Tyler pitched to venture capitalists and got funded not for technical ability but for grit. The investor chose him because he showed resilience, not polish. Sometimes persistence matters more than perfection.
Chapters
I'm days away from being out of money. It's my last. Like, book a flight, go to San Francisco. I've got seven or eight meetings. And I sit down in front of this VC who's like, a dream. He's backed 400 companies. Like, just one of the greatest early stage investors in history. So I meet with one of his partners, and I have the most atrocious pitch ever. It went so bad, like, so bad that I was sweating, and he had to tell me, like, hey, it's cool, dude. Calm down. Can tell you're frazzled. At the end, I literally apologized. I'm like, dude, I'm sorry for wasting your time. Like, no, no, it's all good. Let me get back to you. And I'm like, okay, that's a no. Thirty minutes later, I'm in another building right next door, pitching another vc. I get a text from him. He says, hey, Ulas wants to meet with you. Who's the gp? He's like, can you come back over here right away? He's leaving in 30 minutes. So I literally tell him, hey, I'm so sorry to do this, but I've got to go. So I leave, go next door, sit down again. Hundreds of hours of prep, hundreds of hours of pitching. Up to this point, no, no, no, no, no. I sit down, I share my vision, you know, doesn't really even ask many questions. I'm there for 15 minutes. He goes, hey, will you step outside, Tyler, just for a sec, Step outside. Comes out. Thirty seconds later, I walk in. And he's like, hey, we want to do this, and we're going to write a check. We're going to lead this round. We're going to help you get the rest of your investors on board, and we're going to wire funds tomorrow. Wow. And I was days away from shutting the company down, so, you know, I share that for a few reasons. One Ulas later told me, I said, why did you back me? And he goes, because there's one thing that stood out about you above everything else, because I don't think you're the most technical. I don't think you're the most strategic or the most savvy or the most educated. He goes, you were clearly the most resilient. Like, you were the one that I knew when things got really. When you were a week away from running out of money, you were going to be the one to figure it out. And those are the kind of founders that we back, right?
