I recently caught up with a founder who had gone through the process of building a startup as either a co-founder or an early employee not once, or twice, but three times. He was now working on his fourth company— this time as a solo founder. It was clear that this time he’d seen enough and wanted to do his own thing. Pave his own path.
I asked him a simple question about what he’d learned from his previous 3 experiences, and one phrase stood out to me: Money makes you slower.
It was in response to a question I had surrounding fundraising for startups, and he simply felt that previously he had raised too much. It makes you slower because you now have runway and more time to produce results. More money isn’t always better, and in the case of building out a company, it can acts more as a deterrent versus a propellent.