How I raised a $5.1M seed as a first-time, female, solo founder for a biotech co
celinehh.com
celinehh.com
1. Is it even possible to bootstrap a biotech fund if you’re not rich (min 10mil net worth)? The author doesn’t really say why they even need funding but I imagine biotech has a lot of up front costs.
2. Given how you can “game” your pitches - from the VCs perspective isn’t this bad? Wouldn’t that mean potentially bad companies could “con” you into funding them? I wonder what the downside is of being strictly objective is (if possible).
This was an enlightening article. Good find.
It's pretty similar to gaming job interviews. But in my experience, VCs are very good at reading between the lines, to the point that they sometimes understand the pitch better than the person making it. I don't see anything here as gaming it though. Some VCs even recommend you do something similar.
"I wonder what the downside is of being strictly objective is (if possible)."
The best investments often have a lot of strengths and a lot of weaknesses. Being strictly objective usually emphasizes the weaknesses more. A lot of VCs look for strengths, but these are often unique and poorly defined.
This is kind of a doubled-edged sword situation though. After a certain point, you just start blocking situations out mentally. You try to take shortcuts by just looking for X. You don't react when the world starts changing. If you are in an environment where your sample is very tainted (which happens in VC), it is also very easy to actually get reinforced on situations that aren't optimal (this is why most VC funding goes to people who know each other).
I would characterise myself as someone unusually able to switch my thinking when required and I still have a long list of rules that seem basically arbitrary to an outsider (for example, if the CEO has a knighthood, the company will likely do very poorly)...and no pattern is foolproof (the obvious example is Tesla, I don't tend to invest in companies where the CEO is a habitual bullshitter...most of the time that rule works, in that case it didn't work so well).
But investing is about pattern-matching, it can be extremely arbitrary. If you are looking to raise money, I would consult with someone who understands the market you are trying to raise in (i.e. so you can pitch to that pattern...I don't think it will improve your odds of success but it will mean that the funder understands what the situation is), and remember not to take it personally.
I wouldn't say it's pattern matching. That works great for stocks and established companies, but with "moonshots", you're looking for things that have not existed before. Everyone looks for the next Zuckerberg, Bezos, Gates, Musk, whatever, but the pattern is there is little pattern.
However, that doesn't mean that to be a fraud-resistant VC you shouldn't be looking for a story, or that as a founder you're pulling a fast one by having a narrative in your pitch.
To understand something, you need to make connections. To convince someone to invest, you need to get the investors to understand what your business is and why it's going to grow and make money. Connecting a series of facts and ideas from a starting point to an end IS the definition of a narrative.
That's just how humans interact, disseminate information, and learn. Even technical work (and pure math!) does this.
There's some solid SOPs in here too, and it works whether you're doing an app company or trying to land a job, assuming you have the credentials.
Wow this is a huge undertaking. I wish you luck and I don't mean that sarcastically! If you can do that to a dog, it seems trivial to extend to humans. Have any drugs or supplements extended dog lifespan in the literature? Rapamycin I guess?
Increasing a dog's lifespan by 5 years is massively noticeable. I've never seen a 20-year old dog.
Adding 5 to a human's health is beneficial but isn't nearly as noticeable.
This is ignoring the magnitude of differences between dogs and humans. They're mammals, sure...
I can't recall just how many "successful trial on rats" stories have we gotten on HN that have to be tempered by reality in the comments.
Edit- As a dog owner myself, I'm also hoping the OP succeeds of course! Nearly every day I have a "memento mori" thought about my pet, and it's extremely depressing.
It's true that a lot of people (all over the world) make lifestyle choices which probably shorten their lifespan. Although I think you're understating the simplicity of losing significant weight / quitting smoking / drinking less, all of which are things which are notoriously difficult.
It does not follow that those people wouldn't notice an additional five years of lifespan. Of course they would, it's five years!
If someone was selling pills you could take twice a day to add five years of lifespan, the number of people who would take them is broadly limited by the number who could afford to.
Extending lifespan is less useful than extending the healthy/active part of the lifespan. Like reading the fine print on the side of the packaging or the bottom of the contract, you need to pay attention to the details. This is why lifestyle changes tend to be more important than pills which treat conditions that used to kill our parents or grandparents, the former usually increase the odds you will still be walking around and taking care of yourself in your late 80s while the latter might just mean that you add five years to the amount of time that some nursing home will drain your estate while you are bed-ridden in some warehouse for the elderly.
