In this video Argona Partners Chairman, Richard Anderson, answers the question on what the most overlooked steps are by many business' when starting out. This question was submitted by Daniel, from Locale (unreleased dating app).
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Richard:
"So there's a few different things that I think of when I think about overlooked small steps. The first thing I would think of would be, absolutely do your financial projections, every time. I have an understanding of where your money's going to go, and understand what your raise is for. So for example, don't raise more money than you need to because selling off your equity is the worst kind of money you could bring into your company. Ideally, you would set it up so that you never need money from anybody, and you could just go ahead and create a successful company, but if you do need to get money, then you know, equity is the furthest one down the totem pole of, oh, now we just need to sell ownership in the company in order to get the money, and so making sure that you understand the use of funds and you're minimizing your raise as you're going into it. It asks in the question to "not talk about things like product- market fit", however, I would say setting up scientific hypothesis that you can test easily and really scaling down to find what is your real minimum viable product is super important.
A lot of times that can change your whole business and then otherwise, setting up your employee stock pool, anything that's financial in that way, I would just say, get your finances in order in general. Um, most people are coming at a pitch with just a pitch deck. I feel personally that your performance is probably the most important aspect that you have going into any of your conversations, and is also somewhat I'd say overlooked by a lot of different investors as well, because inherently investing comes down to sure that, you know sure it's a numbers game, sure it's whatever, but ultimately this is an incredibly risky area in early stage startups to be investing in, and sometimes it really does just come down to the emotions of both the investor and the investee. So, you being the person who has to de-risk the investment, make sure you're focused on your finance."
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