The Other Startup Advice

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19 points·makethetick··4 comments

Excellent questions to ask yourself and your team, including "what does success look like?" And excellent perspective on funding too:

"There's such an overwhelming tech industry bias towards this archetypical narrative of "first you get angel funding, then a VC round, then a bigger VC round, then you're set!" And the vast majority of the time, that's horseshit — you're not set at that point, you've just got a lot of stakeholders. "

I question the advice of going into credit card debt. You do not want to ruin your personal credit because your startup happens to tank.

Unless you have traction. You basically have to choose between downside risk (ruining your personal credit) and upside risk (being excessively diluted).

Don't take out more debt than you could service/work-down, if you had to go back to the salaried/contracting life.

For many, this amount is tens of thousands of dollars per technically-skilled founder -- and probably several multiples of what they'd get from a seed-accelerator. (That's another reminder that the money from these programs should not be the primary reason for going through them.)

Of course, note that the debt could become acute at the same time your market value as an employee drops -- as in a general sector downturn that ends many bootstrapped projects at once -- so don't use the peak you could imagine getting during a boom to compute what you'd be able to pay down a year or two down the road.

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