[HN Gopher] Our fundraising learning post-YC
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Our fundraising learning post-YC
Author : matijash
Score : 32 points
Date : 2021-11-23 20:51 UTC (2 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (wasp-lang.dev)
(TXT) w3m dump (wasp-lang.dev)
| criddell wrote:
| Offtopic, but _learnings_ is such a weird word. It reads like a
| plural noun and if it is, then what would the singular version
| be?
| matijash wrote:
| I am not a native speaker, so this definitely might not even be
| a proper word :). Some discussion about it here:
| https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/396140/is-there-...
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| No, it's not a proper word. It is, however, a word that is
| used somewhat frequently ;-)
|
| In native English business circles, it's a word that someone
| made up so that they could say "what are our learnings"
| instead of "what did we learn". Why? To sound more
| sophisticated and pretentious - or so I suspect.
|
| Anyway, yeah. People use it, even native speakers, even
| though it should be taken out and shot.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| My take as a technical writer who has edited lots and lots of
| documentation from non-native speakers, non-professional
| writers, and so on: if you stumble over the sentence and you
| have to go back and read it twice or more times to understand
| what they are saying, then by all means the sentence should be
| reworded. Otherwise there are probably bigger fish to fry. In
| this case "learnings" would pass my test. Even if it's a non-
| standard word I got the gist of their idea without a second
| glance.
| matijash wrote:
| this is helpful, thank you!
| steve_coral wrote:
| Learnings is indeed a strange word but the most applicable
| synonym would be "take-aways" or "lessons".
|
| Kind of like how you always have "misgivings" but rarely "a
| misgiving"
| staunch wrote:
| Yeah "learnings" is just corpspeak for "lessons" because it
| seems more sophisticated (to some people).
| matijash wrote:
| yeah, "Fundraising lessons learned post-YC" prob would have
| been better, thanks.
| kaycebasques wrote:
| This is a bit harsh and assumes mal-intent. The author said
| in another comment they are not a native speaker.
|
| From the HN guidelines:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
|
| > Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of
| what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to
| criticize. Assume good faith.
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| @matijash what was the content of the follow up email you sent,
| was it updates on WASP, more data on traction, fundraising, ect?
| What did you say to prompt people to act? And did you ever pre-
| empt by just sending a SAFE (assuming the round is not priced) on
| a follow up email?
| matijash wrote:
| At that time we were pretty much fundraising full-time, and
| given there were only 2 of us and the product was at early
| stage we couldn't really do a meaningful push on traction, so
| we mostly focused on the updates on the fundraising side.
|
| The basic format of the follow-up was "Hey, you mentioned you'd
| follow-up in X days so I wanted to check if you are still
| interested in investing?". Then I would, if applicable, also
| add a line like e.g. "since we last spoke, we raised another $X
| from investor Y" or "we almost closed the part of the round
| dedicated to the angels and have only $X available".
|
| I would send over a SAFE only if the investor agreed to invest
| and had completed the handshake protocol
| (https://www.ycombinator.com/handshake/).
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| Ok this is very helpful yeah, there's this strange dynamic
| where people want to come by to take a look ( as if we're a
| vendor on the side of the street which we kind of are in this
| context ), but then no one wants to be the first to move. On
| Zoom everything is extra weird because ... Zoom.
| matijash wrote:
| yeah, definitely. The advice we often got was to either go
| fundraising full-on or not at all, because it's very hard
| without that momentum that takes time to build up (as you
| could see on our chart, in the end we had even more
| interest that we aimed for, but took time to get there).
|
| I never did fundraising pre-Zoom/covid so can't compare,
| but the advantage here was the sheer volume of meetings we
| could do in a single day. I guess that in-person it would
| be easier to build rapport, but Zoom was definitely an
| advantage when playing the numbers game.
| xiaolingxiao wrote:
| yeah that's good to hear, I feel like Zoom is just
| strangely efficient. On the momentum note, did you feel a
| sense of less interest from the investor-sphere after
| no's from certain investors? The implicit assumption is
| that investors are colluding with yes/nos.
| ryan-duve wrote:
| I am getting a 404 when I visit https://wasp-
| lang.github.io/blog/2021/11/22/fundraising-lear.... Could you
| double check the permissions/link to make sure everything looks
| correct?
| matijash wrote:
| sorry about that, seems like HN is doing some URL expanding
| which messes it up, this was the original URL: https://wasp-
| lang.dev/blog/2021/11/22/fundraising-learnings
| dang wrote:
| Our software follows the canonical URL when there is one, and
| your page says that https://wasp-
| lang.github.io/blog/2021/11/22/fundraising-lear... is the
| canonical URL. I'll switch it back now but you might want to
| fix that!
| matijash wrote:
| thanks a lot for the info!
| jiveturkey wrote:
| really great article, so rare to not simply say what everyone
| knows but in your own voice.
|
| What I got out of it (which is known) is that founder+CEO is like
| politician. Most of your job is fundraising.
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(page generated 2021-11-23 23:00 UTC)