community) is a hard or risky thing to do? I've been considering trying it, but basically don't know where to start...
This is a detailed topic, but basically you have to expect to lose all your money, and if you want to be serious about it (with a better expected value) you have to do a lot of deals over a long period of time. That being said, you have to start somewhere, and the best way to do that is to co-invest with people. I would meet local angels and hook up with them.
OK, co-investing makes sense. And by "risky" I meant more of losing time and nerve cells rather than money (which is an inherent risk), but I guess these are connected.
Re: What I learned from raising venture capital
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is a detailed topic, but basically you have to expect to lose all your money, and if you want to be serious about it (with a better expected value) you have to do a lot of deals over a long period of time. That being said, you have to start somewhere, and the best way to do that is to co-invest with people. I would meet local angels and hook up with them.
OK, co-investing makes sense. And by "risky" I meant more of losing time and nerve cells rather than money (which is an inherent risk), but I guess these are connected.
Well not necessarily. A lot of people are completely passive. They write checks and never look back. I'm way more high touch and like to be involved, and so the time constraints are more significant.
Re: What I learned from raising venture capital
#27Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well, he is advertising his company. Like HN, it's a marketing activity, but one that also has a value-creation component, not merely an attention-grab.
That doesn't look or fell like advertisement. An ad would be something like "How we bootstrap our way to 7M searches per month"
That's part of the beauty.
Re: What I learned from raising venture capital
#28This is good. As someone who's watched this process many times, I can tell you he learned pretty much everything there is to learn about raising VC the first time through. The only thing that could make his advice inaccurate is that he was raising money for such a good startup. And in particular, one with traction. As he points out, traction trumps everything. So this is essentially a report on what it was like to tr…
What are the biggest factors that increase the time suck? Amount of money you are raising, inexperience? Conversely, what consistently decreases the amount of time spent closing a round?
The two biggest factors in the time it takes to close a VC round are how obviously good the idea is, and how much competition there is for the deal. The two are not entirely independent of course.
By "obviously good" I mean obviously good to VCs, who as a rule tend to overlook the very best ideas because they seem crazy. So for example it may have slowed things down for Gabriel that he was working on a new search engine, because to many VCs it would seem crazy to try to compete with Google.
Re: What I learned from raising venture capital
#29How much did he raise again? He says he didn't get meetings until after the August vacation period. And announced the funding October 13th. Does it really only take 6 weeks to put together a multi-million (?) dollar round?
I didn't say, but it was 3M. As for August, I did get meetings before, it just caused trouble because some meetings I couldn't get before, or there would be large period between meetings, which hurts momentum. And that all adds up to it being harder to align the time-line across multiple firms.
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Re: What I learned from raising venture capital
#30How much did he raise again? He says he didn't get meetings until after the August vacation period. And announced the funding October 13th. Does it really only take 6 weeks to put together a multi-million (?) dollar round?
I didn't say, but it was 3M. As for August, I did get meetings before, it just caused trouble because some meetings I couldn't get before, or there would be large period between meetings, which hurts momentum. And that all adds up to it being harder to align the time-line across multiple firms.
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