When we started raising our angel round, the first thing people told us was "Keep working!" We started to realize why very quickly: It's pretty difficult to code and raise money at the same time. I also started to try and figure out why doing both at the same time was hard -- it seems like it shouldn't be. Since most companies have to go through this at least once, and some companies go through the process multiple times, it's probably worth trying to optimize.
Different people have different ways to deal with the inefficiency. Y Combinator makes the process as short as possible: literally, less than 8 hours total time spent. Many companies choose one founder to raise money, and others to continue programming. Even so, it can be really exciting to meet with investors (especially if it's your first time). In our case, we each added to the team, and we thought bringing all three of us would work best.
From my experience, there were a couple reasons getting work done was difficult:
1. Meetings break up your day and schedule. Getting in the zone is tough when you have a meeting at 3pm in Palo Alto, an hour away. Add 1-2 hours debriefing after the meeting, and your day has been split up into smaller, less work-friendly chunks of time. Somehow, we always ended up with exactly one meeting per day, the entire week.
2. Raising money is exciting. Much more exciting than fixing that bug that doesn't event really matter because it's not that bad and only 5 people use that feature anyway. The meetings were pretty much all we wanted to talk about.
3. Raising money makes you look at the big picture. We were looking at our business from a mile up. From that perspective, you're talking about major initiatives and the entire direction of the company. You can't even see the day-to-day stuff from that high.
4. Last but not least: Selling and coding are opposites. I work my best when I get in a zone where I lose track of time and manage to fit every exact detail of what I'm working on in my head all at once. If I get too excited, I want to sit down and talk about how we're going to do x-and-y and it's going to be amazing, and it's much harder to concentrate.
There was one moment in particular that illustrates the last point, and when it hit me how opposite the two roles were. We had closed our initial round, and the definitives were signed, but we had left a smaller portion open for a potential investor that would be in a second closing. We had gotten all of the selling and raising money stuff out of our heads, and had been pulling 24+ hour shifts all that week, working on some time-sensitive new features. We woke up, drove to Stanford, and talked the entire way about our daily progress.
When we got there, things started off slowly: we weren't selling our product, we were answering questions with factual replies about it's current state -- mostly in a dry, factual manner. Little by little, we started to warm up and started getting back in the flow: Explaining how cool a certain feature was, talking about the potential markets, selling the vision on where we wanted to go, and getting ourselves really excited about what we had coming. The meeting went well (the investor later told us he was in), we got back in the car, and talked all the way home about all the cool things we were going to do. We decided to eat lunch out, and we probably went food shopping, got a haircut, took a bike ride... Anything that wasn't coding -- because that was boring, and we were really excited.
So how do you get work done while raising money? If we had to do it again, I would:
- Understand the process, and why I'm likely to get distracted.
- Try to organize most meetings in 1 or 2 days of the week.
- Do my best not to feel entitled to breaks, just because I have been talking to investors.
- Do my best not to feel entitled to breaks, just because everyone told me I wouldn't get work done.
- Set hard deadlines for feature releases that have to be met.
- Raise money as quickly as possible (you might get a higher valuation by shopping for 2 months, but what's the opportunity cost?)
If you've been through the experience, be sure to chime in and comment.
And on a side note, I just re-published my feed through Feedburner. If you've added this blog to your feed reader, please update to the new feed.
