Lenny Rachitsky: belief

Transcript context

…Great question. So at the time, this is also the thing I asked founders is why do you need to raise money? What is it for? And surprisingly, some people are like, I don't know. They don't have a clear answer. For me, it was pretty obvious. We needed to hire, we needed people. I didn't have personal capital to pay people. There was an alternative reality where we actually built it open source. I was thinking like, is that possible? We're building something for the tech community. I'm sure a lot of people would love to work on this. Could we build it in an open source way? But that's really hard to do. And when you're building a company, you probably don't want to innovate on too many things, including essentially how to build a product and build a team. So anyway, to answer your question, at the time raising money was the right decision because I wanted to hire and I didn't have personal capital. There really weren't any other realistic options, I don't think. Today, I could get further with my own... I'm not super wealthy and I'm super illiquid, but I have at least enough money where I could have funded maybe a year of development with this very small team. So today it might be a little bit different in which I might not raise venture capital because Product Hunt isn't the type of company that needs to raise a ton of money. It's also one which doesn't have direct competitors in the sense of an Uber and Lyft situation where raising is actually kind of mandatory and you sort of have to build a massive war chest to compete. So there is a scenario where if I had more money, then maybe I wouldn't have raised venture capital. But yeah, there's a lot of other decisions and other things that probably bigger mistakes I think I made. Not that raising money was a mistake by any means, I just think the right decision meant. But yeah, there's a lot of learnings and hindsight's 2020. The point you made about you just needed money to run the thing, I think that's so overlooked when people bash the idea of fundraising for a startup that maybe didn't need it. You just need money. You don't have just money to burn and go into debt. That makes sense to raise some money and see where this thing goes without really knowing where it's going to go. I think it's very important to raise from people who are aligned with you too. Meaning why does this person want to, whether it's an angel or a fund, invest in your fund? I'm sorry, not fund, your company? When you go down a certain path, when you've raised a series A, B, C, like you have different expectations when you raise your pre-seed or seed round. So I think also understanding what you're signing up for is super important.…

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