Weekly 🔥 34: Is the VC system broken?
In this week’s edition, we discuss
- The rules of entrepreneurship, applicable to all freelancers, entrepreneurs and solopreneurs.
- Why you can’t raise VC money.
Let’s get to it.
The rules of solopreneurship (applicable to all entrepreneurs)
Solopreneur developer Sam Dixon Brown thought he’d learned everything he needed to know about launching a business from his first venture. His second business had other ideas and delivered some tough lessons, including:
- You can do anything and everything (but you probably shouldn’t) — No one is great at everything, so instead, identify your weaknesses and outsource them.
- Getting something done is better than being perfect — optimizing everything to the nth degree takes time. Time that could often be spent on things that would bring more benefit to your business.
- Being stuck feels like a lonely place. But you’re never alone — There are no new problems, and you can learn from others who have already overcome them in ways you would never have thought of.
- Your best customers might not be who you expect — You can do as much work as you like to identify who your customer will be, but at the end of the day, some people get what you’re doing, and some don’t.
- Most of all, you need support — Someone to tell you the harsh truth when you need to hear it and someone to encourage you when you’re in despair, because a solopreneur is never really solo.
👉 Dive deeper into these rules: 8 Rules for Entrepreneurs I Learned Launching an App as a Solo Developer
The VC system is broken (for now)
Founders have less than a 5% chance of getting institutional money from the top VCs.
Why? VCs may not value what they say they value (profitability) and, instead, care more about hype.
So, what does this have to do with why entrepreneurs struggle to secure financing from venture firms? Simply put, these trends exhibit the disheartening reality that a startup’s success is not necessarily, or even primarily, determined by the quality of its idea. There are other, less advertised factors at play.
Tyler Gebhart believes VC could still solve many of this world’s problems. It just requires a paradigm shift, one that promotes quality over hype.
👉 Dive deeper into why the VC landscape needs to change: Why You Can’t Raise VC Money
Till next time,
Team EH
