9 ms·

I want to take the high road in reading this, but it's hard to not take this in as some new form of humble brag. Affluent duo with super privileged private sch

by crsv 8y ago

I want to take the high road in reading this, but it's hard to not take this in as some new form of humble brag. Affluent duo with super privileged private school educational pedigree land top tier entry level jobs @ big tech co and bootstrap for an incredibly modest 6 months before raising a relatively fat seed round from big VC firms IN 8 WEEKS and bemoan "how terrible the process was". Oh woe is fucking me.

tdb7893 8y ago
Other people have it harder than they do but that doesn't mean that the process want still very stressful and difficult for them.
matte_black 8y ago
It's probably not their fault. The reason we get articles like this is because present society encourages you to write about every little experience. If you don't, then it either didn't happen, or it didn't matter. I think they simply have no idea how hard raising money actually is. Pitching for 2 months and raising a fat seed sounds like a dream.
- jenthoven 8y ago
  This is Julia, the OC. You're totally right that we didn't realize how hard raising money actually is. A lot of other founders I've met also don't realize, which means they're disappointed and discouraged when they try. The point of this post is to encourage founders to keep going even when they're down. I almost stopped fundraising a month in because I was so down, and now I'm grateful that I didn't. Everyone has imposture syndrome when raising. I wrote this post to let founders know they're not alone and to not lose their self-confidence because of investor rejections.
  - matte_black 8y ago
    The irony here is that if I had been trying to raise money for about 6 months with no luck, and I read your article where you raised in just 8 weeks, I'd probably feel like a failure. I know someone that took 2 years of pitching and tweaking his company and bootstrapping before finally raising money. And by the way: In the end, his company failed, all the same.
  - bshimmin 8y ago
    Are you seriously telling me that there are people out there who think fundraising is easy? (And are these people trusted with complex machinery?) You're trying to persuade a bunch of people you don't know to give you a really, really large amount of money - and, worse, those people you're pitching get pitched by people just like you every hour of every day. How could anyone think it was easy?
  - trocadero 8y ago
    I don't think you understood the GP. Their point was that your experience was, relatively, a cake walk so you dont really understand the difficulty of raising money. A bit like a woman complaining that it took her 20 minutes of labor to give birth. Certainly an unpleasant experience but most have it a lot worse. Really yall did a phenomenal job of raising money. Thats hoe you should have framed your post, not how terrible of an experience it was.
vinceguidry 8y ago
I liked the article and I never want to tell anyone that their experience is invalid or shouldn't be shared because they're privileged or whatever. I feel like HN should introspect a little more when it comes to this. The high society founders seek to join is going to include people at all levels of the social hierarchy, there's a very fine line between a wish for someone's perspective to be more relatable and lowbrow entitlement which is completely unproductive but very seductive to want to use to explain your lack of success. Yes, people exist in the world that never had to work for a thing in their entire lives. There exist people that had to work 10% as hard as you did. Dismissing these people's opinions or shared experiences is literally robbing you of valuable perspective that can drastically reduce the amount of effort you have to employ.
sonofaplum 8y ago
This is a message board run by a VC firm. The process of raising venture capital is of significant interest to me and I'm guessing many other readers. Is 8 weeks a particularly fast timeframe for raising a seed round? I'm sure that spending fully one quarter of the total lifespan of your company doing something besides building features would be equally unpleasant for many founders. I didn't read this as the whining of the privileged, but rather as a well-written, detailed account of a business process that is fundamentally important to the tech industry, and yet is extremely opaque to those who haven't directly experienced it. I particularly want to thank the writers for providing detailed and actionable advice regarding how they frame their business to investors.
- kenneth 8y ago
  8 weeks is extremely fast for a seed round.
- ModernMech 8y ago
  > I'm sure that spending fully one quarter of the total lifespan of your company doing something besides building features would be equally unpleasant for many founders. Why? Founders are building a business, not implementing a list of features. Businesses need funding. So a serious founder would approach funding with the same about of regard as building features IMO.
CPLX 8y ago
I wonder if they're like vaguely aware that most people would need a year of relentless networking and work to even get 1/3 of the meetings they seem to have gotten in a matter of days. I mean they raised an average of over $200k a week. Maybe they could have written something with a headline more like "Here's how to get yourself into this privileged class of people who VC's will meet with and fund". That's not snark, an article like that could lend some genuine insight to this topic.
- trocadero 8y ago
  >headline more like "Here's how to get yourself into this privileged class of people who VC's are eager to fund". Not to mention become paper millionaires because some VC think you have a 1% chance of being the next Instagram. I mean, that $1.7 million is more than I expect to bring home after tax for the next 10 years. And my income is probably top 95-99% for the area I live in so it's not like I have a hard life. I can't imagine what someone who is actually struggling thinks of their "terrible experience"
  - jiveturkey 8y ago
    wrong comparison. that 1.7mm is also 10x what the founders individual net incomes can be expected to be. 1.7mm is not a lot of money to a SV startup. it’s seed money. they’ll have to offer embarrassingly small salaries to a desperately small (efficient) number of employees so as to spread it as far as possible.
- titanomachy 8y ago
  > how to get yourself into this privileged class of people who VCs will meet with and fund Get a Harvard degree, then become a Google PM. Easy.
philipodonnell 8y ago
> People tell you they will get back to you. They’ll give you a precise date. Then they won’t. Some will never get back to you. I was shocked by this behavior; it’s super unprofessional, and it sucks for founders. But it’s an acceptable practice in the VC world because investors have all the power. That's probably the kicker for me. "Shocked" that some investors didn't get back to them. Its not the VC world its called the real world. :-)
ummonk 8y ago
She certainly spoke about that though in the section about needing warm introductions... I don’t understand the comments calling this a humblebrag. If anything, it is useful to have a startup that successfully raised money saying how awful the process was even for them...

