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"as a startup you need to pivot and do short-term non-optimal things to be able to raise it"

Could you elaborate?

I assume GP is talking about dedicating time effort and energy to round up the money vs. spending that time effort and energy building the product.

At $small_startup_where_i_was_employee_3, when we were raising, it was the CEO's full time focus, and cost a fair bit of money to generate the meetings, be in the right cities, etc, etc. He was also responsible for a lot of our marketing efforts (4 person co) so that took a toll, and shuffled onto others shoulders where it wasn't our strength.

Yes, but also even the product/company vision sometimes need to slightly change in the short-term to get those critical metric numbers to line-up with VCs' expectation. I.e. getting a few important contracts to prove product-market fit even if it's very costly for a small startup whereas it would have been wiser to wait a bit, focus on the product and scale the team before tackling these contracts.

Ah okay.

Yes I saw such things too.

Company wanted to rise $4M and the investors wanted a "Cloud Product" with >10k customers etc.

Which was ridiculous, because we needed the money for the stuff we already did and it was an on-premis solution for like 10 big corporations.

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