Diary Entry 2 – The Struggle
You have to learn the fundraising rules, seriously
VCs will take advantage of you if you snooze on it
And there’s one lab rat cliché that is true no matter how you slice it:
You gotta be ready to be brook as an entrepreneur
The dream of living in a great house vanishes once you quit your job
Forget about building prototypes and Minimum Viable Products
What you’ll really be building is your Minimum Viable Porridge
The hard thing about hard things is trying to run a venture at 5AM
When your new enterprise is sinking, your associates are leaving
And the rest of your capital sure ain’t thriving
Like so many leade.rs, I solved a need and I had that Oh shit! moment
But after 16 weeks trying to recode my solution, I had that Oh shit! moment
My Zen time ended with no benefits
I went from zero to one to negative infinity
With an Altman Z-score that defied any logic
I felt like Jason when Charlie threw him under that Brooklyn bridge
Completely baffled like an AI device taking a selfie in a mirror
Everything looked inverted, there was no more spark on my soft clavier
I had nightmares of being stuck in a FB elevator with that shark from Jaws
Camping alone in Queensbridge with no partner and depressed
Playing Hendricks with my guitar and covering old songs with my pipe
With my big freaking nose in a bottle looking like a double F
It was like Theranos trying to link up with Lynda and failing the test
I couldn’t even cut corners and bend my income, that was impossible
Instead, I had to realize the truth: there was no income
The struggle is real when you and your brand don’t have any capital
I thought that a precursor idea and a laung trail of innovation footprints
Would attract collaborating funding from the Charles and Hudson rivers
Nobody prepared me for this sabotage, I went past the red tipping point
This was a real struggle: forcing myself to burst my own Bobble
And addressing the backstage issues that landed me in big trouble
Like focusing on a venture hyper instead of building a revenue stream
See, running a startup is like writing poetry: half grinding, half amazing
You gotta make sure your lines of code rhyme with income mode
There is moore to entrepreneurship than just whistles and bell
If you run your ventures like Nas and Mitra
You don’t need not worry, you’ll excel
Cause you have a strong business model
And your poetry is deep, you’ll never fail.