Affluent duo with super privileged private school educational pedigree land top tier entry level jobs @ big tech co and bootstrap for an incredibly modest 6 months before raising a relatively fat seed round from big VC firms IN 8 WEEKS and bemoan "how terrible the process was".
Oh woe is fucking me.
I feel like HN should introspect a little more when it comes to this. The high society founders seek to join is going to include people at all levels of the social hierarchy, there's a very fine line between a wish for someone's perspective to be more relatable and lowbrow entitlement which is completely unproductive but very seductive to want to use to explain your lack of success.
Yes, people exist in the world that never had to work for a thing in their entire lives. There exist people that had to work 10% as hard as you did. Dismissing these people's opinions or shared experiences is literally robbing you of valuable perspective that can drastically reduce the amount of effort you have to employ.
I mean they raised an average of over $200k a week. Maybe they could have written something with a headline more like "Here's how to get yourself into this privileged class of people who VC's will meet with and fund".
That's not snark, an article like that could lend some genuine insight to this topic.
Not to mention become paper millionaires because some VC think you have a 1% chance of being the next Instagram.
I mean, that $1.7 million is more than I expect to bring home after tax for the next 10 years. And my income is probably top 95-99% for the area I live in so it's not like I have a hard life. I can't imagine what someone who is actually struggling thinks of their "terrible experience"
Get a Harvard degree, then become a Google PM. Easy.
Is 8 weeks a particularly fast timeframe for raising a seed round? I'm sure that spending fully one quarter of the total lifespan of your company doing something besides building features would be equally unpleasant for many founders.
I didn't read this as the whining of the privileged, but rather as a well-written, detailed account of a business process that is fundamentally important to the tech industry, and yet is extremely opaque to those who haven't directly experienced it.
I particularly want to thank the writers for providing detailed and actionable advice regarding how they frame their business to investors.
Why? Founders are building a business, not implementing a list of features. Businesses need funding. So a serious founder would approach funding with the same about of regard as building features IMO.
That's probably the kicker for me. "Shocked" that some investors didn't get back to them.
Its not the VC world its called the real world. :-)
I don’t understand the comments calling this a humblebrag. If anything, it is useful to have a startup that successfully raised money saying how awful the process was even for them...
The reason we get articles like this is because present society encourages you to write about every little experience. If you don't, then it either didn't happen, or it didn't matter.
I think they simply have no idea how hard raising money actually is.
Pitching for 2 months and raising a fat seed sounds like a dream.
Everyone has imposture syndrome when raising. I wrote this post to let founders know they're not alone and to not lose their self-confidence because of investor rejections.
Really yall did a phenomenal job of raising money. Thats hoe you should have framed your post, not how terrible of an experience it was.
I know someone that took 2 years of pitching and tweaking his company and bootstrapping before finally raising money. And by the way: In the end, his company failed, all the same.