Why You Shouldn't Take VC Money

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So I spoke to tons of investors last year and tons of people who took

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investment capital over the last several years and

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Santos was basically advocating for it because in his prior experiences it had

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accelerated everything

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When they had done it basically as a result of the PR hit that came from it

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And I was open to it and the way that we were building it seemed like it would

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sort of turning into like

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Adventure business at the time or whatever

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So these but over the course of the year, you know things change for us a lot

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and where we ended up was

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kind of where I was before we started talking to these people and

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It's squarely in the bootstrappers camp and like this is what I sort of define

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as the bootstrappers camp, right?

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Like I think the dividends are good

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I think that if you create a company that is profitable and growing you deserve

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to get paid as a reward

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You should get paid millions of dollars a year and you shouldn't be waiting on

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some

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You know strapped for cash for some liquidity event in the future that may or

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may not happen and

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Just the way tech investors are

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None of the ones I spoke to are dividend advocates. They're all squarely in

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this like you know growth camp

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And I found the investor value proposition to be pre-week

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There seems to be a lot of people promising support and go to market in

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recruiting which

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my view is

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the go to market help is more to get a founder like me excited and

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dreaming bigger dreams of like this ultimate exit someday and

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If the growth actually occurred it was probably my team doing it and not the

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investor

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And then you know this help with like finding executives

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Which is an outsourced service that you don't need investors and their networks

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to do like you can literally just pay and get that

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and

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look

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My view is if you don't have to have a new seat at the table

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Then you should avoid that because a new seat at the table with a different set

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of interests at best

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That will slow you down at worst even if they have a minority stake there are

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ways these people can ruin your life

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I just spoke to a lot of different people with a lot of horror stories over the

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last couple years

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So they can ruin your life and then God forbid something happens

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Something macro happens that slows you down

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It can crunch your remaining equity stake

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And there's kind of nothing you can do about it

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So I think that that

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In my opinion, I'm better off without it, you know

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and there's this

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different set of interests that every investor has because they're in the

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portfolio game and you are not and

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There can come a time when if you have three or four investors and it's sort of

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like a lot of your equity

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And they have some type of preference that they can decide that they want you

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to do something some sort of a transaction

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That you do not want to do

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And man, I heard some horror stories about this

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There's just a whole machine set up

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To make you do things that you do not want to do

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to put it that way

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so

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There's another fundamental problem that you sort of notice when you're talking

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to investors and by the way these guys are

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super smart in you know what they do and

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A lot of them are operators and we're super smart and being operators most a

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long time ago. I think but

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a lot of investors are very rich and they got very rich doing something totally

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different than what for instance I am doing today, right?

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like

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Being an investor for 30 years is not being a startup founder being a D to C

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Building a D to C company 10 years ago is not being a startup founder being a

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startup founder 30 years ago is not being a startup founder today

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But super rich people tend to think that they understand everything very deeply

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That's just what being rich does to you. So I

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Think that can just be annoying to people at least based upon the conversations

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that I had, you know

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For instance this year. I want to do something that I think investors would

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Maybe maybe let me pursue for a very short period of time before telling me to

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stop

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They would be like okay. You've done well enough. We'll let you have this and

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and what I want to do is give away an

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Incredibly valuable product to hopefully millions of people totally free and

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convert a tiny percentage of them

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To a very underpriced price point

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That's just the opposite of what of what this game they're playing says that

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you should do and

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I think that even if it were like, you know a few people with some minority

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stake the amount of pressure that I would feel

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Even though I'm saying I don't care if we make a dollar this year. It's all

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about the exponential growth in the future

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And they're like okay. Uh-huh if that actually happened. I just feel like

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an enormous amount of pressure to stop would be put against me and then if I

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didn't then

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They'd find a way to get me out of there

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you know

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just based on conversations that that I that I had last year um

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there's another very controversial thing and

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You know people farther along me scoff at it and just say I'm I'm inexperienced

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and I haven't gotten there yet

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But I just don't believe

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that measuring things ends up in

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Decision-making that's best for the long-term health of the company

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It screwed us last year. I know a bunch of people that it screwed last year

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like spreadsheets in particular

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You sit there you make a model you like build this growth in then you're like,

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oh, how many sales people do I need to make that happen?

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You go out and hire all these people and it doesn't work

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You know because fundamentally

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the salespeople are not

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sourcing the demand but

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Their output is something that you can measure so you assume that since you can

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measure it you can scale it whereas

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in reality

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Demand is getting created from something like what we're doing right now and

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there's no

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way I could measure

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how one person could hear this that could bump into two other people at live

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events and then

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Listen to me on some other person's podcast and then decide to come in through

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some automated

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You know str thing that we have right like the only thing you can measure is

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like

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the point at which this person actually

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Decided raise their hand in declare that they want demo so

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That is not a

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Comfortable paradigm to operate in if you are partnered with an investor

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People want budgets. They want spreadsheets. They want like

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I've never run an AB test. I think that a

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Lot of the tech that we use isn't even valuable

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But like people are looking at metrics and tech companies are able to

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Exploit the fact that we're looking at these metrics and getting in the way of

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stuff that was gonna happen anyway and get you to use their tech

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But I'm just you know, I don't know if that's old school and no new school

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Some people probably say it's just dumb, but I just think that

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the best businesses are

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The greatest entrepreneurs understand that what makes businesses the best are

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things that you can't measure I

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Cherish so much about what this does for my life like this thing that I'm in

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the middle of and how much energy

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it gives me to pursue other things and

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a lot of those things

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may have been compromised

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Had we done it and I'm just so glad that we didn't