VCs Are Destructive Predators
joelx.com
joelx.com
"Work through your business model" as a growth strategy. Brilliant.
Paid acquisition has gone through the roof as Facebook/Google are increasing monetisation. Content marketing has never been more difficult as more and more companies compete for the same keywords. More and more startups competing for the same customer.
It's not like founders like me are looking to give equity to VCs. It's because it's getting more and more expensive to grow.
There are tons of methods to sell, and if FB and Google Ads (I am a Premiere partner of both) are your first avenue of selling, you will get destroyed. Try less expensive methods and only when you prove it elsewhere then try those very expensive areas.
Beyond customer funding, look at SBA loans. Or bank loans.
Avoid credit cards if you don't pay them off monthly. Your business probably won't grow as fast as your debt will if you go this way.
I personally used a combination of using my own savings (dipped into about $10k before my net worth started going up) in combination with customer funding.
Bon Appetit.
One of the things I've come to believe after being around for a while and watching a lot of humans is that we are much more at the mercy of our environment and the forces therein than we think. Individual humans are very very small, and their decisions are largely driven by the socioeconomic context they inhabit. Incentives matter a lot.
Today there is effectively a Cold War between the US, China, and to some extent other nations and nation-blocs over who can print the most money to hep up their economy the most to generate the most GDP growth. All those metrics are financial in nature. You get what you measure. You also get ghost cities (China), crazy asset bubbles (America), predatory leveraged capital (everywhere), and a financial economy increasingly disconnected from value creation, but those things are not being measured so nobody (in the political class) cares.
This creates an incentive structure best parodied in the Silicon Valley TV series: your company's product is not its product. Your company's product is its stock. The goal is to soak up as much of that financial capital as possible, because that's where the money is.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cube_(film)
This is why I wonder if humans are actually intelligent or just clever. Seems to me that a true intelligence would learn to command its own game theoretic / emergent context, not be dragged along by it to wherever the magic bus is going.
He said their policy was to invest in a 100 startups in the hope that one would go viral.
The sooner the other 99 died and stopped bleeding the happier they were.
Go big or die soon was their policy.
If the 1 went viral, they'd make back all and way more than they lost on the 99.
The fact that 99 founders were broke and broken didn't bother them at all.
I wouldn't have been able to build my startup to the size it became without venture capital support.
Uh, ok.