Part 2: Life of a Blockchain Entrepreneur
It’s been a long journey since I quit my job as a Software Engineer at Bloomberg to start my Blockchain startup, Stardust. This is the second part of the Life of a Blockchain Entrepreneur series, if you missed Part 1 — give it a read! It gives a great overview of my decision process in starting a business.
Part 1 left off with me networking, building an MVP (minimum viable product), assembling a group of freelancers via Upwork, writing my whitepaper, and compiling a pitch deck. Even though the Blockchain market had cooled off considerably in August 2018, with all my materials in hand I knew that investors would be lining up to give me their millions.
Step Three — Pitching, what went right, wrong, and what I learned
I had gotten my first meeting by chance by using Step 1, networking. I had sent my pitch deck to a VC that was accepting solicitations through LinkedIn. It was less than a professional deck, but it was enough to get me into the office for a meeting — perhaps it was more my gall than my good looks and crappy deck. Shout out GeneralCatalyst for giving me my first opportunity at pitching to a VC.
I went from that meeting to more, flew to Silicon Valley and was able to snag a few meetings with a few of the VCs on Sand Hill Road. After the first month and a half, I had exhausted all of the meetings I had scheduled. The bank was still empty, no checks were coming, I had gotten a verbal commit for half of a smaller seed round (from a seed investor in NYC) — but upon follow up I never heard back.
After all of this, what I considered to be failure, I took a step back to decompress and reflect over my experience. These were my takeaways, but are by no means a generalization to how every VC thinks and acts.
What went right
- I got a meeting, made contacts, established a dialogue
What went wrong
- I could not explain my idea in 15 seconds or less
- I had no presentation with me (for the General Catalyst meeting)
- I was asking for too much money (2 million dollars in my seed round)
- My business cards & product samples were very poor quality
What I learned
- A VC is going to remember ~15 words — make a tagline and repeat it
- Driving the conversation is important, a presentation is key for this
- It’s a NO unless they write a check, they are either in or out
- Finding someone to stick their neck out as the first check is difficult
- Your idea may be great, but running a business is more than just an idea
Step Four — Decisions, where do I go from here?
I felt beaten down, whether that was the actuality of the situation or not, that’s how I felt. I’d gone from being 110% confident in my idea to not sure whether I should continue. Money was running tight, savings were lessening, it was time to either put up or shut up.
Time to change it up and try again
My idea was great, hubris be damned — I knew it was, but something had to change. So I looked back at all my meetings and decided — I had not gotten an investment because I could not explain my idea to others in a succinct manner that they could easily understand. In addition I had to make the idea more all-encompassing, my current idea only dealt with a small subset of the gaming industry rather than the whole.
There was one sentence in one meeting I remembered that I remembered over all others. After having explained my convoluted idea for about 20 minutes, the VC said,
“so… Stardust is a CMS (content management system) for blockchain gaming assets”.
That sentence took me aback, she (Lake Dai) had taken the last 20 minutes of me waffling and put it into a simple sentence every single technologically focused person would immediately understand.
This was what my pitch had to have, a tagline I needed people to remember.
So I thought, played with words, buzz-words aren’t my favorite, but acronyms are key to explaining complex ideas in an easy to understand manner. After 3 weeks and a conference presentation later — I knew how to describe my company.
Stardust is a Blockchain SaaS that enables game publishers to easily create and implement blockchain assets into their games.
The Stardust Platform is a decentralized Blockchain SaaS (Software as a Service) that enables game publishers to easily create and implement blockchain assets into their games.
For more information on Stardust, stay tuned! We’ll have a medium post soon with more information.
