Jeff Church: Lessons for Venture Starters

Oftentimes people quit when success is right around the corner. And I tell people, look, unless it's systemically flawed and it's very difficult to tell, but unless it's systemically flawed, keep pushing, keep persevering through it. Maybe you should ask a mentor, ask a parent, ask a business person, ask a CEO of another company to kind of check and balance you, to make sure that you are on the right track, but kind of push through that threshold, you know, to persevere. Find a partner or mentor who balances you. You know, we all are going to be good at, you know, one or two things, but we're not going to be good at five or six things that cut across all functional areas. And most people tend to be more left brained or right brained. And I find it's really important to partner with somebody that complements you. And this doesn't mean they have to be an equal owner. This doesn't mean they have to be an owner at all. They could be a parent, they could be a professor, they could be a friend, they can be a CEO of another company, but partner with somebody else. Because the minute you go to talk to investors, they're going to start drilling you. And if you're a sales and marketing person and they start drilling you on cash flow and you go, huh, you're done. It's over with that particular investor. So make sure you complement yourself with somebody that really can pull that stuff out. And the final thing is what I call the rule of twos. And that's that everything takes twice as long and costs twice as much money. That's just human nature. And that damn Excel, Excel makes everything really easy because we can make an Excel model look just really dynamite. And in reality, it's a lot harder to hit those models. And I find it just takes a lot longer than we think is human nature. So if you can run your models out for an extra two years, run your cash flows out for double your costs so that you really know last thing you want to do is run out of money. And the last thing you want to do is run out of money when success is right around the corner because you're going to go out and raise money when you're out of money and talk about dilution, you're going to get wiped out and then you're going to be really unhappy. So make sure you get enough capital up front so that you can kind of weather that storm.