When talking to investors, don't try to hide your problems. Investors know every startup is a series of disasters. If you pretend nothing's wrong, they'll assume you're lying. Confident founders are candid.
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There's also a more subtle reason not to hide your problems from investors. You'll have much more interesting conversations if you're open about them. Nothing is more convincing to a good investor than seeing a good founder's mind at work.
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(Later stage, the most convincing thing is revenue growth. But you'd need something like 18 months of steep revenue growth before a good investor would start to care as much about that graph as about how your mind works.)
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Most founders overvalue their pitch and undervalue their brain. You think your deck is great, because you spent so long on it. Whereas your brain, you think, is a noob's. But to experienced investors your deck is <deck> and your noob brain is a fascinating work in progress.
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The big mistake teenagers make when trying to seem impressive is trying to seem like adults. Maybe it fools other teenagers. But to adults, they'd seem more impressive if they were good teenagers instead of bad imitation adults.
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Similarly, it's more impressive to seem a promising but inexperienced founder than to seem like a bad imitation of one who's already successful.
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If you have 18 months of steep revenue growth, why would you need investment?
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18 months of 5% per week revenue growth, which is good for a startup, would be 45× what you started with. If that's 45 clients or 45000 clients, you're still five orders of magnitude from being 2019 Facebook.
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@threadreaderapp please unroll. - Show replies
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...which really is a big problem. How many ideas are delayed because they're birthed by bad founders? The best thing we could do for innovation is find a way to let ideas win.
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One way of letting ideas win is freeing ideators from their ideas. We demand they hire and train the orchestra, when we should really just let them get back to their desk writing another piece of music.
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