How to Raise Money (2013)

&gt;To founders, the behavior of investors is often opaque — partly because their motivations are obscure, but partly because they deliberately mislead you.<p>YC itself is opaque. All their rejection emails are a simple &quot;sorry, we can&#x27;t tell you&quot;. I don&#x27;t know if they are afraid of legal liabilities or the reasons are much more mundane : &quot;It&#x27;s been 2 years and your revenue is only $2k&quot;, &quot;AI is overhyped&quot;, &quot;Too small a market&quot;, &quot;You look dodgy&quot; etc.<p>&gt;Don&#x27;t raise money unless you want it and it wants you.<p>I wish I knew this before I went on a wild goose chase for angels.<p>The only two startup articles I read are either PG or indiehackers and I am impressed with how clear and lucid this dude is with his words.

Definitely seems like really obvious advice that only really makes sense once you&#x27;ve been there and done it.<p>For a newb, it just sounds like quite a few things to remember, lots of expensive mistakes to make, although the saving grace is that investors are about money so even if you call them a rude word, I&#x27;m sure they&#x27;ll come back if you&#x27;re making enough money!<p>Does anyone have a fixed link for the Sequoia slide deck?

are there any crowd funded equity raise out there? whats the overall process like compared to traditional money raise?<p>because i feel like that is the best alternative to this 2013 article, it lets you bypass the whole problem of having to know an investor, mind you, is not necessarily a rewarding experience.<p>the fact is any one that has managed a small portfolio with or without wins is tough to tell apart from each other. when you have certain amount of money it buys you a comfortable cushion to fall back on despite your failures and still come across as successful, but in fact you are a horrible fucking money manager&#x2F;investor who happened to get lucky in the 90s through ultimately being exposed to an environment where wealth and poverty divide is particularly wide in a massive city.<p>a crowd source equity fund raise, not much different from an ICO apart the added rigor (one ICO had some Russian dude in a drag posing as HR, switching gender and hair color for different roles filled by the same person, exit scammed with an anti-semetic pepe meme), equalizes the power balance between investor and innovator from what was a master-slave relationship to many masters-slave that is supposed to be more democratic yet fragility is questionable. ex. FUD, fake news causing run on bank vs one investor weathering it out because of #faith<p>im still not sure what the legality of crowd equity raising is in canada but this is what i decided to pursue now.

this:<p>&gt; Though it sounds slightly paradoxical, if you want to raise money, the best thing you can do is get yourself to the point where you don&#x27;t need to.

This gives a really good insight into the investor mindset and explains why we&#x27;re in such a massive bubble now.<p>It&#x27;s as though investors don&#x27;t think at all, they&#x27;re just following each other and copying every move. That&#x27;s the definition of dumb money.

&gt;Before you can talk to investors, you have to be introduced to them.<p>But how can you get introduced to them when they won&#x27;t talk to you?

How does he get through this article without even mentioning putting on a good old-fashioned bake sale?

this is interesting but seriously need an update on this for the 2018 ICO world. Especially Oct 2018..<p>I&#x27;m working on a new social document collaboration platform:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;getpolarized.io&#x2F;</a><p>and I&#x27;d like to raise funds for it but it&#x27;s REALLY unclear if I should go ICO, pre-seed, etc.

Seems an odd read in the post ICO world.<p>Why deal with any of that headache when you can just launch a landing page&#x2F;white paper and ask for money from the public to fund your idea without giving up equity or control.

Yes, lots of startups need external funding, say, venture funding.<p>But the US is awash, from border to border, in successful businesses, say, <i>Main Street</i> businesses, that never got external funding. They were, say, <i>bootstrapped</i>.<p>Maybe if pick an information technology (IT) project carefully, then can bootstrap it or start it with just own checkbook and no external funding.<p>Really, an IT startup should need less money to start than a lot of Main Street businesses. E.g., can quickly need $100,000+ in spending to get to the first $1 of revenue in an auto body shop, auto repair shop, asphalt driveway paving company, dentist&#x27;s office, pizza or Chinese carryout restaurant, etc. Heck, in my neighborhood, the guys mowing grass show up with $100,000+ in equipment.<p>In contrast, for, say, a Web site, can plug together a quite powerful server for less than $2000 and can get a lot of relevant software tools and infrastructure software for free or nearly so. Can run ads from ad networks. If people like the site and keep a $2000 server busy, then in a year can have more in pre-tax earnings than could get from a venture seed round.