Of late, there has been talk that Silicon Valley is not a meritocracy, and that it is biased against women, black, and older entrepreneurs. I don’t believe this is true.
I have lived and worked as a serial entrepreneur in the Valley for more than 15 years. Over the past couple of years, as I have been running the One Million by One Million virtual incubator, the mission of which is to help a million entrepreneurs reach $1 million in revenue, I have worked with hundreds of entrepreneurs on a daily basis. I have raised angel and venture capital multiple times for my four startups (as CEO). I have also been rejected by investors at various points for various reasons, many of which were perfectly legitimate. And by the way, I am a woman of Indian origin, so I am definitely in the minority.
Let me start this piece with an anecdote from 2010. I had just put the concept of 1M/1M on paper. We had no product and, obviously, no customers. We had some free users for our various free offerings, including the online roundtables that have now become widely known.
I went to my VC network to get feedback on the idea from seasoned pros. I had access to very experienced, sophisticated VCs, and I wanted to either raise capital from some of them or understand why I shouldn’t raise capital. I had also made a personal choice that I would either raise enough money to get to serious revenue, or I would continue to bootstrap the business.
As I went through the discussions, one thing was clear: At the stage I was at with 1M/1M during the summer of 2010, we could raise a $2 million round comfortably, but not a $6 million round, which is what I assessed would take us to get to revenue momentum. I was very sure that I did not want to bootstrap with VC money, and I thus discontinued the $2 million financing discussions.
In this process of decision-making, one conversation was particularly important. It was held at the offices of Benchmark Capital with Bruce Dunlevie, one of the classiest VCs in the business. Bruce asked, what if the revenue ramps up slowly? What if it takes several years to get to momentum? The concept is new and innovative, and the market may take time to adopt the solution.
I came away from that meeting with the distinct realization that I needed to do the experimentation with my product, business model, pricing model, distribution strategy, and conversion ratios outside of the
