Bringing Out the Clowns

🔥 10 SUREFIRE WAYS TO NEVER RAISE FUNDING — based on tried-and-tested real-life experience 🔥

1️⃣ Pick a male-dominated field, optimally something like raw materials, electronics, or tech, to enter as a woman. If possible, try to even combine several male-dominated fields together.

2️⃣ Make sure all your founders and all members of your management team are women. You get major plus points if they are all or almost all “in a childbearing age”.

3️⃣ Put together a team including a lot of Ivy League graduates, but make sure none of them are nepo babies.

4️⃣ Invest heavily in R&D in anything but tech or something too STEM-focused.

5️⃣ Create a highly scalable tech solution that is not sexy enough to be considered “high tech” or “deep tech”.

6️⃣ Have an impact that creates so many ripples that it becomes hard to quantify and then offer funders qualitative data instead.

7️⃣ Run your company leanly enough, through cost optimization and bootstrapping, that you cannot justify the need to raise several million at a time.

8️⃣ Network and market so hard that people consider you a “thought leader” for the whole industry, but then be real enough to lack “the aura of a real founder”.

9️⃣ Because funders love it if you are neither a clear-cut for-profit company nor a clear-cut non-profit, structure and run your company as a social enterprise to highlight that you have no intention to sell out your soul but that you also do not believe in repeatedly begging others for donations.

🔟 Talk about values, ethics, democracy, gender, community, and education loud enough to scare off any remaining funders that you did not yet manage to drive away with steps 1 to 9.

Et voilà, there are all the ingredients you need for my personal secret sauce on how to build something sensible without ever securing external funding for upwards of 4 years! 🌶️

❌⭕❌⭕

Lots of love from a female founder, who for some rather inexplicable reason still has not given up and closed shop

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I will now go back to writing my grant proposal numbered something upwards of 1000. Literally no one even knows the real count anymore, because why would I be wasting my time counting proposals when I could be working on my seemingly fully unfundable and highly disruptive ecosystem solution that I currently still refuse to sell to the highest bidder?

If you feel like contributing to our qualitative #impacttestimonials dataset based on this highly inspiring post, you can do that here.

The photo is of me at 20 at a "fancy dress or dress fancy” dinner party. I obviously decided it was a better idea to wear a full Star Trek uniform than a black cocktail dress, and I would probably make the same decision again if presented with the same choice today.