3 Excuses Founders Make for Why They Can’t Fundraise and What They Actually Mean

Everyone has excuses when they fail, but the best entrepreneurs know how to turn their excuses into successes

Image courtesy Ron Lach via Pexels

Humans are great at making excuses when things don’t work out as they’d intended. We self-justify, blame other people, rationalize, complain, or simply lie. For example, if nobody reads this article, I already know what excuse I’ll use to explain why. I’ll tell myself: “Medium.com must be messing with its algorithm again.” It’s a useful excuse because it lets me off the hook for creating bad content. I get to blame an abstract and uncontrollable concept — Medium.com’s content distribution algorithm — rather than my own failings as a writer and educator.

Since startup founders are, of course, also humans, they’re equally good at making excuses. I know this because I’ve spent years as a founder. Plus, when I haven’t been running my own companies, I’ve been mentoring other entrepreneurs building theirs. Thanks to those experiences, I’ve both heard and personally used hundreds of excuses to help explain why things didn’t go according to plan.

Despite the enormous number of excuses founders tell themselves to justify their entrepreneurial shortcomings, one area of startup ineptitude…