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Alon Cohen: Proving Product to Investors

Name: Alon Cohen: Proving Product to Investors
Uploaded: 2015-02-09T06:46:21+00:00
Duration: 1 min 15 s
Channel: GHION.AI
Description: In this concise talk, Alon Cohen addresses the complexity of raising capital and proposes a straightforward approach: demonstrate a successful…

9 Feb 2015 · 1 min

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1:15

In this concise talk, Alon Cohen addresses the complexity of raising capital and proposes a straightforward approach: demonstrate a successful, bootstrapped product before seeking investment. He argues that traditional advice—having an already successful company—doesn't help first‑time founders, so instead they should bootstrap to prove product‑market fit and operational capability. Success, in his view, is when venture capitalists start chasing the founders. By showing real users and limited‑budget execution, founders signal to investors that they can deliver, making subsequent fundraising considerably easier.

Chapters

How do you simplify raising money, right? There's tons of books on that and lectures and everything, right? It's a complicated thing, so it seems, right? It is complicated. So there's one simple way I realized is you do one company that's successful and then it's easy to raise the next money for the next company. But that doesn't work if you don't have that first company. That was ruled out. What's the definition of success? Yeah, I don't know, that's a great question. It's when the VCs are chasing you after that, yeah. So anyway, that doesn't work, right? So what do you do? So for us it was basically us bootstrapping it solved a lot of the problem. And it's not for everybody, but it definitely is a very viable way to make things work. Because what happens is that you come to investors where you have something that's already there, it already has been proven, right? People are using it and you've shown that you can— you and your founder, co-founders, right, were doing it on your own with very little budget. That's really what investors are looking for, right? That's an indication that you guys can actually make it happen, right? And it made our life a lot easier.