"Venting Frustration: The Frustrating Fundraising Video Call"
Feb 1, 2024 - 3:46pmSummary: The speaker conveys their frustration with a difficult fundraising experience, describing a particularly unsatisfactory video call with a fund representative. The caller was in a bad mood, hadn't reviewed the provided materials, and hesitated to engage with the product's features. This led to a tense exchange where the speaker challenged the representative's commitment to valuing founders versus purely focusing on financial metrics. Feeling disillusioned, the speaker is left with a distaste for these disengaged "NPCs" and remains focused on their vision of fostering creative and engaging spaces.Transcript: Man, fundraising is truly a psychedelic, beautiful, and awful experience at the same time. I just spoke to someone from a fund and it's got to be like one of the worst video chats I've had with someone in a long time. Her vibes were just so whack from the beginning. She was supposed to be like some follow-up call after I spoke to some VC and he's like, could you speak to this person from my firm? I've got a few questions about the company. He seemed very excited and this seemed to be like a, I don't know, a bean counter from his fund. And we're out of the bat. She was just like in a bad mood, hadn't seen the deck. I wanted her to try out the space-time feature to be in a call and she like wouldn't install a test flight because she's like, I think it'll take a while. And then immediately started asking about like retention numbers and stuff. I'm like, what's the point of talking about this if you don't know what this is and you can't see the bigger picture? And then I lightly snapped because, you know, she's asking these questions. I'm like, listen, the person at your fund, tell me they believe in founders and understand that it's challenging. They, who they want to bet on? Founders. I was like, well, you either believe in founders or you believe in numbers. Which one do you believe in? And she's like, kind of both. And I said, well, anyone can say one believes in founders. It's just like anyone can say I'm a good person. You must do it via demonstration. But anyone can look at numbers and say these numbers are big numbers. So I asked her, what are the numbers you're looking for that check the boxes here? Because I can tell you the answers. You're looking for daily active users, daily retention, weekly retention. I can tell you numbers on prior experiments. I'm not gonna pull up some graphs. I'm not gonna go do a bunch of digging through data. I also don't have access to all of that data. But I know what was working and despite that I'm focusing on a different direction, which I think is more important. Trying to go down the psychedelic portal of what happens when you put a super creative intelligent host into environments that people want to hang out in. Oh, I'm like so sick of these NPCs, man.
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