A founder raising money for Kahani negotiated a vesting clause tied to his mortality: if he died, his vesting stopped. The story shows how institutional investors impose unusual terms to protect returns, revealing the hidden costs of taking external capital.
Talk about just your fundraising experience and some of the biggest lessons that you learned in the process of fundraising.
You know, it's a great thing as long as your eyes are wide open. Everything is alignment. I have a funny story about this and I want to share just as an example of how things change a little bit. So we raised money for Kahani and one of the final terms of the negotiation was there was this term that if I died, I would stop vesting.
This is getting morbid fast.
And it occurred to me in that moment that the second you raise institutional or professional money, your business becomes a financial product for somebody else, and that that financial product has to Have return, and I ended up giving on it. I think it was just a really stark contrast to someone who's bootstrapped businesses his whole life for the first time. This is a financial product for these guys. They have to make sure that the cap table stays clean in the case where I die, right?
SF startup Eve just raised $103 million led by Spark Capital with backing from a16z and Lightspeed.