Little dogs can live to 20.
I met a woman in the park who said she had a dog like mine that lived to 20, then drowned in a swimming pool. I didn't know whether to offer congratulations or commiserations.
So solving the problem for dogs first might be a clever way round much of that!
we’ve cured MS and sepsis in rats like 20 times now. Doesn’t mean much for us.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4068608/
"The most notable benefit of using the dog for genetic studies is that dogs get many of the same diseases as humans, with a similar frequency, and the same genetic factors are often involved."
My home field uses chinchillas a lot. Cardiologists use pigs. etc.
* https://www.rejuvenatebio.com/ (Gene therapy for mitral valve disease in dogs)
* https://dogagingproject.org/ (Involved rapamycin which is already known to increase lifespan in model organisms)
* https://www.vaika.org/ Reverse transcriptase inhibitors in dogs to increase healthspan/lifespan.
Nothing about taking treatments that work in one species and transferring them to another is trivial. You really can’t even assume that it would remain effective. Every single failed clinical trial of a drug was back up by previous animal studies showing efficacy, but it’s just not guaranteed to translate.
2. Having great credentials.
3. Being connected in VC industry.
With above three elements its not tough to raise initial capital. Difficulty will arise in next round as that will depend on your ability to demonstrate success given the funding. This path is for people who are highly connected and influential. Not for common blokes.
[0] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6814615/
https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11357-020-00274-1
The story with kidneys is a bit stranger. Heavy rapamycin use seems to trip up 'normal' levels in insulin-related measurements, but this may have a lot more to do with the body being in a different state than the usual measurements are calibrated for, and doesn't seem to be causing diabetes in practice. (to paraphrase, perhaps badly: in many ways, rapamycin acts like artificial calorie restriction, which does strange things to insulin handling anyways.)
One possible reason is that men may have been actively looking to invest in female founders for diversity reasons. Female investors wouldn't feel the same pressure for gender diversity among their portfolio companies.
https://hbr.org/2016/03/women-and-minorities-are-penalized-f...
Certainly not as much as men like women, on average.
I keep "rediscovering" this, so maybe others need to be told/reminded.
If you want to post something nuanced and relevant about your own experience, that's great. But whatever your experience has been, inflating it into grandiose claims on classic flamewar territory is not going to end well—and is also much less interesting. We don't want gender war here. It's tawdry, repetitive, and boring.
I'm sometimes working with US-Americans and not being US-American myself, I feel like this is also a US-cultural thing? In important meetings with US stakeholders I struggle to read the room because everything is always 'awesome' and 'amazing', there's rarely upfront criticism. Honest feedback has to be pried out of people later at the bar.
I think this is valuable knowledge for non-US people trying to get into US-style work and funding.
1) VCs want to keep the door open for later by not outright saying "No.", since there's no incentive for them to do otherwise.
2) VCs follow the herd (need social proof), so they will often wait for that area to blow up, or wait for another VC will be the "lead."
3) VCs today would rather be late investors after the concept is proven and they can move hundreds of millions of dollars around to get even more hundreds of millions.
Also note that VCs like to imply that they have integrity, but that's often not true:
1) They've had meetings to collude against YC (documented in the press.)
2) Silver Lake Partners revokes employee shares if you leave before 4 years ("In it to win it.") (documented in the press.)
3) Shocking personal anecdotes.
As a German (15+ years in the US) formerly in SF now in Seattle I see big discrepancies in what I perceive as genuine feedback from coworkers or the general public compared to what I'd expect back in Germany.
Of course VCs go even farther to keep all doors open. That to me is more of the same I observe from most folks.
A founder from a different cultural background seeking funding or advice from US VCs must understand the baseline US culture and then how to interpret VC behavior relative to that culture.
EDIT: To provide a specific example: What is considered polite encouragement to a Californian comes across as very strong / enthusiastic encouragement to a German. Polite is relative to culture. Initially people unfamiliar with the culture may take the words of the random Californian or the VC at face value - both appearing equally enthusiastic observed this way.