by crsv 8y ago

tdb7893 8y ago

Other people have it harder than they do but that doesn't mean that the process want still very stressful and difficult for them.

matte_black 8y ago

It's probably not their fault. The reason we get articles like this is because present society encourages you to write about every little experience. If you don't, then it either didn't happen, or it didn't matter. I think they simply have no idea how hard raising money actually is. Pitching for 2 months and raising a fat seed sounds like a dream.

jenthoven 8y ago
This is Julia, the OC. You're totally right that we didn't realize how hard raising money actually is. A lot of other founders I've met also don't realize, which means they're disappointed and discouraged when they try. The point of this post is to encourage founders to keep going even when they're down. I almost stopped fundraising a month in because I was so down, and now I'm grateful that I didn't. Everyone has imposture syndrome when raising. I wrote this post to let founders know they're not alone and to not lose their self-confidence because of investor rejections.
- matte_black 8y ago
  The irony here is that if I had been trying to raise money for about 6 months with no luck, and I read your article where you raised in just 8 weeks, I'd probably feel like a failure. I know someone that took 2 years of pitching and tweaking his company and bootstrapping before finally raising money. And by the way: In the end, his company failed, all the same.
- bshimmin 8y ago
  Are you seriously telling me that there are people out there who think fundraising is easy? (And are these people trusted with complex machinery?) You're trying to persuade a bunch of people you don't know to give you a really, really large amount of money - and, worse, those people you're pitching get pitched by people just like you every hour of every day. How could anyone think it was easy?
- trocadero 8y ago
  I don't think you understood the GP. Their point was that your experience was, relatively, a cake walk so you dont really understand the difficulty of raising money. A bit like a woman complaining that it took her 20 minutes of labor to give birth. Certainly an unpleasant experience but most have it a lot worse. Really yall did a phenomenal job of raising money. Thats hoe you should have framed your post, not how terrible of an experience it was.

vinceguidry 8y ago

I liked the article and I never want to tell anyone that their experience is invalid or shouldn't be shared because they're privileged or whatever. I feel like HN should introspect a little more when it comes to this. The high society founders seek to join is going to include people at all levels of the social hierarchy, there's a very fine line between a wish for someone's perspective to be more relatable and lowbrow entitlement which is completely unproductive but very seductive to want to use to explain your lack of success. Yes, people exist in the world that never had to work for a thing in their entire lives. There exist people that had to work 10% as hard as you did. Dismissing these people's opinions or shared experiences is literally robbing you of valuable perspective that can drastically reduce the amount of effort you have to employ.

sonofaplum 8y ago

This is a message board run by a VC firm. The process of raising venture capital is of significant interest to me and I'm guessing many other readers. Is 8 weeks a particularly fast timeframe for raising a seed round? I'm sure that spending fully one quarter of the total lifespan of your company doing something besides building features would be equally unpleasant for many founders. I didn't read this as the whining of the privileged, but rather as a well-written, detailed account of a business process that is fundamentally important to the tech industry, and yet is extremely opaque to those who haven't directly experienced it. I particularly want to thank the writers for providing detailed and actionable advice regarding how they frame their business to investors.

kenneth 8y ago
8 weeks is extremely fast for a seed round.
ModernMech 8y ago
> I'm sure that spending fully one quarter of the total lifespan of your company doing something besides building features would be equally unpleasant for many founders. Why? Founders are building a business, not implementing a list of features. Businesses need funding. So a serious founder would approach funding with the same about of regard as building features IMO.

CPLX 8y ago

I wonder if they're like vaguely aware that most people would need a year of relentless networking and work to even get 1/3 of the meetings they seem to have gotten in a matter of days. I mean they raised an average of over $200k a week. Maybe they could have written something with a headline more like "Here's how to get yourself into this privileged class of people who VC's will meet with and fund". That's not snark, an article like that could lend some genuine insight to this topic.

trocadero 8y ago
>headline more like "Here's how to get yourself into this privileged class of people who VC's are eager to fund". Not to mention become paper millionaires because some VC think you have a 1% chance of being the next Instagram. I mean, that $1.7 million is more than I expect to bring home after tax for the next 10 years. And my income is probably top 95-99% for the area I live in so it's not like I have a hard life. I can't imagine what someone who is actually struggling thinks of their "terrible experience"
- jiveturkey 8y ago
  wrong comparison. that 1.7mm is also 10x what the founders individual net incomes can be expected to be. 1.7mm is not a lot of money to a SV startup. it’s seed money. they’ll have to offer embarrassingly small salaries to a desperately small (efficient) number of employees so as to spread it as far as possible.
titanomachy 8y ago
> how to get yourself into this privileged class of people who VCs will meet with and fund Get a Harvard degree, then become a Google PM. Easy.

philipodonnell 8y ago

> People tell you they will get back to you. They’ll give you a precise date. Then they won’t. Some will never get back to you. I was shocked by this behavior; it’s super unprofessional, and it sucks for founders. But it’s an acceptable practice in the VC world because investors have all the power. That's probably the kicker for me. "Shocked" that some investors didn't get back to them. Its not the VC world its called the real world. :-)

ummonk 8y ago

She certainly spoke about that though in the section about needing warm introductions... I don’t understand the comments calling this a humblebrag. If anything, it is useful to have a startup that successfully raised money saying how awful the process was even for them...