These huge rounds are crazy, a $5 million exit would be life-changing for most founders.
It wasn't an exit, it was a funding event.
Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding
51–60 of 120 posts
Re: Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding
#52TLDR; I turned down 5 million so that I could practically name the investor, get attention for my startup, and still make page 1 of HN. ---- I wonder how investors feel about posts like this. If you are an investor, would it change the way you feel about the CEO or the company?
Who cares? It's not like he's taking their money.
edit: I'm not losing sleep over someone hurting the feelings of venture capitalists by publicly saying he didn't take their money when offered. Just as I doubt they're losing sleep over the companies they turn down.
Re: Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding
#53Well written article. In my brief stint with YC and other startup circles, I think one big takeaway I've had is that most (or at least many) people who want to start a startup or hit it big with a startup actually really want a lifestyle business. Hyper growth isn't the goal of the founders. Their goal is to create a good product that helps people and allows the founders to live comfortably and be happy with their wo…
I wish I could upvote this more than once. What's more because of the focus on hyper growth, I think a lot of people are discouraged from working on valid problems which lack immediate potential for that kind of growth.
Re: Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding
#54Well written article. In my brief stint with YC and other startup circles, I think one big takeaway I've had is that most (or at least many) people who want to start a startup or hit it big with a startup actually really want a lifestyle business. Hyper growth isn't the goal of the founders. Their goal is to create a good product that helps people and allows the founders to live comfortably and be happy with their wo…
I think one big takeaway I've had is that most (or at least many) people who want to start a startup or hit it big with a startup actually really want a lifestyle business.
I think that's an important question that potential startup founders need to answer before diving in. $20k/month coming in from a lifestyle business sounds less stressful than being CEO of a startup with a billion dollar valuation.
Re: Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding
#55> Are you taking funding for the sake of taking funding, or do you actually need the money?
"Needing the money" probably needs to be defined here. If you're going to the VCs because you "need the money" as in the lights will go out pretty soon, unbutton your slacks and bend over because you are in no position to negotiate.
On the other hand if you "need the money" because, in spite of the fact that your runway looks very very healthy, you can foresee a point well down the line where you will actually need the money then that's a much better scenario to be going to a VC.
Re: Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding
#56Well written article. In my brief stint with YC and other startup circles, I think one big takeaway I've had is that most (or at least many) people who want to start a startup or hit it big with a startup actually really want a lifestyle business. Hyper growth isn't the goal of the founders. Their goal is to create a good product that helps people and allows the founders to live comfortably and be happy with their wo…
I wish I could upvote this more than once. What's more because of the focus on hyper growth, I think a lot of people are discouraged from working on valid problems which lack immediate potential for that kind of growth.
That sounds like a conversation I just had yesterday with a coworker. We were translating Visio diagrams into user stories in Jira and we thought it would be cool to have a visual project management tool that had an interface like Visio that created tickets and managed dependencies, etc. He joked that he would only invest in it if you could apply Instagram filters to the diagrams and the Jira tickets disappeared after you viewed them.
Re: Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
FWIW I opened it in a background tab. Still completely unacceptable. (EDIT: as in, your site is giving a value proposition and I don't accept it if it includes a massive popup)
Sorry your hacker news experience was ruined today, perhaps you can ask for a partial refund for your troubles.
To be fair, attention is a pretty precious resource these days
Re: Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding
#58I just see a HUGE ad asking for my email address and a passive-aggressive "No thanks, I don't want to grow my business", the rest of the page blacked out. I can tell there's content underneath but screw that, I'm not reading it after that.
Love it or hate it, I bet it drives a lot of subscriptions. This is the service they use, btw http://bounceexchange.com/
Holy wow, that is one of the most obnoxious sites I've ever seen (and like others, I felt the same about the ad on the blog).
Leveraging our exclusive "Exit-Intent" technology, Bounce Exchange™ is leading the paradigm shift in automated customer acquisition.
I think they actually used one of those parody startup-speak generators.
Re: Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Well that's entitled. It's his site, he can do what he wants. Even if that does mean that I'll put it through Instapaper to avoid that stuff and not sign up to his mailing list.
It's not. I'm just giving a data point, as is jc4p, as is codegeek. So are the up-voters. What part of what I said gave you the impression of entitlement? I didn't say "I deserve to read this without ads". I said "I stopped reading because you put a massive pop-up that filled the entire screen and prevented me from reading it, I don't find that acceptable, and so closed the tab". Would it be better to have no feedbac…
The issue for me is derailment.
Your complaint - which is unrelated to the content of this article - is now the top comment.
I agree with you, but there are probably a lot of things we agree about, which are also not related to the content of this article.
And regarding whether your complaint is doing the author a favor? You know, it's probably not. You're just going to discourage him from writing, because then he doesn't have to deal with HN's abuse.
Re: Why I Turned Down $5 Million in VC Funding
#60During the dot com boom it was a always an issue if your company took too much VC money. Having a fat bank account balance can make you lazy, you can spend on things you don't need (Aeron Chairs for Everyone!) and you don't "sweat the details." but a lot of the things startup teams need to learn how to do are the exact opposite, spend only when necessary, sweat all the details, understand where every dollar of your monthly burn is going and ask yourself every month "Did that dollar work as hard for me as it should have?" With too much money it is easy to lose the discipline to keep the business at the forefront of your thoughts.