2019-09-27 at

Comment: on the Supportive Venture Capitalist

Here's a counterexample LOL:
- M0: July 2015 I started raising funds for a new business (I was probably going to do it by myself anyway, with USD 12,000)
- M1: August we signed down a USD 98,000 round with multiple angels
- M3: October we lost 2/3 of our operational founders and had to hire faster
- M5: December we basically delivered the MVP running 24-7
- M8: March 2016 we had maxed out the feature set for GTM
- M10: April we went viral and did $29,000 sales in just that month
- M12: June I did a capital call to expand service area. Negative response.
- M13: July I started laying off staff to optimise...
- M50: September 2019... we've been in cockroach mode for 37 months and I have a pretty solid crew, but have to solo all the R&D, and I deprioritise fundraising because what we really need is more cofounders (I like to say I prefer a CFO, as it's easier to find one of those than a product person who's able to carry what I need them to do). I have been living almost beside my office for 40 months... just moved away because I found reduced rent somewhere else and the team is not horrible.
Moral of the story? If you're expecting a lack of support, be prepared to rough it out and fix things by yourself. I think an absence of continued support from angels is normal - it's not their job to take more than one step forward.

Do however be on the lookout for a worse scenario - sometime you will face active opposition from internal parties... this is classified as a weakness, not a threat, if you use a textbook SWOT lens. Friendly fire is rarely expected, and generally very annoying to fix.

But if you signed up for war, then just shoot the troublemakers and continue.

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