Brad Feld

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Don’t Forget To Bootstrap

Nov 09, 2011
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I recently spent some time with a long time friend and entrepreneur who I’ve funded in the past. He’s working on a new company which I think is really neat and I’m already a user of. He called me for feedback on his fundraising strategy as well as to see if it’s something that we’d be interested in investing in.

It’s outside our themes and different than the type of business we invest in. Given our long relationship and the fact that he’s an awesome entrepreneur, I squinted hard at one of our themes, turned my head sideways, and decided to take a look. We spent a few days applying our process to it (each partner touches it and we give each other real time qualitative reactions) and quickly realized that it really wasn’t something for us as it was far outside anything that we felt like we could help much with beyond money and moral support (which my friend is going to get from me anyway.)

So – I sent my friend a note with my explanation for why we are passing. I offered to help with introductions because (a) he’s an awesome entrepreneur, (b) it’s a very fundable business – just not by us, and (c) I have a lot of confidence that he’ll build a successful business and there are several VCs who I know that I think would like what he’s working on.

His response was dynamite. It was

“No sweat. I knew it was a longshot, so I appreciate you even considering it. I know how many deals you have to pick from.

I’d like to take you up on your offer to help us get funded, but I have a better idea … help us avoid the need for funding (700 clients gets us to profitability).”

He then went on to detail a handful of things he’d like me to do assuming that I’m a happy user of his product. All of them are easy, low maintenance for me, and in several cases actually benefit me.

I love that my friend is much more focused on ramping up his customers than raising money. It’s easy to get lost in the soup of “X company raised $Y” and forget that it’s not about fundraising, but building a business. When I think of some of my favorite TechStars companies, such as Occipital, they bootstrapped for several years before raising any money (well documented in the book Do More Faster) and even then could have easily built their business without raising any money.

Don’t forget to bootstrap.