Entrepreneurship is much like playing competitive basketball where it is becomes more mental competition and less physical competition as the game wears on. There will be phases during the fund raising process when you get so much external rejections and internal failed experiments that you starting thinking “am I just being a con-artist” when entering into the next fund raising session.
The real work of the entrepreneur is the mental exercise. Do not let external rejections and internal failed experiments cause your conviction to waver. Let the investor deal with their job (where to park their cash) and the management deal with theirs (how to use the cash). Your job one and only job is to convince the investor to part with his cash so that you can pass it to the manager to use the cash.
Do not confuse the roles of Entrepreneur, Management and Shareholders
- Entrepreneur: role is to acquire external resources required to grow the company
- Shareholder: role is to keep watch over security of the capital invested and have it grow
- Management: role is to ensure the externally acquired resources get put to proper use with minimal wastage
When in fund raising mode, do not emotionally entangle yourself with “being accountable/responsible” for the funds that will be acquired externally to be put to good use internally. Just dealing with all the multitudes of external rejections during the fund raising exercise is in itself already a Herculean chore. There is no reason to self-sabotage by causing yourself to waver from your conviction by further introduction of self doubt during this critical process.
There is a difference between marketing the product and marketing the company. Products are marketed to customers while the company is marketed to the investors. The three classes of investors:
- Angel investors – buy the story
- Venture Capitalist – structured as a fund to ensure compliance with governance
- Private Equity – late stage fund to get the company ready for IPO
- Public offering – the general public as well as trust funds
The important thing during fund raising is to rapidly filter out the naysayers and frame a story that will excite the remaining investors to want to part with their cash. Do not waste time with the naysayers.
It is unlikely that you will be able to haul in all the capital you need in one shot. Just figure what story you need to tell to the next person to pull in the resources necessary to snowball the idea bigger and repeat that process until the entire idea gets fully realized.
Ideas/ brain child a fragile creatures that need to be protected and nurtured by the founder.
People who started companies but only have experience working in technical functions will under appreciate the importance of story telling. These companies will ultimately fail. They do not see all the marketing the partners in the company did to get it off the ground initially. People who started companies but do not attempt to build up the company in fear of failing are people simply just trying to find a job for themselves. They are not entrepreneurs but self employed.
The reason why entrepreneurs like to hang out with other entrepreneurs is that they feed off each others energy. And that is crucial for the mental game that they have to deal will on a daily basis. The most classic example is Steve Job’s reality distortion field.
There is one fundamental difference between Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk. Jeff Bezos is from the investment banking background, since series A he constantly tweaks his story to the tune of the market to get the resources the company he require. Whereas, Elon Musk was so strong in his belief and charisma that right out the gates he was able to create a cult following around his company while polarizing all the naysayers. These two approaches are reflected in their companies share prices with Tesla being really really turbulent.