Do you need co-founders before raising money? Not necessarily. What matters is showing you can recruit early hires on equity alone, which signals to investors that your vision is compelling enough that people will bet their time on it.
Yeah, I would generally say yes, like, unless it depends what you did before, I'd probably add an asterisk on that. If I think you need a team, you don't necessarily need co-founders. I think co-founders are tricky. They're either kind of there at the beginning and you found the business with them, or they're not, and then you as a CEO can build your team out. But I would say, yeah, you probably need, you need either a team or proof that you've built a team before.
Right. Yeah. And a way that I always like to explain it to people too is, look, you're just, you're an investment, right? Like you're trying to de-risk that investment however you can. And if you can't recruit a team to work for you for a little bit of money and just equity, which is sort of normal, right? With any seed stage or pre-seed startup. Like if you can't convince just those people too, that what you're doing is valuable where they're not investing money, they're just investing time. Then an investor who's investing money is going to be like, all right, well, I'm not going to be the first idiot, you know, like who's like, yeah.
I mean, that's one of, that's one of the crazy things about fundraising is for certain companies that are going to need to raise a lot of money. The skill of fundraising is a key skill for the CEO to have. And the skill of fundraising is very similar to the skill of recruiting because you're essentially selling a future that doesn't yet exist. You're trying to get people together and support the creation of something that doesn't yet exist. So hire— getting a team is kind of the same skill set. You're going, you're identifying people that would be a good fit, going, getting in front of them and telling them what you're creating and why it's going to be so awesome and asking them to join you.
Yep. Yeah, you're conjuring something out of nothing and you're going to have to pitch that to team members, to customers, to all the stuff, investors, or a couple a couple steps up that ladder.
Yeah, and it really is. There's nothing else that I found that's really like that. It's— you— yeah, conjuring something out of nothing is a great way to put it. I love that.
