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10 months agoI put some thoughts on the link below.
There are two major takeaways for me:
- never let your board with such a low number of people (3 people left the OpenAI board in 2023 and were not replaced)
- always have board members with (1) a vested interest in the company success and (2) no conflict of interest. It seems that some remaining board members were in one of these categories.
Full post on: https://juli1.substack.com/p/founders-what-can-you-learn-from
I wrote my story about raising funding for my startup and the top fundraising mistakes that I have seen from founders.
In short, if you quadruple revenue every two months, you should start to be cash flow positive. In this case, you are default alive, and you may go without raising any money because you will avoid any dilution.
If you are growing revenue but are still not profitable, you can either (1) raise money or (2) change your unit economic and come back to the situation one paragraph above.
The point is: I would really avoid raising money unless you really need to. Raising a round is not easy, it takes time and it’s painful. Not only, it will distract you from operating your company (and serving your customers) but you will eventually give away a lot of equity and maybe give up control of your company moving forward.
While we think raising funding is the traditional way, there are many other ways to start a company. Some major public tech companies were bootstraped for a long time, and it worked out very well for them.