Brad Feld says early-stage investors bet on two things: the founders themselves and the product vision. He stresses that the best startups are built by founders obsessed with solving the problem, not chasing money.
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That's continuing, right? And so you say, well, what's the next, you know, five year wave of that? Fuck, I don't know. But that's part of the beauty of it is you let it continue to occur and unfold.
So cool. All right, 30 seconds. I'll let you go, I promise. This guy on LinkedIn, what is consistently and reliably proved to increase a startup's ability to fundraise, and I included it not just because every startup has, but I'm seeing, you know, social impact accelerators who are going to, you know, partnering with startups and they want the teams to get funded, funding, funding, funding. It's not, you know, unicorn chasing. There's something to this. And, you know, that's my. That's his question.
We can, I think, I think at the early stages, you boil it all off. Most investors are investing in two things, because you don't at the early stages generally have enough demonstrable metrics to show that your business is really working. A lot of people show metrics that people then get sort of convinced that things are working. It's good to have those, but they generally are not the one, they're generally not mature enough metrics to say there's undeniably a successful thing here. So the question back to the question of improving the chance of success for funding, I think comes back to the two things that early stage investors are most focused on, which are people and product and the initial people in the company, the founders of the company and the characteristics of those founders is quite important. And there's a lot to that. So you can't answer that in 30 seconds. But then also in product, it's not just the vision you have for the product, and I would also suggest it's not the demonstrable metrics that you have of the product and it's working, but it's some combination of your aspirational goals for where you're going with the product. And the best companies ultimately become the product or embody the product. And so if you're working on something that's a step to something else, that's very hard at the early stages. But if the thing you're working on, and I like to describe it, I use the word obsessed. If you were put on Planet Earth as a founder to work on this problem, whatever this problem is, and that's the product you're creating, and then you can show both that you can demonstrate that through your behavior, and then you can show that that product has relevance and importance, not through what you've already done. But through what you're aspirationally doing, I think that improves your probability of very early stage investment.
