To Fund Or Not To Fund
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash
Get funded!
If you float around social media long enough and follow certain cohorts or hashtags, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there are only a few paths to entrepreneurial success - and even fewer paths that are ”right”.
In particular, the pressure is to get funded - or at least that’s the option that provides (is given) the most ’social’ credibility.
Just come up with an idea, build a great plan focused on achieving unicorn status in record time (because time is of the essence), get the right investors to put money in (and a lot of it), get to work and achieve aforementioned unicorn status.
It follows then - if that is the path - that there are the right rules to be followed, the right people that need to be met, and the right pace to be kept to get through to your goals.
It also follows that the folks giving you that money know exactly what they’re talking about, and will get you to success if only you follow their rules.
After all, they know what success is.
Except that, that’s not always right. In fact, I’m not even sure it’s right most of the time.
The idea that you have to get someone else’s money and live (and die) by their rules in order to achieve a definition of success that isn’t yours, is a fallacy borne of this very unique environment we live in.
It’s one borne of a world that idolizes stock performance and rapid growth above all else. It’s one fueled by social media and the resultant pursuit of social (and public) success that is often at odds with what truly creates value for the customer. It’s one where personal wealth (of your investors first and then, you the entrepreneur) is the single most critical goal.
There’s a boatload of bullshit in that point of view.
It ignores the fact that solving a single customer problem really, really well, above all else, is paramount. It ignores the fact that thoughtful, profitable growth even at the expense of (gasp) rapid growth is not failure. It ignores the fact that the money markets don’t dictate real value in the short (and often medium) term.
It also ignores the fact that funding yourself and bootstrapping your way to success is a perfectly viable and respectable path. It might not be as sexy or provide the social credibility we all seem to crave, but it makes sense and it works.
There’s no shame in that path, even if it gets scoffed at by the VC glitterati and their most ardent twenty- to thirty-something followers.
In fact, those who’ve really been there and done that i.e. those who’ve actually built something, will respect the struggle and the eventual success even more, no matter the pace or the scale of it.
What matters is the venturing forward, the commitment through the challenges and the persistence to realize the vision. The fact that it’s worth a million or a billion is simply a metric, one that is yours and yours alone to determine whether it meets your goals.
So, should you get funded or fund yourself?
That’s your choice.
Neither path is wrong so long as your underlying principles and motivations are sound.
The ultimate arbiter - the only decision maker - has to be you.