It's a bit tiring having to praise things you don't believe in to provide honest feedback. In German culture the strong separation between work persona (with a shared mission on behalf of the company / shareholders / customers) and personal life makes it pretty easy to be straightforward at work. People don't define themselves by their job unlike in the US (or certainly SF) where one of the first questions may be "what do you do (for work)?".
From my perspective US colleagues overcommit (say yes to too many things) but don't ask enough detailed question to design solutions that can be of high quality. I'm not surprised you'll find Germans frequently saying that something is crap :D Germans tend to be cautious upfront, asking many questions (to understand scope and to mitigate risks). This often seems unnecessary to the visionary leaders, but a tactician will understand the importance for execution. Nothing wrong with saying "No, we can't do that. But if we reduce the scope, or change this or that we could deliver something."
In the end there are many cultural differences that are subtle but profound. Invisible to either side and usually expressed as what appear to be individuality / personality differences. It takes a lot of experience to understand which elements must be attributed to culture.
The responses are all platitudes and I've learned to ignore things that are "positive feedback".
Today, the only thing that says an investor is in when they sign and send the money. Up until money in the bank, it doesn't matter how nice or how tough a potential investor is.
Unless you're the hottest startup, this is probably the most realistic way to treat all meetings and understand that it really is a grind.
That reminds me of that call with Triplebyte where they said I "had about the highest score ever" on their screening test. I knew immediately they were full of it and totally dishonest.
"Actions speak louder..." Don't buy any of it except as an act and going through the motions so they can pat themselves on the back.
Real feedback means adversarial criticism, weaknesses, and examination of the business. However, they can leave their "passenger's seat driving" suggestions at the door too, unless they're really useful.
If anyone is ever going down the VC route, they're going to be married to them. Who wants to be married to a liar who can't speak truth or honestly?
That was also something in Japan I noticed though, everything is amazing and great and it couldn't possibly be wrong just differing levels of great.
I'm from the US grew up in the Valley but lived in the UK for a startup for a short while. It's both a byproduct of career hierarchal corporate obedience and social success façade (see also: modern campus culture of Ivy Leagues and Pac12s). It's absolutely awful for mental health or getting things done.
More practically, it's a problem when people try so hard to be liked that they throw away respect by being too "nice." As such, they're not your friends or anyones friend, they're toxically-positive, inherently dishonest, and cowardly "yes men." It's a dishonest, time-/energy-wasting, and an untrustworthy cultural- and communication-style. People like these are a liability because they won't go anywhere far except to the diplomatic corps parties, UN-sponsored social ventures, and sing Kum ba yah. (Wantreprenuers and dumb money dispensers.) You have to be radically honest with yourself and others before you can attain and grow anything substantial.
Besides, VC investment is only essential if it's a capital-intensive venture or velocity-constrained by lack of capital. Having more capital isn't useful in and of itself without a plan and a strategy to deploy it to something that's already established, like water on a seedling. This is why chasing VC is worthless: sales of viable product cures all, including bringing VC interest.
But yeah, that was one insightful comment.
Whether people are superficial corporate robots or without real friends or follow all kinds of meaningless ritual etc doesnt matter if they are driven. Why? Because thats who you end up relying on when competing against other people who are mindlessly driven.
How are you going to compete with people who are more driven than you - "the do whatever it takes" brigade? Ranting takes away focus and thought from answering that question honestly to yourself.
Some evidence of this is required.
Stop looking at it as competing with others and compete with yourself instead?
This! That term that describes perfectly my impression of many people from the U.S.A. It's maybe just a cultural thing, but I have a lot of trouble working together with people who have this sort of attitude.
Never been to the USA in the last 10 years, but I interact regularly with usians, and this is not my experience at all. All of them have been extremely nice people, without a trace of disagreeableness.
What irks me, is that they are constantly giving unwarranted and over the top praise. I find this very disturbing. In France this attitude is invariably interpreted as ironic mockery. And if they spoke French I would be genuinely offended by such attacks.
I’m American but have mostly lived abroad for decades, and I still find his disorienting for the first few days of any trip back.
To me the point of a tech scene is to be large. As in dollar value. Generate capital in terms of valuations, market cap, revenue and funding for new ventures.
Attempt to summarize the experiences, readings that contribute to my view:
Number of startups in US. Size of tech companies. US tech scene companies ranking in world's largest organizations. Personal experience with those companies.
