[chollida1]

> I was offered the option to liquidate up to 20% of my vested shares at my last company's Series A. It was restricted by tenure though (3 years), so it wasn't available to everyone. In retrospect, I should have liquidated the full amount, but it was a new concept to me at the time and I was more conservative with the amount.f

Oh wow, how many companies have a series A after 3 years? How did your company survive without any raises for 3 years and what made your company finally decide to raise money after going 3 year without doing so?

[extragood]

That policy was actually one of the major reasons I liked that company and stuck with them for so long. Their goal early on was to avoid raising money if at all possible, and they managed that for a long time by mostly being cash-flow positive/profitable. The trade off is slower, but sustainable growth.

We hit an inflection point in the early pandemic where money was cheap and we had a ton of new customers coming in, so we were able to secure very favorable terms for the Series A and used that money to expand the business. Things continued to go in the right direction for the next ~2 years and we ended up doing a Series B round, and that in retrospect was a mistake. We over-hired in 2022 and couldn't back that up with increased business. And because we had given up so much control to investors in the previous rounds, we were unable to return to the sustainable-growth strategy that had worked for us in the past, and had to adopt faster growth strategies, none of which panned out and ultimately hurt the company and led to many rounds of lay-offs.

[Chilko]

> by mostly being cash-flow positive/profitable. The trade off is slower, but sustainable growth.

As someone that is outside of the tech industry, the fact that this is seen as an abnormal approach seems quite ridiculous.

[kelnos]

As someone inside the tech industry, I absolutely agree.

The problem is that new startups often don't have options here. Unless you're in a market where VCs are shy about funding new companies, if you don't take the VC cash and go into high-growth mode, someone else will, and they'll end up out-competing you, at least in the short term. (Long enough that you won't be able to remain solvent, at least.) So you either fail, or take the money and often get into a situation of doing not-particularly-sustainable things.