The 3 Fundamental Mistakes I Made Founding a Startup
Actually, it’s not a great idea to quit your day job
It’s been almost two years since my full-time job was at a company I founded. Since then, I’ve gotten to work with some fantastic individuals that have changed some of my core beliefs about startups. Namely Nate Watson at Contemporary Analysis, Cory Scott at LiveBy, and the three founders of Buildertrend: Jeff Dugger, Steve Dugger, and Dan Houghton.
Learning from these people and many others has drastically changed my views on what’s important in an early-stage business. In hindsight, I think my mistakes as a founder were caused in part by core beliefs that were fundamentally wrong.
False Belief 1: ‘VC is evil’
One of the biggest mistakes I made when starting companies was delaying raising capital for as long as possible. Mind you, I wasn’t pushing it off because I didn’t need it but because I despised the idea of it.
Asking others to fund your company always seemed backward to me. If it’s a viable business model then it should fund itself, or at least be on its way toward doing so. And if that’s the case, why raise money at all? Why spend time formulating a pitch deck when you could be formulating your actual product?
