
What I learned from raising venture capital - danthompson
http://www.gabrielweinberg.com/blog/2011/10/what-i-learned-from-raising-venture-capital.html
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pg
This is good. As someone who's watched this process many times, I can tell you
he learned pretty much everything there is to learn about raising VC the first
time through.

The only thing that could make his advice inaccurate is that he was raising
money for such a good startup. And in particular, one with traction. As he
points out, traction trumps everything. So this is essentially a report on
what it was like to travel through VC land in the express lane. The scary
thing is, even then it took 4 months. It might have gone faster if he'd been
on the west coast, but it still would have been a big time suck.

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ccollins
What are the biggest factors that increase the time suck? Amount of money you
are raising, inexperience?

Conversely, what consistently decreases the amount of time spent closing a
round?

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pg
The two biggest factors in the time it takes to close a VC round are how
obviously good the idea is, and how much competition there is for the deal.
The two are not entirely independent of course.

By "obviously good" I mean obviously good to VCs, who as a rule tend to
overlook the very best ideas because they seem crazy. So for example it may
have slowed things down for Gabriel that he was working on a new search
engine, because to many VCs it would seem crazy to try to compete with Google.

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fredwilson
It is crazy to compete with google

But crazy is good when combined with a good entrepreneur and some traction

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heyrhett
I am always extremely impressed by Gabriel Weinberg's honesty and
transparency. He's literally not "selling anything" here. This is just a gift
to his fellow entrepreneurs.

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lurker17
Well, he is advertising his company. Like HN, it's a marketing activity, but
one that also has a value-creation component, not merely an attention-grab.

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rokhayakebe
That doesn't look or fell like advertisement. An ad would be something like
"How we bootstrap our way to 7M searches per month"

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ohashi
That's part of the beauty.

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conductrics
RE: Congratulations. My wife is a musician, and back in the day,when record
labels mattered, many musicians would focus almost entirely on getting the
record deal. That was the thing, to get the deal. Sure, there would be stories
about artist X or Y who's album had been shelved by the label or the signed
artist losing of control over who would be the producer etc. but primarily it
was considered a sign that you had made it, you were legit. You just didn't
really consider the loss of control that went along with the 'deal'. I think
the same is true with funding. Yes, you are making an exchange - money for
equity. However, you are also signaling that you are legit, to outsiders and
to yourself. Of course, there is a cost to everything, and if entrepreneurs
are not treating the funding as a sub-goal, but rather as the goal,then you
wind up with organizations that are optimized to get funding rather building
customers/long term profits.

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va_coder
I hope you guys are working on a pro-privacy email service

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epi0Bauqu
Unfortunately, no time for that.
<http://help.duckduckgo.com/customer/portal/articles/215614>

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djb_hackernews
How much did he raise again? He says he didn't get meetings until after the
August vacation period. And announced the funding October 13th. Does it really
only take 6 weeks to put together a multi-million (?) dollar round?

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epi0Bauqu
I didn't say, but it was 3M.

As for August, I did get meetings before, it just caused trouble because some
meetings I couldn't get before, or there would be large period between
meetings, which hurts momentum. And that all adds up to it being harder to
align the time-line across multiple firms.

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makira
Hi epi0Bauqu! Congrats!

That being said, is it possible to see the actual six slides deck ?

Thanks!

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epi0Bauqu
Thx! I thought about that a bit, but am not comfortable with sharing it yet.

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doc_larry
Thanks for your article, for someone outside of Europe it helps a lot to get
insight on the process in the US. Ironically, albeit a super interesting
write, it's your link to why it doesn't feel right that got my attention! Good
luck for the rest :-) good things come to those who work hard !

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nh
IF Gabriel is reading this: How did you meet the VCs/Angels you already knew?

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epi0Bauqu
\--Angels mainly through angel investing myself, which I realize most people
cannot do.

\--Entrepreneurs who have been funded before from going to events and getting
intros through other people over the years.

\--I really didn't know many VCs. I met a few through entrepreneurship events
in Philly. One through an angel friend a while back. And one I worked for 10
years ago.

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eps
Would you say that doing an angel investment (with no prior experience and no
ties into the angel community) is a hard or risky thing to do? I've been
considering trying it, but basically don't know where to start...

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epi0Bauqu
This is a detailed topic, but basically you have to expect to lose all your
money, and if you want to be serious about it (with a better expected value)
you have to do a lot of deals over a long period of time.

That being said, you have to start somewhere, and the best way to do that is
to co-invest with people. I would meet local angels and hook up with them.

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eps
OK, co-investing makes sense. And by "risky" I meant more of losing time and
nerve cells rather than money (which is an inherent risk), but I guess these
are connected.

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epi0Bauqu
Well not necessarily. A lot of people are completely passive. They write
checks and never look back. I'm way more high touch and like to be involved,
and so the time constraints are more significant.

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strickjb9
dontbubble.us link is broken - it sends you to donbubble.us

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epi0Bauqu
Thank you -- fixed.

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vaksel
if Gabriel had so much trouble, I can just imagine how tough the process is
for everyone else.

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Meganduma
Thanks Gabriel, this is great.

