Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by sarah180 2513 days ago
The VC isn't exactly wrong about this. If you want a valuation in the hundreds of millions or billions, your goal is to figure out how to grow fast and capture defensible territory in a market. Profit is less important than growth—as long as you have a path to profit based on that growth.

If you're not aiming for this kind of territory, you're not really compatible with the VC financial model, which is designed around high risk and high reward. 30–40% of startups end up in liquidation, and 95% never meet their projections. Unless some your successful companies have fantastic returns, your fund will fail.

This is something you should understand before you take VC money.

1 comments

This has been the SV narrative for the last decade or so but I'm not sure that it will stand the test of time. It seems likely that the bubble will pop on these companies going public without having returned an honest penny.

But there is probably a reason I'm not drowning in money like most investor types.