Size of China market. Number of Chinese tech billionaires. Number of massive Chinese tech companies, and their ranking in world's biggest companies/tech companies.
I don't think any hard analysis of the data is going to disprove my claim that world tech scene's are ranked: US, China (close second)
But if it did that would certainly be very interesting and high value information to me! :p :) xx
You also have generations of successful entrepreneurs staying in the US and teaching the next generation. Entrepreneurship in EU is mostly a joke, good entrepreneurs are hard to find.
And still, despite of this, people working in Europe seems to be much happier (even if they're poorer) than in the US.
My experiences with USA companies haven't been positive (very immature working culture of burning your employees) but I was always impressed at how the founders (some from the US, some immigrating from outside) managed to rake in a casual few millions at demo day just by saying they want to solve problems for a certain audience.
My company got 10k€ for 10% after fighting for months (some more money came later thanks to an angel I sourced), which were not even enough money to incorporate a company in the country I was.
Uh, what? Wrong, at least for Germany, which is littered with internationally successful small and medium-sized companies. Compare https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mittelstand .
Edit: Unless you were refering to the kind of "entrepreneur" that burns millions of USD in VC money over the span of a couple years, fails to create anything that anyone is willing to actually pay money for, but produces a lot of insightful blog posts in that time. Yes, we don't have a lot of those here yet, but we're working on it.
American entrepreneurial culture includes a strong dose of "It's OK to lose a million dollars a hundred times if the next one makes a billion dollars". Some think that's part of the reason the US is the country that generates the FAANG(M)s. They throw money at the wall and make big wins off of what sticks, if most of it doesn't.
It's arguable whether that's actually beneficial for the world (is there any of the MANGAFs you don't feel uncomfortable about?), but it certainly accomplishes something. If only making the US rich.
The gap between bombastic marketing (esp. in the VC/startup world, but also self-promo) and reality must be mentally devastating. US has a serious, nationwide medication problem.
Honesty has its upsides, the (financial) success of an "awesome amazing disruptive changing-the-world-again-this-week" mindset notwithstanding.
East coast seems to be more willing to tell you that your idea sucks, you suck, and your grandma sucks too. Unfortunately they're also way less likely to give your company a decently sized investment and valuation, so there's that.
If they seem to be grudgingly impressed, you are golden.
It's an eye opening experience.
Oh and it’s arguably unhealthy too.
Everything is crap. By default. Almost everything is "not bad", "fine", or at best "pretty good". You will almost never hear a French person describe anything as "awesome", "great", "fantastic" or "brilliant" (unless they’ve spent too much time in the US or work in startup la la land).
But crap also is "not bad", "fine", or sometimes even "pretty good".
So, how does one tell the difference?
Easy! It’s all in the contemptuous tone, annoyed dismissive look, sneering smirk and distracted disdainful wave of the hand!
What a great culture to be born in.
As another post said, ignore everything said, the only thing that matters is when their money hits your account.
The link to relevant other work is most welcome, of course.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...
Plus, in this precarious phase, further discoveries are possible. Few things work exactly the same way in labs and in the real world. Usually, some anomalies are observed that actually widen our understanding of the problem.
GitHub just commercialized git in the beginning.
DataStax <> Cassandra.
Armory.io <> Spinnaker.
AWS <> *
It would be different if this were pitched as a way to get to human life extension.
Also, this was a really great article and congrats to the author!
> I worked in venture capital for two years at a fund specializing in the area my Loyal is in (so I had a preexisting VC network, was seen as a bit of an ‘insider’, and the fund invested in Loyal, which was good signaling).
At interview stage gender balance is a factor in prioritization with companies with female CEOs being prioritised until 40% of invited companies have female CEOs.
Source:https://eic.ec.europa.eu/system/files/2021-03/EIC%20Work%20P...
I also like the fact that you have been very upfront on what you deemed advantages. Most articles, you can see that the writer is trying to elevate themselves by stretching the challenges as similar to heroic tales.
More power on your startup which is a noble one - extending the ultimate friendship between humans and dogs.
I don't think it's actually super common, but feels like it's hard to not end up with millions when you raise (at least for ex-FAANG folks).
As far as I'm concerned - more money, more problems (and less equity).
