How to Raise Money

>"You can't trust your intuitions. I'm going to give you a set of rules here that will get you through this process if anything will. At certain moments you'll be tempted to ignore them. So rule number zero is: these rules exist for a reason. You wouldn't need a rule to keep you going in one direction if there weren't powerful forces pushing you in another."

> What this seems to be saying (to young people) is "it's ok to ignore what other older more experienced people say (or what established practices are) and try to disrupt in those situations because the guidelines and experience they have is bogus but I am telling you that my rules are right so just trust me".

In particular, I took the "this" in "What this seems to be saying" to mean preceding paragraph you quoted from pg's essay and the quote following it to be a restatement of an argument pg was making in this essay or elsewhere. Since pg's essay didn't talk about the "disruption meme", include the words "disruption" or "meme", or have anything to do with advice outside a fundraising context, I had assumed you were referencing previous essays.

So, either the "this" in "What this seems to be saying" is referencing something else or you're responding to a position nobody in this conversation, including pg, has taken. Wanting to be charitable, I assumed you misread the essay or over-generalized its argument.

Now, I'm just confused. C'est la vie.

> But there may be cases where a startup either wouldn't want to grow faster, or outside money wouldn't help them to, and if you're one of them, don't raise money.

Having the essay earlier would have saved me a lot of time and effort. For my startup, I tried for a long time to raise money, and as in the essay it was a huge distraction from the real work. Eventually, at absurdly high cost in time and effort, I concluded the more common half of what is in the essay.

Since I wanted to try hard to crack the nut of fund raising, I kept at the effort until I got some decent understanding.

Also I had to conclude that VCs and I do projects and project planning and evaluation in very different ways. Since it was quite a while ago that I was 20 years old, and I've done a lot of projects and seen a lot of business, I prefer my approaches to project planning and evaluation. Also, for my project, my technical background, in applied mathematics, is far above that of all but maybe 10 VCs in the country. There is likely not a single VC in the country who could understand the crucial core of my project, some original applied math I derived, and only a few VCs who could even direct a competent review of that crucial core. So, I just can't be impressed by what VCs think of the crucial core of my project. When I was fund raising, I wondered how the VCs would evaluate my work; the answer is, they wouldn't! So, they don't have a clue about what they are missing.

So, net, VCs will evaluate my project based on traction which should mean that, for me, a solo founder with meager burn rate, by the time a VC wants to write a check, as in the quote above from the essay, I will no longer be willing to accept one.

After the fund raising effort, I settled on the line in the essay I quoted above: For me, and as often in the essay, the VCs are just too much trouble to work with to be worthwhile. Yes, the VCs are trouble in fund raising, but also the VCs will bring Board overhead, more time/money with lawyers and accountants, and, then, in case of the success they want, an IPO with all the Wall Street and SEC nonsense. Handling all that would be a full time job for me, the CEO of my company; that's not the kind of work I want to do; and my hands would be taken from actually building and running my company.

I see another point: In the US, businesses are started and succeed coast to coast in big cities down to crossroads by solo founders by the millions each year. Such a business might be a pizza shop, auto repair shop, landscaping service, big truck/little truck business, etc.

My startup, with me as solo founder, is in information technology (IT) which should be a huge advantage: E.g., my first server farm will cost less than the truck and lawn mower of the guys who cut grass in my neighborhood, and the Internet connection I need will cost less than $100 a month. Moreover if I half fill the Internet connection, then from simple arithmetic my revenue and earnings in one year will be quite comparable with funds from a Series A.

So I just view my startup as a one person pizza shop but with some big advantages from IT; e.g., a pizza shop owner needs to be in the shop for each dollar made, and my server farm can be making money while I sleep.

For PG's definition of a startup in terms of very rapid growth, so rapid that VC funds become important, that's not important to me. I need a nice business; I don't have to shoot for another Google and wouldn't want to manage anything that big anyway.

A recent remark of Mark Andreessen is that there are only about 15 startups a year that deserve a Series A. So, the essay is talking about only about 15 startups a year and, thus, I am not disappointed the essay is not talking about my startup.

The VCs and I will have to disagree on how to plan, evaluate, start, and build a company. If I am successful, then likely that disagreement will have been a big part of my success.

The VCs remind me of the Mother Goose story The Little Red Hen when she could get help only when she had fragrant, hot loaves of bread coming out of the oven and customers lining up to buy and no longer needed any help.

For me, one really serious turnoff of VCs is that, since they have really no chance of understanding the crucial core of my business or how I do projects, no way would I want to report to a Board with VCs. Vinod Khosla has some recent remarks on how helpful Board VCs are!

Another big turnoff of VCs is that, as reported on Fred Wilson's blog, on average over the past 10 years, the VC ROI has been poor. Net, VCs do not have a lot of credibility in business.

Another big turnoff is that too many VCs were not STEM majors and have written little to no code.

Another big turnoff is that my startup, as is recommended for startups, is doing work that is new; well, there is some education for how to work effectively with things that are new, a Ph.D. degree; I have an appropriate one from a famous research university, and nearly no VCs do. I will have a tough time viewing a VC as a helpful colleague in the crucial core of my business.