Raised 6M, no customers, no revenue, no product, a buggy, non-functional MVP.
19yo founder was terrified to relinquish control to senior devs because he was scared they would implement something he wouldn’t understand, so the company sat there burning cash making tiny incremental improvements and flip flopping on priorities as the new-shiny whims of the founder changed every few days.
I have no idea how he raised 6M, I think it was a combination of lies and FOMO from latter investors.
I tried my best to guide him and give advice but his ego was out of control (but only backed by mediocre skill set) so I had to leave when I realised I couldn’t help anymore
Of course you gotta find the guys with more money than sense. They're not exactly thick on the ground but during a boom cycle there seem to be quite a few. (Often the winners of the last boom cycle, convinced that they were smart rather than lucky.)
my company raised a small round e years in. enough to keep us engineers comfortable but no where near 6 million. meanwhile my cofounders have years of experience in financial analysis and running a restaurant while I have 10 years of experience as an engineer before stepping in here as cto and first technical hire. We actually do have traction and getting new customers every day off a product that was self funded. I can't understand investing 6 million on a 19 year old with no experience with an ego fueled by insecurity. A startup needs to be run like a phalanx because there isn't room for redundancy and dead weight. And definitely can't afford to stick to a ego fueled "vision." I trust my cofounders to do their job and they in turn trust me. the "vision" should always be about serving the users and thats pretty easy to quantify if you are willing to humble yourself and engage with them.
the good news is we will have more favorable terms when we do a series A. The good thing about starting a startup in a recession is that you're more accountable to making your business actually be something people want.
People say this with poorly invested money all the time, but I must be missing something. You could invest it in an index fund, say the S&P 500, and annually yield over 10% on average [1].
[1] https://www.officialdata.org/us/stocks/s-p-500/2016?amount=1...
Until recently, this was less than inflation. A year ago the inflation rate of the US$ was more than 8%. So the net result when applying an interest rate of 5% was -3%. Less than in most of the period before 2021 when assuming an interest rate of 0%. I doubt that investors are not aware of this, arn't they?