Pinterest founder Ben Silbermann on the 3 lessons he learned about raising venture capital

There are lots of ways for investors to say no to you, and I'm pretty sure that I've heard all of them. Number one is, call me back in a few months. This is kind of the most painful. It's just like you ask someone out on a date and they're like, not right now, but maybe. Maybe in November, right? That one is, like, really, really hard to hear, because you're going to have even less money and you're going to even have less leverage in a negotiation. The second is, who else is in? This is one that you hear all the time. It's like, it's not good enough for me by myself. But if there are other people that commit money, I'd be willing to consider it. And then there were the occasional people that were really blunt. They were just like, there is no way this is going to happen. This is insane. It's totally crazy. I remember really vividly, I went to a session where I was pitching actually a whole group of investors up on Silicon Valley. And it's really intimidating, right? You're looking. And these people have built great companies. And I'm about five minutes into explaining what we're doing, and everyone starts just heading for the door. And I was like, man, what am I doing wrong? And I found out they had brought a tray of free cookies. And what I was saying was interesting enough to keep them in their seats as long as there were, like, no cookies in the background. We've done fundraising a few times, and sometimes it's been easier, and sometimes it's been really, really hard. And I think I've learned three important lessons that I think any entrepreneur should know if they're starting the kind of company they think will need funding. The first is that even rich people are subject to free cookies, right? Even though you're really rich, you're probably still the kind of person that is influenced by free. And in that lesson is actually something really important. It's that investors are just people, too, right? Investors are just regular people that happen to have other people's money or their own money that they're willing to put forward. And even though they have a really good opinion on things, they might be wrong. And that was something that was really hard for me to swallow because I really looked up to all these people. The second lesson is that if you really need money and they have money and they know they're the only person that can give you the money, you don't really have any leverage whatsoever. You have zero leverage. And that puts you in a really Tough spot. You can't really negotiate. It's 2008. They know it's 2008. They see your app, it's kind of crappy. Nobody really uses it. There's nothing you can do unless you hack that system, unless you somehow turn the tables and give them a reason that you should have the leverage. And those reasons generally are fear of losing the deal or the belief that this thing is just going to be so big that whether you give the money or not, you're just going to be wildly successful. And the very last thing I learned is that people are going to give you all kinds of advice. And I think that it's really easy to take that advice because you walk into a room and there's like, Google's first stock certificate, and they invented Yahoo. These people are really, really, really smart. But if you look at the returns on venture capital, it's pretty shaky. Like, we're in a pretty high volatility industry. And one thing that we always told ourselves, and one thing that I really, really believe, is that fundamentally the future is unwritten. Like, if they knew, they would be done right. And so people can tell you that you should be more technical. They can tell you that you're in the wrong market. They can tell you all of these things, and those things might be true, and you should assess them for yourself, but you shouldn't take it on face, because they could be wrong. But. And in the back of your head, you have to remember something that for all the millions of dollars venture capital investors have made, for all the certificates that are on the wall, there are things that they passed on, and those are the things that actually burn them up. Like, those are the ones that, like, haunt them at night. And I think that if you can convince somebody that you just might be the one that's going to beat the odds, you can be successful. And it's a general attitude that I think is important, whether you're recruiting, whether you're raising money, whether you just need to make a final push in adjusting your product.