It's not legit to flag an article just because you don't like the general category. There must also be something about the specific article itself that's demonstrably bad for HN (for example, maybe the article doesn't contain substantial new information, is gratuitously baity, or is mostly fuel for internet drama). None of that is the case here—quite the opposite. This is just the sort of article we should welcome, so we can have substantive discussions about relevant issues instead of hurling the same old nasty platitudes at each other yet again. (Can a platitude be nasty? or do I need a different word?)
A thousand thank-yous to the user who took the time to email about this while the thread was still fresh; I wasn't focused on the HN front page just then, but I got the heads-up. If you ever want to make a big difference to HN quality, emailing hn@ycombinator.com when you notice solid, substantive content not getting the attention it deserves (whether because of flags or for any other reason) is one of the highest-leverage contributions you can make!
Edit: if you meant what you can tell from public information: (1) sudden drops in rank, as walterbell points out downthread—(edit: but it's important to know that sudden drops in rank can also be because of the flamewar detector, which is unrelated to flags), and/or (2) the [flagged] annotation, which appears when flags outweigh upvotes by a certain threshold.
I guess I should turn on the show dead to see flagged posts
It works. Nasty banalities could be used too. Slightly different meaning but both reflect what is happening.
Especially for those of us where top software can be very critical, but who are not in the software business and are committed to efforts in other areas of technology.
I can only imagine the challenges you have been facing are on the increase.
At this time the first 50% of the comment page does not discuss gender so it clearly turned out right, but they were posted after the dead comments. If a fresh article has the majority of comments being people warring about gender then the option given to users is either to ignore the war, flag it, or engage in the discussion. Having seen that multiple times it is often easier and uses less time and energy to simply flag the article regardless of how great the article actually is. The flag would not be a comment about the quality of the article, but rather the climate and culture for which it was posted in.
Dang, is this a problem?
If the article were garden-variety flamebait then it would be a different story (no pun intended) – but this was such a clear case of the opposite.
The best thing is to give us a heads-up at hn@ycombinator.com. That could be either "hey, there's a really good article getting unfairly flagged" (a user did that last night and it was extremely helpful) or it could be "hey, there's a really good article getting a lot of flamewar comments". Actually it could also simply be "hey, there's a really good article that hasn't gotten any attention yet". (People often send those for their own articles, but that's a little less noble and not what I'm talking about here.)
You can see the common denominator there: "a really good article". There aren't very many of those. Just as the most important thing for startup investors is not to miss the best startups, the most important thing for HN is not to miss the best articles.
A standard version that I often see is when articles get sunk by shitty comments are when the author is controversial. The negative comments are focusing on the author, and often that dominated the article comments until the article get flagged to death. Fair? No. It is however a pattern that keep repeating itself.
I don't recognize this bit though: "Not being able to use the flag feature when a article is being used as fuel for culture war". That doesn't sound like what I said and certainly isn't what I meant. Edit: oh, I see what you mean - "being used as fuel for culture war" is your rephrasing of what I described as "shitty comments". Don't take this absolutely, though. The median case is that both the article and the comments are garden-variety culture war; those are legit to flag. I'm just saying that you shouldn't flag indiscriminately. We want some discernment when an article clears, let's say, the 95th percentile of thoughtfulness.
Myself and my co-founder never had time to go network or sell to investors, building a product just took 200% of our time. Having a moonshot idea and big market didn't matter. We just didn't have the connections or the time to build them. Looking back that is all that mattered. They didn't care we had customers and revenue and a good deck or market.
...did you care? If you had customers and revenue, why did you need VC?
I love how the darkest dystopian outcomes for humanity are kinda just fine to try out on our pets. Here, Fido Ten, good boy!
A clone is nothing more, and nothing less, than a time-shifted identical twin.
I probably wouldn't clone my dog for that reason: it's not "getting my dog back" it's having his identical twin.
But I grant that identical twins are very similar to one another, so if you like your dog's look and personality, the clone would probably be a lot like his twin. So I don't judge people who would rather do that than find a new dog; why not?
I do think it would be weird to give the clone the same name though. That said, a few pet owners give all of their dogs or cats the same name. Just because I don't understand it doesn't make it bad.
