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Plan B for Fund Raising
Guy Kawasaki of How to Change the World | September 9th, 2008 - 01:44 PM
(107) found this useful. Do you? 
Here’s how most entrepreneurs approach venture capital funding raising. I call it Plan A. It’s a plan and an outcome that no one talks about but happens all the time. I’ve been on both sides, so I should know.
- Step 1: the entrepreneur cogitates: “Let’s raise $1-2 million so we can focus on programming and marketing and not worry about raising money. We’ll hit all our milestones and then go out for another $5 million in two years and get acquired or go public soon after that.” Believe it or not, many companies raise the $1-2 million and sometimes more because venture capitalists compete for the deal.
- Step 2: the entreprenur fantasizes: “Our most conservative forecast is one million users in the first six months. We need to scale to prepare for this, and the reason why VCs gave us money is that they want us to scale and win the land grab.”
- Step 3: the product is late, and the dogs don’t eat the food. After six months, there are 10,000 users, not one million. The company has scaled up its expenses but for no reason. Money is tight, but the VCs are still clueless and accustomed to initial projections being off by orders of magnitude.
- Step 4: Unbelievably, the company is still able to raise a second round of $5 million. Life is good. The entrepreneur “knows” that things are going to pick up so she scales up some more to prepare for the “hockey-stick” growth curve that coming soon.
- Step 5: Another six months go by, and there’s still no viral explosion. (To continue the hockey analogy, the handle, not the blade, is touching the ice.) The venture capitalists that the entrepreneur thought were true believers and BFFs (best friends for life) go to Demo and see three products that do the same thing that appear to be further along.
- Step 6: Out of the blue, the lead-dog venture capitalist calls up the day after a partners meeting and says, “We just don’t see how you’re going to make it. We want to give your company a ’soft landing’ by merging it with our online dogfood company. And we’ll call some executives we know at Yahoo!, Google, and Fox Interactive to see if they’re interested. We want our money back before you burn through it because my partners think this has gone on too long.”
- Step 7: The entrepreneur hangs up the phone in a state of shock. A week ago in a board meeting, no one said anything about shutting down the company. She thought that her investors were getting a little antsy but were fundamentally still behind her. She calls the investors “stupid, arrogant bastards who don’t get it” in her staff meeting–conveniently forgetting that she’s missed three years of forecasts by 90% and has burned through $3 million.
- Step 8: The company rapidly implodes. No one wants to merge it with another dog in the venture capitalist’s portfolio, and no one at Google, Yahoo!, or Fox Interactive is interested. This is a fundamental fact of companies: they are bought not sold. That is, an entrepreneur or investor can seldom call up logical buyers and get a deal done. All an entrepreneur can do is create a good company and pick up the phone when a buyer is calling.
The company is sold for pennies on the dollar for what little assets (intellectual or physical) that it has. Some money is returned to the investors. The management team toys with two ideas: first, buying the company from the investors, but it quickly realizes that it created a dog that’s not worth buying. Second, suing the investors for not fulfilling their fiduciary responsibility to the company, but when the lawyers laugh at this idea, the team gives it up too.
As readers of this Open Forum blog, I want you to be open to another way. I call this Plan B. In this plan, you take very little if any venture capital until you need capital to expand, not create, your product. Here’s how it works:
- Step 1: You dig, scratch, and claw yourself to $100,000 of funds from your friends and family. Maybe you work as a YCombinator company. You take no salary. You live with your parents, and you keep your day job at Microsoft. You hope your spouse doesn’t get laid off. You have no office, but work virtually and meet your co-founders at Starbucks if you have to. Everything you use is Open Source or shareware.
- Step 2: Rather than trying to boil the ocean (”the mobile sector”), you boil a tea kettle. Rather than paying to attend high-end conferences, you hang out in the lobbies of the hotels where the events are and meet the same people for free. Rather than hiring a PR firm, you suck up to bloggers and hope they cover your product. Rather than buying booth space, you get on Twitter and use it to gain a reputation for your product.
- Step 3: You’re late with your product too (because everyone is late), but you’re not burning $250,000/month, and you don’t have to tell increasingly greater lies at monthly board meetings. Finally, you release your prototype. TechCrunch covers your release because you wrote Mike Arrington a compelling one-paragraph message that you sent on a Friday afternoon because you know he reads email on weekends.
