airbnb is a great example for hardware companies. YC (specifically PG) didn't believe in the the idea. If they hadn't started selling Presidential Cereal, the

airbnb is a great example for hardware companies. YC (specifically PG) didn't believe in the the idea. If they hadn't started selling Presidential Cereal, they would have died. Literally, they bet the whole company and a binder full of credit cards on Obama O's, a gimmick cereal. if no selling cereal, then no YC investment, and no airbnb. This is an important lesson to hardware companies, who need more money than anyone will bet on them: FINANCE YOURSELF DOING SOMETHING ELSE. Nobody ever, ever believes in any idea, ever, even if it obviously works and is great, in fact ten billion dollars great. Nobody will believe you. Go sell cereal - you'll get sales from a standing start in a market you've never played in, faster than you can get liquid investment when rushing full-scale ahead toward $10 billion that you're executing on. Never, ever forget this lesson. Obama O's obviously weren't even a $50 million worldwide market. airbnb "obviously" was a $10 billion worldwide market. The former is what financed the latter - "convincing someone" didn't. Brian Chesky famously posted his 7 rejections here - https://medium.com/@bchesky/7-rejections-7d894cbaa084 https://medium.com/@bchesky/7-rejections-7d894cbaa084 (well, 2 didn't respond.) The only one who will ever, ever believe in you is you. If you can't do it without money, go do something else: vc's don't care about seeing and investing in winners; they want to ride their coattails. You may think I'm being cynical, but let me turn it around and make it a hypothetical: everyone knows battery tech kind of sucks, it lags behind all other advances in consumer electronics. If I personally had a breakthrough battery technology, everyone in the world would want to hear from me when we're raising series A. But to my point: nobody would look at the tech itself and invest before then. the stages are just totally different. This is just a hypothetical and I don't know anything about battery tech. I just know that if I did, I could never raise an investment for it, on the basis of what likely would be a research report and maybe prototype. it'll never happen.