His advice to us was stop trying to raise money and “Just fucking do it.”
If you’ve never read the history of the company he founded, Computer Associates, it’s an interesting story of growth by M&A - at one time it was the largest software company in the world, ahead of Microsoft. http://www.company-histories.com/Computer-Associates-Interna...
RIP Charles.
> After an initial failure, he succeeded with CA-SORT, a program enabling computers to sort through data quickly and economically. Wang's SORT offered competition to a similar IBM program, and Wang convinced many businesses with IBM hardware to change over to CA's product. Mainframe software was licensed rather than sold, and the recurring revenue from the licenses of the SORT software was a great boost to Computer Associates.
It was a different era for sure.
So it may have turned out differently without that 'invention' for funding.
This is not difficult to accomplish for your average credit consumer, and if your burn rate is low and you have some reasonable path to profitability, it’s superior to taking investment.