- Step 4: This is where the miracle occurs–lo and behold, people like your product. (Truly, miracles have to occur whether you’re bootstrapping or venture-capital funded. It’s just that if you’re bootstrapping, there’s more time for the miracle to happen, and a smaller miracle suffices.) Month to month, you’re showing 10-15% growth, and monetization, praise God, has started.
- Step 5: Now you have options. First, you can contact venture capitalists with a company that’s already shipping to raise capital to expand your business. This is a very different discussion than raising capital to build a product. Second, you can continue to bootstrap and grow by using your cash flow. Three, you can pick up the phone and agree to meet with Google, Yahoo!, Fox Interactive, or any other company that has noticed you.
Many readers of this blog are not tech entrepreneurs, but the merits of Plan B are the same for almost any type of business. You can try Plan A as long as you realize that the hard work begins after you raise venture capital, and you will need a bigger, faster miracle to make everyone happy. Or, you can just believe me: “Plan B, don’t leave home without it.”
Click here for more information about small business and click here for more information about venture capital (if I’ve not scared you away from it).
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Discussion Boards
darrylxxx | September 9th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
Great stuff Guy! I love your ‘fund-raising for dummies’ approach - it’s a great antidote to a lot of the hype over valuations and VC funding.
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benjaminr | September 9th, 2008 at 2:11 pm
outstanding posting!
indeed a excelent plan b
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kumar | September 9th, 2008 at 2:14 pm
so so so true. both the scenarios are true as i know people who are or have put thru such times. i guess one can’t trust a venture whose founders itself haven’t gotten into deeper shit to keep everyone else on the board out of it. the very sight is so inspiring.
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Christopher S. Rollyson | September 9th, 2008 at 2:19 pm
Guy, thanks for this, I see it everywhere. In my del.icio.us tag, I called it: “Start-up Growth models Web 1.0 vs. Web 2.0″ Today open source and the cloud can do so much compared to yesteryear!
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Fundraising » Plan B for Fund Raising | September 9th, 2008 at 6:07 pm
[…] desmoinesdem wrote an interesting post today onHere’s a quick excerptStep 1: You dig, scratch, and claw yourself to $100000 of funds from your friends and family. Maybe you work as a YCombinator company. You take no salary. You live with your parents, and you keep your day job at Microsoft. … Read the rest of this great post here […]
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Tony Eyles | September 9th, 2008 at 10:19 pm
Thanks Guy - I have been through both scenarios and actually prefer Plan B. It makes for a more robust business model where monetisation and efficiency is inbuilt from Day 1, it keeps you very customer focussed, very delivery focussed, very real. And as an added bonus you are not diluted early.
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Andrew Beeston | September 9th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
And here I was thinking Plan B was Plan A the whole time.
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Christine | September 9th, 2008 at 10:22 pm
This definately works for non-techie businesses as well! I’ve started up a company this year, and have done it all boot-strapping style, and it’s working! We’re almost out of the red, and it’s only been 2 months. It’s totally a home office, starting with just family credit cards and our own money. LOL! But it’s working, things are tight, but they won’t be for very much longer!
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Sterling Okura | September 9th, 2008 at 10:27 pm
Love the article. It’s nice to see OPEN getting “it” and bringing us respected bloggers like Guy.
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Marc Dangeard | September 9th, 2008 at 10:45 pm
I love plan B so much that I have been pushing it to entrepreneurs for the past many years. The problem in Silicon Valley is that people have been brainwashed by the VC stories so much that it is hard to get them to listen and open their eyes, unless they have been burned once before.
There is another point to this, which is that of the entrepreneurs (or would-be entrepreneurs really) who pursue the plan A dream, very many stay stuck at step 1, wasting time and energy trying to convince VCs (or angels for that matter), when they should use that same time and energy somewhere else, namely step 1 and 2 of plan B. You can’t do both and picking plan A means entering a competitive economy where very few wins (even though they are very well publicized when they do). At least with plan B you have a better chance to make it past step 1.
Assuming you accept this and go for plan B, the one thing about your plan B that still needs to be figured out is the “dig, scratch, and claw yourself to $100,000 of funds” part. Not everybody as friends and family that can shell out this kind of money, and it does not mean they do not deserve a chance. This is why I started the Entrepreneur Commons (http://www.entrepreneurcommons.org), maybe you will like the idea. I would love to discuss it if you care to do so…
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Andrew | September 9th, 2008 at 10:56 pm
Hi Guy, good post thanks. I would like to point out, however, that Plan B is how the rest of the world has always started businesses - it’s not new at all. Your post highights how skewed the Silicon Valley world view is, as a place where money does grow on trees and falls like rain from the sky. The rest of us live in reality - we’ve always used our own money, frugality and common sense to get things done. Cheers, Andrew
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brant collins | September 9th, 2008 at 11:03 pm
Roll up your sleeves, work hard, build something you believe in and the money will come…
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Diego | September 9th, 2008 at 11:53 pm
Great plan B! In countries like Spain, it is what works.
