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Comment by wiradikusuma | Hacker News Reader

Last time, when I met a VC associate, he was excited to hear my pitch, and in the end he asked about my team. When I told him I did everything alone (and doing it parttime), his facial expression changed, and started lecturing me (in a subtle way) about how hard it is to run business alone and part-time. I had a working product and some tractions. The idea was to get money from him, so I can confidently quit my job and working on my product fulltime. Sounds like catch-22 no?

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"nobody on the internet knows you are a dog" - make your pet dog/cat/hamster a co-founder/imaginary friend. Create a facebook page/github account/stackoverflow account for them so they exist on a cursory Google search. At a later stage after you have done the money grabbing explain that your co-founder didn't really commit much code and you had to let him/her go. Dishonest? Yes, but women that posed as men to get publishing deals or to join the army were dishonest too. In the current scene there is this 'must have cofounder' rule that doesn't entirely make sense. It is mythical man month to a certain extent - if one person spends two years to develop an MVP and get traction that is somehow worthless whereas if a team of two do it in a year that is somehow perfect.

Don't investors do due diligence before wiring money to your bank, even it's just a seed funding?

If you're making up imaginary partners to get someone to give you money when they wouldn't otherwise, you'd be committing fraud. If the investor found out, they could press criminal charges[1] or sue you to get their money back. (They'd be especially likely to do this if they lost money on your company.) Once the case ended up in court, you'd have no way out, since continuing to assert your lie would be perjury (a felony).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fraud#As_a_criminal_wrong

"Team" doesn't have to mean full-on partners, but usually without money you can't get people on board to commit to anything resembling reasonable effort to get things done. Perhaps some things should be outsourced, with you still managing and making decisions, but outsourced to extremely low-cost people, then you'll have the 'team' the VC wants so desperately to see??

Given that you're already doing it, I'm not sure you need a lecture or reminding about how hard it is. It's also really hard to convince people to come work for you for no money (probably harder than just getting your stuff working and bringing in money in the first place).

>> It's also really hard to convince people to come work for you for no money

I think this may have been why his face dropped. If your pitch isn't convincing anyone to take a risk with their career/time on you, then the investor is going to think twice about taking a similar risk with his money.

Part of what they want to believe is that you have the personal network to get good people and the skill to keep them around and believing in your vision. One way you can finesse this is by finding people who will join you instantly when you have money. E.g., "My friend Joe has been helping me with the coding and will come on full time as soon as I can pay him enough to cover his bills."

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