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> ...The problem is not so much the money itself as what comes with it. As one VC who spoke at Y Combinator said, "Once you take several million dollars of my m
by staunch 11y ago
> ...The problem is not so much the money itself as what comes with it. As one VC who spoke at Y Combinator said, "Once you take several million dollars of my money, the clock is ticking." If VCs fund you, they're not going to let you just put the money in the bank and keep operating as two guys living on ramen. They want that money to go to work.
http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html http://paulgraham.com/startupmistakes.html
This is an example of A16Z killing a startup. They only care about about the big hits, so they'll happily dump too-many-millions into small products like ProductHunt and RapGenius, trying to force them to Get Big Fast.
ProductHunt should've been operated by two people for 5+ years but they raised too much money. Communities can't really be bought with money. You have to grow them organically and authentically over many years. Hacker News and reddit are perfect examples to emulate.
Digg is an example of the VC way of doing things.
- mkagenius 11y agoBlaming it all on the VCs may not be the complete picture. There are companies raising millions and not spending most of it and still doing good. Do VCs force people to take money even if they don't want to?
- ddw 11y agoYeah it reminds me of that one episode of "Silicon Valley": "No one told me that I didn't have to take the money!"
- tedmiston 11y agoTo be fair, Rap Genius did grow a community organically over time. Google Trends "rap genius": https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22rap%20genius%22&cmpt=q&tz=Etc%2FGMT%2B5 https://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=%22rap%20genius%22&c... [2] Remember at Demo Day in their W11 batch, they had both: more traffic than every other startup in the batch combined, and more than any other YC startup at any demo day in history [1]. 1: Source: The Launch Pad: Inside Y Combinator 2: I think the fall off in the last year is due to rebranding to just Genius.