186 karma · joined April 1, 2017
^ Still do, even just to hear the Kelethin music or to run from Kelethin to Erudin. I may just do that this weekend…
However, money is not the biggest issue because we saved and planned for this effort. It's exactly what was written "The Tradeoff" section that's the biggest difficulty with not working with VCs. We constantly see competitors and semi-competitors in our industry posting on LinkedIn about recent fund raising rounds, new contracts, acquisitions, etc. and every post seems to have 1000s of likes. Obviously it's not all due to VC support, but that community and network really does help (and is enticing).
It's funny... in my industry people seem to have forgotten that you can build a company without taking VC. It feels like our customer base equates small business with any new business even if that company has taken $250M of VC.
Some people call this “phenomenon” planning against the deadline.
I’m more concerned about my privacy being utterly raped for advertising purposes. That’s why I use a paid VPN, paid privacy-focused DNS, paid ProtonMail account, use Signal, etc. I could probably be better served from self hosting some of these things, but this is a good balance for me. It seems to me that this concern - hiding data from Google, Microsoft, Verizon, etc. - is secondary to hiding from the NSA/CIA in many open privacy conversations.
Note - I am sympathetic to the fact that there are hostile governments all over the world and privacy-tooling is mandatory for whistle blowers, activists, protestors, journalists, etc.