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I'd been working as a founding engineer with a startup for the past couple of years. It was my first experience actually trying to raise money, and I had no ide

I'd been working as a founding engineer with a startup for the past couple of years. It was my first experience actually trying to raise money, and I had no idea how hard it actually was. I hear stories about other companies with literally nothing more than a mockup get millions of dollars, and we had a full tech stack and couldn't get more than $20K. Crazy.

WeylandYutani 3y ago
Business is still a personality game. Some people just have that magnetism and can talk millions out of investors. People like Trump or Steve Jobs are special like that.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  100% this. Early on, I learned that there were broadly two types of people. "Inside people" and "outside people". Inside people are the ones who are at their best developing the product, outside people are at their best marketing the product, getting investor interest, etc. It's very rare that a single person can perform well in both roles. For this reason, I would never start a business by myself. At a minimum, I need a partner who can be the outside person. Another significant thing founders need to do is to be really honest about the limits of their abilities and to find other ways of doing the things they're bad at.
- danielvaughn 3y ago
  I think you're right. The storyteller is so important.
Solvency 3y ago
Honest question: why not hire a designer then and get some better mock-ups?
- danielvaughn 3y ago
  The crux of my comment is that I genuinely don't understand why we weren't able to secure funding. I mention the mockups only to point out that they didn't have a working product, whereas we did/do. If I had to guess, I'd say they were able to "tell the money story" better than we were. That is, being able to say to investors "you give us [x] amount of money and we're shooting for [y] amount of revenue in [z] number of years". I felt like we had a compelling pitch, but for some reason investors just never committed.
deleted 3y ago
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WeylandYutani 3y ago

Business is still a personality game. Some people just have that magnetism and can talk millions out of investors. People like Trump or Steve Jobs are special like that.

JohnFen 3y ago
100% this. Early on, I learned that there were broadly two types of people. "Inside people" and "outside people". Inside people are the ones who are at their best developing the product, outside people are at their best marketing the product, getting investor interest, etc. It's very rare that a single person can perform well in both roles. For this reason, I would never start a business by myself. At a minimum, I need a partner who can be the outside person. Another significant thing founders need to do is to be really honest about the limits of their abilities and to find other ways of doing the things they're bad at.
danielvaughn 3y ago
I think you're right. The storyteller is so important.

Solvency 3y ago

Honest question: why not hire a designer then and get some better mock-ups?

danielvaughn 3y ago
The crux of my comment is that I genuinely don't understand why we weren't able to secure funding. I mention the mockups only to point out that they didn't have a working product, whereas we did/do. If I had to guess, I'd say they were able to "tell the money story" better than we were. That is, being able to say to investors "you give us [x] amount of money and we're shooting for [y] amount of revenue in [z] number of years". I felt like we had a compelling pitch, but for some reason investors just never committed.

deleted 3y ago

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