How to raise money for a mission-driven company. Should you be a public benefit corporation or a C Corp? And which matters more: traditional VCs or impact investors who actually care about your mission?
When we were deciding how to raise our first institutional capital, there were two real questions we were grappling with. The first one is, do we be a public benefit corporation or do we go out as C Corp? And the second one is, do we raise from traditional VCs or do we raise from impact investors or even other folks? Being a nonprofit was on the table for us. How do we make those decisions in terms of incorporation? I think Patrick and I are both really passionate about the idea of a public benefit corporation, which is an entity which in its bylaw laws says what is a social mission that we're going to solve? Meaning the very first legal contract you draft up as a company, it is written there. And the reason why we want to do that is because a public benefit corporation, unlike a B Corp. Stamp or something like that, has a unique quality that if at the end of the day, for example, you want to sell and there's a big offer from a for profit company that has nothing to do with your mission, and there's a lower price option from another company that will be a better steward of your mission, you have the ability and the fiduciary duty to your stakeholders to be able to take that lower offer for someone who cares about your mission. And that's an amazing amount of protection to have as a company in order to really build that legacy of a company that's pursuing a particular thing that's not just profitability. So we decided to do that even though the day before we went out for fundraising, someone from Greylock said, absolutely, don't, you'll never raise money. It turns out no one even asked us in the seed process. They were like, ah, I see your metrics, they're good. Can I give you money? And so that was, you know, a much easier process than we were warned against. And then the second thing around, who to take money from, it's a really, it's something that I really encourage folks to put thought into. We said that we wanted to go after traditional vc and the reason for that is because we said we want folks who are going to push us as hard on the financial metrics, which is an area we want to be really strong and healthy in in the early days as much as possible. And we believe that because we have this public benefit corporation protection that, you know, a lot of these folks live in VC land and aren't just impact investors. So we wanted to open up scope to both of those sets of folks. But every company is different and not every company is a good fit for traditional vc. They have a very particular model which is very boomer bust. They want one out of 20 portfolio companies to work and all the others go to zero, and that's fine for them. That might not be what you want for yourself as an entrepreneur, and it might not be what your mission needs in order to be successful as a company either.
O processo de reconhecer limites, mesmo quando a vida parece exigir sempre mais.
Depois de tantas histórias, aprendizados e pausas necessárias, o @interior_iza está de volta
