Really appreciated this post from Chris at Range Ventures.
In some ways, it’s tough and stark feedback for founders. It’s a painfully difficult time to raise capital, and far harder for people who have already raised from institutional sources. There are expectations that you might (probably?) feel like you can’t hit.
Chris’s advice is calm and clear:
Run the numbers, and if you find yourself coming up short of expectations, you have two options — fix your short-term business fundamentals or convince your existing investors to bridge you.
I’ll say the final part out loud — if neither of those are viable, pray for a miracle and brace for impact.
Building a company is hard and sometimes great founders roll the dice and come up snake eyes. It’s reductive to say the winners succeed through shear force of will, because that implies that the losers just didn’t want it bad enough. That’s horseshit.
But doing everything you can buys you more tickets in the startup lottery. Now is not the time to say “we can’t do that.”
Now is the time to ask your team, your investors and your advisors, “how can we possibly make that happen” and then try to make it happen.