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Ed French | September 10th, 2008 at 12:10 am
Great post- I’m sure we’ve all seen this so many times. However, I’d like to note that in the first example the product didn’t take, and in the second it did. Would a failure in the friends and family funded company really be a lot less painful?
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Mariano Marcos | September 10th, 2008 at 2:37 am
Some years ago, almost every business around (except for the big big ones) was started with a plan b ? In fact it wasn’t called plan b, it was called “let’s make this business work”, I guess.
(Notice that I also write from Spain ;
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Alan Haarhoff writes about Web 2.0, Social Media, e-Marketing and Web Development » Blog Archive » How to approach venture capital funding raising | September 10th, 2008 at 3:07 am
[…] this article from Guy Kawasaki of How to change the world, is […]
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Polux | September 10th, 2008 at 3:19 am
If everyone keeps their day-job, what do you need $100.000 for ?
Didn’t Guy himself start Truemors for much less ?
http://blog.guykawasaki.com/2007/06/by_the_numbers_.html
I think for the average Joe $100.000 is more than they can raise from friends and family, credit cards, etc… While $10.000 - $20.000 should be no problem if you try hard enough, even personal savings might be enough.
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Michael Bailey | September 10th, 2008 at 5:56 am
Thanks a lot Guy - I am almost finished with Plan B, Step 3 and moving in to Step 4.
I must say that the Plan B approach for me has taken almost 3 years to pull-off, so if anyone is thinking about doing it, just be sure that they have enough patience and persistence to pull it off.
Stay the course!
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Oskar Hart | September 10th, 2008 at 6:39 am
You are my personal Hero Guy. I think a lot of people can relate very much to Plan A.
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Pablo Brenner | September 10th, 2008 at 6:54 am
Completely agree, as a small vc firm, and after going through some of the scenarios you’ve been describing, our new approach is somehow similar to your plan B, with the only difference that we do give some low amount of money to the entrepreneur so he can quit “his day job at Microsoft” and dedicate 150% of his time to the new venture having an “almost decent salary”
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Brian Glassman | September 10th, 2008 at 9:30 am
Great Article.
After Studying Entrepreneurship for 3 years I came to a realization that Plan A only became possible in the last 40 years, prior to that Plan B was your only option.
Thanks for the great article
Brian
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Excelente post de Guy Kawasaki « Pablo Brenner & Sergio Fogel Blog | September 10th, 2008 at 10:36 am
[…] vista pareceria que va contra mis intereses como VC, comparto en gran medida lo que Guy escribe en este post. Y creo que independientemente de el mecanismo de financiamiento es importante ser […]
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Jay | September 10th, 2008 at 12:15 pm
I’ve been thru this scenario a couple times. I think the VCs out there are really genuinely pretty clueless. This is not to say that founders are not also clueless. But I’ve yet to meet a VC who I though was worth a damn. (I haven’t met Guy, but he seems like an exception) The VCs seem to focus on buzzwords and hockeysticks, when the entrepreneurs know there is risk, and that there might be some adjustment of businessmodels or products before things light on fire.
Anyway, when it came time to building my own company, I already had $100,000 in the bank, because I’d been saving it while I was an employee. Guy is right, we’re late with our product. There are only two of us, and our burn rate is about $3000-$4000 a month. Can’t say yet whether we’ll have lots of customers, but our leverage to those customers is such that we don’t have to have any infrastructure or scaling issues. (I guess I’m proud of the way we structured our business, but I’m getting off of the point.)
Three months of work at $4K burnrate is $12k. Don’t raise or save $100k.
Take plan C — a sabbatical from your job and spend three months and 12k getting your business going. You should know by that time whether its viable or not. Planning on 6 months development or startup effort means you’ll go a year before you even know if your understanding of the market is right.
Best if you can do your product in a month, and start selling it for 2 months– even on a small scale. If your product is flavored butter, make it in your kitchen and sell it at local farmers markets. If your product is software, scale it so that it can be built in a month, and released.
