Short spoken anecdote by Matt Wolfe describing a negative experience raising outside capital for one company (which was later sold to Kodak). He explains that too many investors wanted input, making decision-making slow and difficult; he attributes some responsibility to the founders for not setting ground rules and says he hasn’t raised capital for a company since.
There was one company that we exited, actually ended up selling to Kodak, but that was one of the only companies that we ever went and raised capital from. And personally, I kind of hated the experience. And the reason I hated the experience is because everybody that ended up investing in that company wanted a say. And it got to this point where there were so many cooks in the kitchen that it was impossibly slow to push things forward. And I think that's partially on us. We didn't know what we were doing. We probably, like, should have stipulated during the raise that, like, this is our company. We're going to make those decisions. But we didn't know what we were doing. We raised a bunch of capital. All the people we raised the capital from wanted things to go their way. And all the people we raised from didn't always agree with some of the other people we raised from, and we didn't always agree with the investors. It was kind of a nightmare. I really, really didn't like that experience. So I've never actually gone the path of raising capital again.
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