Marc Andreessen and Parker Conrad’s best advice for raising venture capital

I started a company before this that I was at for about six years, and my co founder and I pitched almost every VC firm in Silicon Valley. We literally went to, like, 60 different firms, and they all told us no. And we were constantly trying to figure out how should we adjust our pitch and how should we do the slides differently and how do we tweak the story and that sort of thing. And at one point, there was this sort of key insight that someone gave me when I was pitching, actually someone at Coastal Ventures, and this VC said, guys, you know, he was looking for some very particular kind of analysis that we didn't have on hand. And he was like, guys, you don't get it. He was like, you know, if you guys were the Twitter guys, you guys could come in and you could just be like. And, like, you know, put whatever up here and, like, we would invest in you, but, like, you guys aren't the Twitter guys, so you need to make this really easy and have, like, all this stuff ready for us and all this kind of stuff. And I took, like, the exactly opposite lesson of what he, I think, wanted me to take away from that with, which was like, geez, like, I should really just figure out a way to be the Twitter guys. And, like, that's the way to do this. And so actually, like, one of the reasons I started my current company, or one of the things I found very attractive about Zenefits, is, as I was thinking about it, it seemed like a business. I was so frustrated from this experience of having tried for, like, two years to raise money from VCs, and it sort of decided, like, to hell that you can't count on there being capital available to you. And so the business that I started seemed like one that, like, actually just maybe I could do it without raising money at all. Like, there might be a path to kind of. There was enough cash flow, it seemed compelling enough that I could do that. And it turns out that those are exactly the kinds of businesses that investors love to invest in. And it made it incredibly easy. So I actually think, like, I mean, Sam's very kind and said I was an expert in fundraising. The reality is, I don't actually even think I'm very good at fundraising. It's probably something I'm, like, less good at than sort of other parts of my job. But I think if you can build a business, that's where everything is moving in the right direction. If you can be the Twitter guys, nothing else matters. And if you can't be the Twitter guys, it's Very hard for anything else to make a difference, for things to kind of come together for you.

Why did that VC say, be like the Twitter guys when the fail whale dominated the site for two years?

Because it worked. Yeah.

The other point I want to make is bootstrap as long as you possibly can. I met with one of the best founders in tech who's starting a new company, and I said to her, well, when are you going to raise money? I might not. And I go, that is awesome. Never forget the bootstrap.

So I was actually going to close on this, but I'm just going to accelerate it because Parker, I think, just gave you the most important thing you'll ever hear, which is what I was also going to say, which is. So the number one piece of advice that I've ever read and that I tell people on these kinds of topics is always, it's from the comedian Steve Martin, who I think is an absolute genetic. Wrote a great book on his startup career, which obviously was very successful. The book's called Born Standing Up. And he literally. It's a short little book, and it describes how he became Steve Martin. The heart of the book is he says, what's the key to success? He says, the key to success is be so good they can't ignore you. In a sense, we're going to have this entire conversation, I'm sure we'll keep having it, about how to raise money, but in a sense, it's all kind of beside the point because if you do what Parker's done and you build a business that is going to be a gigantic success, then investors are throwing money at you. And if you come in with a theory and a plan and no data and you're just one of the next thousand, it's going to be far, far harder to raise money.