Its the adjustments of business plan and models that cause the plugs to be pulled by the clueless- get that out of the way early.
And if that miracle happens you’ll find you don’t need venture capital at all– just loans for a growing business, or angel funding probably.
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Jon Berry | September 10th, 2008 at 12:39 pm
Wow, great post! I have been working on an idea and debating with my partners whether we should seek funding or “suck it up” and boot-strap it ourselves. This really hit home!
Also, @Marc Dangeard, I’ll check out http://www.entrepreneurcommons.org.
Thanks!
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» A propos des plans B - Ouvre’s corner | September 10th, 2008 at 3:29 pm
[…] Encore un très bon article de Guy Kawasaki. […]
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Natasha Soleil | September 10th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
I love it! I was laughing…because I do go to high end conferences - most recently, at the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills - I checked out the schedule on-line and showed up during the break all dressed in black so, no one knows if I work at the hotel or attending the conference. After the break I just followed the crowed into the conference room. Voila a free pass and met some great contacts! I really appreciate your Plan B advice…it confirms I’m on the right track! Thank you so much and wishing you a wonderful day! Natasha
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Elizabeth Potts Weinstein | September 10th, 2008 at 10:44 pm
I’m glad to read that my funding strategy has a name and is something that other people are actually doing. Here in the Silicon Valley it seems that everyone has got VC money, and as a self-funded start-up I thought I was nuts. Maybe I’m secretly a genius.
~ ElizabethPW
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Esfandiar | September 11th, 2008 at 1:34 am
Well written and insightful. One small modification… before the big lead venture calls you to say they are going to sell your company, they will replace you. If they are nice and often smart, they may keep you around not to demoralize the company out of existance. Then they will hire an Investment Bank to shop the company around.
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Esfandiar | September 11th, 2008 at 1:40 am
I have to add this too. Not all $ is created equal either. A good VC will watch over you, bring in a strong team to help and will indeed be more valuable than their money. They KNOW they are your partner. They win, only if you win.
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Guy Kawasaki: Plan B for Fund Raising « TechBays | September 11th, 2008 at 2:02 am
[…] Guy Kawasaki: Plan B for Fund Raising Posted on September 11, 2008 by Carlo Maglinao From OpenForum.com: […]
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Patrick Lor | September 11th, 2008 at 3:38 am
Plan C: Raise $50k of seed capital, gain some traction, and convince Guy to become an advisor/evangelist for your company. Works like a charm . . .
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Peter Van Dijck’s Guide to Ease » Blog Archive | September 11th, 2008 at 4:27 am
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Marc Dangeard | September 11th, 2008 at 8:00 am
@ESFANDIAR - Correction to your comment: The VC wins only if the company wins, which does not exactly translate into YOU winning. The company may win and they may win while you are left with not much.
And VCs, good or not, report to their own investors, the LPs in the fund, so your role in their picture is limited to what you can do for them. You should stay aware of this…
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Julian | September 11th, 2008 at 9:05 am
Okay, we are currently doing mostly Plan B.
But, “Month to month, you’re showing 10-15% growth, and monetization, praise God, has started” is not happening. Too bad. We are going way more slowly. At least our VC is not outraged…
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Doug Klein | September 11th, 2008 at 9:28 am
@Ed French: you have the best comment yet. Everyone should ask how they’re going to deal with failure since that by far is the most probable outcome.
While I don’t disagree completely with the premise of building with a more bootstrap approach, Guy has put forth a somewhat biased view that in A the business fails while in B it miraculously works. There is an implicit assumption that the root cause for failure in A was the funding strategy - big error in analysis.
The elephant in the room that is being ignored here is that early stage founders tend to struggle greatly with setting goals and running the business by metrics. In many ways it’s the nature of the beast. By definition you don’t really know how things are going to roll out since you have no track record, so setting realistic goals is a real shot in the dark; and by their nature successful entrepreneurs are wild-eyed optimists so “next month” is also going to be the breakthrough. Regardless of funding strategy you must run the business by metrics. As my favorite angel and current board member said to me just the other day, “hope is not a plan”!
My variant on this advice is this: get the funding appropriate to your personal situation, the needs of the business, and a realistic perspective on the market and opportunity. If it makes sense to bootstrap and it’s logical to believe it will work, by all means do so. If it doesn’t, go get professional investment money. Don’t take Guy’s advice as black and white - I’d love to see somewhat bootstrap the next Intel
Ain’t going to happen and that would be a shame. However, when you do raise significant VC money, spend it as if you had to pay it back. Feel some personal obligation to make a return. Sure, they realize the risk their taking but if you run it like it came from your family (or better yet from your personal savings) you will make more rational and prudent spending/investment decisions!