I really not intended to be moralistic, i was just reusing your wording. Sorry
Please don't start wearing black turtle necks.
https://www.celinehh.com/aging-field
> The reasons we do not have an approved aging drug today are not due to the science - the biological blockers to a first-generation aging drug have been clear for at least ten years. The primary reasons there are no approved aging drugs today are much more tricky - they are regulatory, societal, structural, and cultural.
> For the last years, I’ve been a researcher in academic aging labs, worked in aging-focused venture capital and early-stage aging drug development startups, and am now the founder of the aging biotech Loyal. The common theme of my work has been trying to find the highest leverage way to support and accelerate the first aging drug approval.
> In January 2020 I closed a $5.1M seed round, my first financing for my first company. I’ve closed another ~$6M since then. This is how I raised that first round.
She did. The team she hired was possible after raising the capital as a solo founder..
Just a side note, it doesn't matter if you are Mark Zuckerberg, Steve Job or Elon fucking Musk. You might have created the future alone in a fucking garage but you definitely should prefer word "we". It's also a great sign of leadership.
Does the above statement seem bigoted?
Over decades I’ve Seen lots of sales people target demographics in illegal ways. Mostly insurance and age. Basically impossible to prove unless your put it in writing.
Still one does normally advertise such things.
This is the text I'm seeing on my chrome /mobile android browser, would be funny if we were being shown different versions, but it seems as if you might have made a mistake there.
That’s what I see. I assume GP was trying to make a point.
It doesn’t seem like she was hiding anything, in fact that’s a pretty bold admission in an article about raising VC.
https://loyalfordogs.com/the-science/pipeline-current-studie...
New names are usually given to new, unknown compounds where a company spent years on getting the compound right and tested thousands of them to select the best (using a criteria that the company publishes)
Although that's not an explicit rule in the site guidelines, I think it's pretty clear that your comment broke more than one of the rules that are: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html. It's also a flamewar tropes to switch some words around and act like the person said that when they didn't. Please don't do flamewar tropes on HN. Clichés are tedious and uninteresting to begin with, and the flamewar ones are poison.
Edit: it also looks like your account has been using HN primarily for flamewar. We ban accounts that do that. If you wouldn't mind reviewing the guidelines and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.
The problem ranges from light sexism (skepticism over whether she can "lead" and "be tough") to blatant misogyny (trying to exchange money for sex and blackballing her from deals if she refuses or talks about it). Those are things that men mostly do not have to deal with when raising money.
Things like systematically schedule 150 VC interviews in 4 weeks and analyse their reactions to specific words/phrases. Very geeky, very appropriate for HN. Only a true nerd would do that.
But I really don’t see why sex would have anything to do with it.
“Crunchbase data show that not only did total funding to female-led startups fall this year, but the proportion of dollars to female-only founders also declined, to 2.3 percent, compared to 2.8 percent in 2019.”
Source: https://news.crunchbase.com/news/global-vc-funding-to-female...
You've done the very thing you're complaining about, guaranteeing a flamewar. That breaks the site guidelines. Please don't do that.
"Good" in this context refers to the expected value of the subthread the comment leads to, as described here: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor....
We're particularly trying to avoid the online callout/shaming culture here because it leads to more bad things; please don't practice that here.
Source: a vet friend
Buddhism is developing acceptance of lifespan and appreciation of life in the present moment. It's in the peace of mind category.
Please, please, please name this firm. For the good of all founders.
I also dislike almost everything about dogs, but unless an office becomes "pet-friendly" (=dog-friendly because no one is going to bring their cat/parrot/turtle/fish to the office), is unlikely you will ever notice.
https://highline.huffingtonpost.com/articles/en/lotto-winner...
What are the chances of the average seed-funded web startup still being around in five years? Can't be much over 1%.
Also, I think most people vastly overestimate the level of competence of VCs and especially the degree of due diligence that they do. They are just as easily wooed by great presentations and the typical sales tricks. Cases in point: WeWork, Theranos, etc.
Remember when more than one millionaire funded Juicero? I remember.
This is one of the most important qualities you need if you are building a company.
Also when it comes to VCs, you gotta sell it. Or perish. And if you are gonna sell it, you better have some strategies. This is independent of how good your idea is. Maybe there will be an utopia where VCs consider things only on merit, but that is not the general reality right now.