3 ms·

I'm surprised by this. Tom Preston-Werner's talk at Startup School 2010, which had a strong influence on me and many of my friends (we still refer to it often),

I'm surprised by this. Tom Preston-Werner's talk at Startup School 2010, which had a strong influence on me and many of my friends (we still refer to it often), was very anti-VC. Here is a link to the talk, and a relevant quote from the introduction: http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272031754 http://www.justin.tv/startupschool/b/272031754 "But for me, I don't have to worry about these things, because GitHub has never taken any funding, ever. So I want to talk a little bit about how you can avoid this mess of VC, if you so choose, by telling you a little bit of my story."

danielharan 14y ago
1- Andreesen Horowitz isn't just any VC 2- They already avoided most of the problems of VCs by getting to profit.
- markerdmann 14y ago
  You're right. In his blog post about the talk[1], he makes it clear that his emphasis is on bootstrapping to profitability. "The ironic thing about bootstrapping and venture capital is that once you demonstrate some success, investors will come to YOU. When this happens you will be in a much better place to make a more reasoned choice about taking on additional capital and all the complexities that come with it. Talking to VCs with some leverage in your back pocket is an entirely different game from throwing yourself in front of a conference table full of general partners and trying to persuade them that you're worth their time and money. Power is happiness." [1]: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happiness.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happin...
Nate75Sanders 14y ago
If they're really looking to use the money to expand into Enterprise territory, I think it's a really different game. I think the bootstrapped B2C game is ALL about saving money/not going broke. It's most accurately about making great decisions (it always is, at any level), but I think for what they were doing, that meant not spending. Their management/founders might have been great at that. I think it's very much an engineer's mentality, anyway. However, B2B is a different animal, I think, and one that Tom Preston-Werner might not be geared to hunt -- at least not until someone turned him on to how much bigger GitHub could be. It's not cheap to get the attention of big companies, neither in pursuing them at all, nor in buying the people you need to pursue them -- engineers usually can't do this by themselves. You need veterans of _that_ game and it's a different game (at least from what I've seen).

danielharan 14y ago

1- Andreesen Horowitz isn't just any VC 2- They already avoided most of the problems of VCs by getting to profit.

markerdmann 14y ago
You're right. In his blog post about the talk[1], he makes it clear that his emphasis is on bootstrapping to profitability. "The ironic thing about bootstrapping and venture capital is that once you demonstrate some success, investors will come to YOU. When this happens you will be in a much better place to make a more reasoned choice about taking on additional capital and all the complexities that come with it. Talking to VCs with some leverage in your back pocket is an entirely different game from throwing yourself in front of a conference table full of general partners and trying to persuade them that you're worth their time and money. Power is happiness." [1]: http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happiness.html http://tom.preston-werner.com/2010/10/18/optimize-for-happin...

Nate75Sanders 14y ago

If they're really looking to use the money to expand into Enterprise territory, I think it's a really different game. I think the bootstrapped B2C game is ALL about saving money/not going broke. It's most accurately about making great decisions (it always is, at any level), but I think for what they were doing, that meant not spending. Their management/founders might have been great at that. I think it's very much an engineer's mentality, anyway. However, B2B is a different animal, I think, and one that Tom Preston-Werner might not be geared to hunt -- at least not until someone turned him on to how much bigger GitHub could be. It's not cheap to get the attention of big companies, neither in pursuing them at all, nor in buying the people you need to pursue them -- engineers usually can't do this by themselves. You need veterans of _that_ game and it's a different game (at least from what I've seen).