Confessions of an Entrepreneur: From $105,000 in debt to selling my company for $16.5 million by 25.

Our story was stereotypical. A group of young people start a business in a garage basement and turn it into a hyper growth story with no funding.

In 2019, I turned 25 and sold one of my companies for a combined value of $16,500,000 in a cash and stock options deal to a publicly traded company. Right before we sold we had just reached $2 million in monthly revenue and we were netting roughly 40% of that in profit. At the point of sale we had not raised any capital and my ownership of the company sat around 34%.

The following list is comprised of lessons I learned while building and growing a successful multimillion dollar enterprise. My hope is that by sharing this brief list I can add value and save time for others in their various pursuits.

1.Avoid VC Money at all Costs — When I used to work in software, I can’t tell you how many entrepreneur friends I had who used the amount of money they raised as a badge of success. Avoid this type of false logic. The only metric you should care about when building a business is whether it is profitable. As the VC bubble bursts and funds dry up, the long term winners will be the slow and steady value businesses with strong fundamentals. Hearing about how someone raised $50 million may sound appealing, but the real question you should be asking is why they needed to raise $50 million in the first place and how much equity they have left over. The…