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Congrats! Concern: is 650k after 75 investors inefficient?

• laluser 14y ago
  I don't think it's a concern. The investors were out there all along, she just had to find them. Talking about efficient/inefficiency doesn't make much sense here.
• buro9 14y ago
  It's more efficient than 75 investors and $0. Though seriously, there are no overnight successes and no-one is just going to give you $1m regardless of what we read on HN. I don't have my notebook at hand to cite the exact number, but Matthew Prince of Cloudflare pitched to something like 60 or 70 investors. This was with Project Honeypot in the bag, and a stack of existing users via that, and the basis for what became Cloudflare tested. My point is: Even with the idea and execution you're not just going to get the investment. I think the real thing that Aihui achieved in a short time was to demonstrate determination, perseverance... and in the words of Mark Suster ( http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/15/invest-in-lines-not-dots/ http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2010/11/15/invest-in-line... ) showed that her company (led by her) is a line going up and to the right, rather than a dot. It was most likely the weekly check-ins and constant hard grind at the communication that helped her get the investment.
  • ryguytilidie 14y ago
    But is it more efficient than 0 investors and $0? It seems like if most people doing startups are having 70 investor meetings they could be better spending that time working on the product right? I think cloudflare is kind of an outlying example here.
    • tempestn 14y ago
      If you don't have a business at all, its efficiency is somewhat irrelevant. Not all startups can bootstrap their way up from nothing; some do require initial capital.
• milkshakes 14y ago
  Steve Schwarzman had to pitch over a hundred times before he got his first bite for Blackstone. And he wasn't exactly a nobody at the time either.