(Disclaimer: After 6 startups I’m still pretty bad at this myself, so do as I say, not necessarily as I do
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Jay | September 11th, 2008 at 10:21 am
Your odds of failure INCREASE when you take VC funding. The reason is that VCs only want to invest in billion dollar opportunities, and so they will push you towards betting it all on owning some market.
I don’t think VCs are good partners because I’ve yet to see one that didn’t force technology decisions on companies that exceeded the VCs understanding of the technology. The money comes with strings, and the people pulling the strings are generally not better at it, and often worse, than the founders.
When you take outside money, you start the clock ticking and you start spending that money towards the goal of having a huge payoff quickly. That is a fundamental choice that increases the odds of failure.
When you have control over the funding yourself, you can do what needs to be done, or change directions as needed to reach success. The goal becomes success, rather than a specific, high reward, low probability out come that the VCs want.
Then if things don’t work out with the initial idea you can adjust the direction of the company or product to better fit the market.
With VC funding if the VC saw you as a social startup, but you discover that a packaged software for businesses is the best way to use your unique technology, then the VCs going to be unhappy since your no longer fitting in the buzzword that they originally funded.
Also, at this point, if you’ve never gotten VC funding, don’t start. Most of the VC funded startups I’ve been involved with have lost their CEO for a year or two, pretty much full time, to seeking the money, getting the deal closed, dealing with the VCs afterwards, seeking the next round, etc. etc.
In a small company, effectively losing the CEO for the first two years as a contributor to the product, or even to managing the direction of the company, is a very serious blow.
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Carol Cole-Lewis | September 16th, 2008 at 7:25 pm
What about companies that require millions to start up – for example, a clean tech manufacturing company with all plans and processes ready to build the prototypes? Anybody got a “Plan C”?
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Rohit | September 17th, 2008 at 6:18 am
Plan B is what we have been following with Pragma. Just wanting a small piece of miracle though
It will happen.
/Rohit
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Pemo Theodore | September 19th, 2008 at 1:11 am
Very enlightening & much appreciated reading this post! The big question that came up for me is ‘Where are the women??????’ Because intrinsically (& obviously generally) it is more difficult for women to burn through millions $$$ without relating it to results & returns! I love all the young men that are involved in the technology sector & their ideas are often brilliant but isn’t it all turning into a ‘young boys club’ instead of the ‘old boys club’. Surely if vc’s & angels were more open to women entrepreneurs & more practical ideas then these odds would not be so high???? Surely if there was more balance there would not be so much extremes? Correct me if I’m wrong!
Pemo
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RAJ | September 29th, 2008 at 1:48 am
The simple difference between success and failure. It’s easy to burn VC funds and the justifications are also similar:
1. Hey these guys should have known better than I when they invested. After all they are experts.
2. The never helped me with the business development (and I did not do any either)
3. The funding was’nt enough (for our designer offices and personalized stationery)
… you get the idea.
All Guy’s plan B is saying is “Get off your ass, use your own money, work hard and once you are used to a hard working life, come to me and we will see.”
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Pemo Theodore | September 29th, 2008 at 11:13 pm
True Raj & keep your feet on the ground and always relate everything to ROI!!!! Simple really,
Pemo
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Jessica Meats | October 13th, 2008 at 6:18 am
Hopefully this doesn’t just apply to tech businesses - I’ll be trying to get interest in my first novel when it comes to print next year.
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Plan B for Fund Raising (by Guy Kawasaki, Entrepreneur & Venture Capitalist) - mbbcc | October 20th, 2008 at 1:07 pm
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Ilya Bodner | October 28th, 2008 at 6:08 am
What a rough situation to be in! But hard work pays off in the end.
Sincerely,
Ilya Bodner
Small Business Owner
Initial Underwriting Group
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SUPRIYA | November 5th, 2008 at 11:34 pm
IT is very good
SUPRIYA
Social Bookmarking
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How to Start a Business: Plan B | PDRater.com | November 6th, 2008 at 7:05 am
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juliejulie | November 21st, 2008 at 11:11 am
This was great, and I’m glad we’re on Plan B track from the beginning. I don’t think Plan A is available anymore to bootstrappers anyway.
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