Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login
Naval Ravikant: Hack Your Funding Process (hackersandfounders.tv)
90 points by iamelgringo on March 22, 2011 | hide | past | favorite | 16 comments



(Hi! Jonathan - thanks for doing this, this stuff is pure gold.)

Continuous Fundraising is a pretty radical idea. Basically, you never close your seed round since you're doing a note and the terms are fairly standard, so you just keep getting small checks from a large number of angels. Less pressure and hassle. Big win for entrepreneurs. As Naval says, you raise 50k/month for 6-12 months and you're all set.


(Thanks, Dude. I really need to get back and hang with the H&F NYC crew again. Does the weather still suck?)

re: Continuous Fund raising.

It is a pretty radical idea, and I really like it. It takes a bit of the pressure off the "One big round" model, and moves the focus to "Always be pitching" mode, which I think is probably healthier, and more productive for startups.

The only caveat I've heard of is when the startup runs out of money and is struggling. At that point, not having a lead investor who is keeping tabs on the company and who is willing to go the extra mile to raise additional capital for the company is going to be detrimental.


So, "always be fundraising" and "always be recruiting" and "always be learning from customers" and "always be improving product/market fit" and "always don't go broke" and so on?

I can understand parallel-tracking some of these things, but if you do too much at once, don't you end up doing nothing well because you waste so much time task and focus-switching?


This dovetails with a lot of what PG went over in High Resolution Fundraising. http://www.paulgraham.com/hiresfund.html

If you learn well through video, this is very worth the hour of your time.


Thanks a bunch for posting this! I can't get the H&F video to load but will read PG's article right now!


Hey, sorry to hear of the video difficulties. I'm one of the cofounders of VidCaster.com, we power the H&F video site. Can you send us a note at support [at] vidcaster [dot] com about the issue you experienced?


So weird, was just listening to his Mixergy interview this morning(I will say it again, Andrew Warner is killing it with Mixergy, its such an awesome project/resource/business).

Sadly can't watch this one because it won't load. I assume its currently experiencing an irregular amount of traffic. Is it working for anyone else?


Hey, I'm one of the crew with VidCaster.com, we power the H&F video site. Could you send a quick email to support [at] vidcaster [dot] com about the playback issue you experienced?


Hey Thanks for checking it. It wasn't a playback issue, the site just wouldn't load at all at the time I tried.


Sweet thanks for that data point. We're migrating to a distributed set of web instances (working on that this evening in fact) which will significantly improve capacity.


Working fine for me.


I was there at this meetup, and having known H&F over past 2+ years, this was one of their best events. Lookin fwd to many more. H&F FTW!


Nice Logo there H&F.tv, YC but with an H. reminds me of StartupDigest "copying" TC's color theme :) both SD and H&F are great things, though.


I know. We're getting a new logo made STAT.

We've been using that logo at Hackers and Founders meetups for the last 3 years, since we're the HN meetup in Silicon Valley: http://www.hackersandfounders.com. I actually ran it passed pg a few years ago, and he didn't complain.

But, now that we're pushing 3,000 members, we really need to change the logo. We really aren't affiliated with YC in any way. And, newcomers are starting to get confused, which is bad.


If you missed Naval this time, he'll be at the Founder Conference on May 3rd in Mountain View (with a bunch of other great guests). http://thefounderconference.com


My first H&F event and it was really insightful. Thanks Jonathan




Join us for AI Startup School this June 16-17 in San Francisco!

Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: