The One Type of Entrepreneur You Should Never Take Advice From
Some entrepreneurs are trying to help you, but others are just trying to help themselves
I invited a founder to be a guest speaker in one of my entrepreneurship classes. He’d recently moved his company to San Francisco and successfully raised a $3 million seed round, so I thought he’d have some good insights.
During his visit, I asked him to talk about his funding round and explain why he’d decided to take venture capital. Here’s what he said:.
“We actually only just decided to take on outside investors. We bootstrapped for the first three years. But now we’re at a point where we’ve proven our technology, we know how to acquire customers, and we’ve proven the market size. We finally felt it made sense to take on outside capital in order to capture the opportunity as quickly as possible.”
It was exactly the justification for raising capital I love hearing. As I’m constantly telling my entrepreneurship students and all the founders I advise, venture capital isn’t something you pursue in order to build an awesome company. You build an awesome company, then you raise venture capital to help scale it. That’s exactly what this founder was doing. He was raising capital after gaining significant traction, not…
