VC Minute – quick advice to help startup founders fundraise better.
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Brandon
If you don’t wanna fundraise, which I don’t blame you, it’s a difficult process. When you’re building you’re marketing, you’re getting your brand out there, fundraising can be such a difficult task on top of everything else that you have to do. It doesn’t make sense.
If you decide that I don’t want to go that route and I want to bootstrap, be ready and prepared for everything that comes with that.
When I bootstrap my first company, Inventrify the first black-owned crowdfunding platform in the US. I was living out of my car. It was crazy. And I would go and sleep in different Walmart parking lots and go and get Dunkin’ Donuts in the morning and try to make it all work and try to make it all happen.
The thing that I always told myself was, Plan B is another way to make Plan A work. Plan A was, get this platform off the ground and nothing else mattered to me at that time.
Not everybody has the luxury to do that. Maybe you have a family that you have to support, maybe you have other obligations, whatever. I get it. I understand.
And you know, success tends to follow, luck tends to follow those who put in the work.
I think the best pitch I ever heard at Overlooked was by a founder that we ended up investing in called Moment AI. Black woman founder, absolutely amazing, former Google engineer. And she created a company to help if you were having a health event while you were driving, so a heart attack or whatever, it can actually detect that and then stop the car safely for you and contact who it needs to contact so that you’re okay.
And this founder, what truly amazed me about her, she would go to play poker to bootstrap the company that she was building and that’s how she did it.
She was going to make this happen regardless of who invested or who didn’t. And that was just so amazing to me.
There’s a certain hustle and grit that people that are outside the lines, come from these different backgrounds, that they have, especially in the heartland of America as she was from Memphis, Tennessee. You just know they’re gonna make it happen.
But you have to have a mindset. If you’re gonna bootstrap that, there’s nothing else. I’m going all in on this. And if you’re ready and willing to go all in. Then do it.
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