The Business Development Hacker

Me (on the left) and my brother, Cliff with our new servers at CapitalStream. I blame the 1979 Ford Pinto. In my final year at Washington State, I was contemplating law school, student loans, and a car with a peculiar talent for catching fire when rear-ended—the only source of my transportation. My brother, Cliff, convinced me that a better option was to join him and make millions as a tech entrepreneur. While I was studying in Japan and traveling around the world on my way home, he had given up his aspirations for medical school and launched a POS systems integration business. The prospect of riches won out over debt and the flamemobile. As a systems integrator, we found a few challenges we needed to continually overcome. First, because we didn’t own the software, the ISV could make or break our business. We also noticed financing created a barrier. Most of our systems were leased, and the lease approval process would take two weeks. We thought it would be a clever idea to build a sof...

  You worked to hard to mess things up Fundraising is hard. It's not like the movies or shark tank where a fancy pitch and 20 minutes will have investors showering you with cash. There is a myth that raising funds can be easy - it's not. So many factors outside your control combine to make the process frustrating. As a startup founder you want to focus on your product and team. You want to sell to customers. Talking to investors can feel like a distraction from your core vision. It's not. It's your job. You wanted to be a startup founder, raising money is a key part of the job description. Once you finally get an investor interested you need to prepare yourself for the questions they will ask during their due diligence. Putting yourself in their shoes and understanding why they will ask for certain information will help. Don’t get frustrated. It may seem like you are being asked for unimportant information. I can’t tell you how many startup CEOs have complained about th...