Finding the Right Early-Stage Investor

I can tell you, when I raised capital for my own company, I was 23 years old, and it was very intimidating because here's these folks that show up and they've got millions of dollars, and, you know, that number was just daunting to even think about. And, uh, you start to immediately think about this subservient relationship to them, and that's clearly not the model that, that leads to success. I think, I think the thing I have learned over the years is The relationship, and I'm speaking about early stage, of an early stage investor with their founders truly has to be a partnership where they're not investing with a mindset of judging, they're investing with the mindset of building. When a company is really raw, it's actually not about governance, right? What you can have board meetings, but what governance is there to do? Because there's problems everywhere. Everything has to be figured out in the early days. So, the mindset has has to be, what are the key decisions that need to be made? How do we help you make them? How do we help eliminate failure modes? So it really needs to be a builder's mindset, uh, early on. And, and if I'm starting a company, if I'm, you know, somebody in the audience doing that, I would really be screening for that. I would really be looking for exactly how you would work with, uh, the capital investor. And if you're not going to get that, then you want somebody passive so you can decouple capital from, from, from advice and go seek advisors in the, in the market that maybe can help you build a So it's got to be one of those as opposed to necessarily adding too much governance tax in the early days.