Here is a simple equation to raise money

If you enjoy these newsletters and think a colleague or a friend should read them, please get them to sign up on this page. 📝

If it is your first time here or you want to binge-read past letters, here are all of them.📰

If you found this newsletter interesting, I would love it if you could share it!

These are the crazy things I learned last week.

1/ Let's start with something awesome, as always.

For the 3-4 of you that don't know, Y Combinator (YC) is an American technology startup accelerator launched in March 2005. It has been used to launch more than 3,000 companies, including some of the most iconic startups in the world like Stripe, Airbnb, Cruise, PagerDuty, DoorDash, Coinbase, Instacart, and Dropbox, Twitch, and Reddit. The combined valuation of the top YC companies was more than $300 billion 💰 by January 2021.

The company's accelerator program started in Boston, and Mountain View expanded to San Francisco in 2019 and has been entirely online since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you are an aspiring founder and want to learn and get inspired by the best, you should enroll in the Aspiring Founder Track course.

This course provides a straightforward recipe to get you from 0 to MVP 🚀

1. Module 1: Should I Start a Startup?
2. Module 2: Generating Startup Ideas
3. Module 3: Vetting a Startup Idea
4. Module 4: Finding a Co-Founder
5. Module 5: Planning an MVP
6. Module 6: Future Plans

💡 Don't forget that I have launched a similar email course (Built to fail) designed to teach you the exact ideas and proven strategies that top entrepreneurs use to try out their ideas without spending any time and money. If you haven't done ti yet, you should definitely register.

2/ Is your company by default dead or alive?

Paul Graham - the founder of the most iconic Startup accelerator in the world 😉 - said something 7 years ago that couldn't be truer today.

Assuming your expenses remain constant and your revenue growth is what it has been over the last several months, can you be profitable on the money they have left? Or to put it more dramatically, by default do you live or die?

You can read the amazing article here.

3/ Are you struggling to raise money? 🤔

I have a simple equation for you that will show you how much money you can raise right now!

But before that, a short story.

The founder of WeWork just raised $70M for a web3 company.

Yes, the same guy that lost around $1B less than a year ago.

How did he do it? Network. That's it. He had a big network.

You can lie to yourself that the product is the most important (which, of course, sometimes it is), but the equation is the following:

Product

• Terrible product: 0
• Ok product: 3
• Epic product: 10

Network

• No network: $0
• Ok network: $1M
• Good network: $5M
• Epic network: $10M

You multiply the product with the network, and this is the money you can raise.

For example, "Ok Product" * "Ok network" = you might raise $3M

How much money do you think you can raise?

PS: The equation is similar to what Derek posted some time ago.

4/ Netflix is trying to get into the NFT space, and I love what they are doing with their "Love, Death + Robots" show.

It is a Scavenger Hunt!

QR codes are sprinkled in some episodes; you scan them 🤳 and unlock some NFTs.

Pretty similar to what I do on my YouTube Channel.

5/ It's been a long time since I've given out some Victory coins, so here we go!

📢 The first 10 of you can claim 99 $Victory coins.

I hope the marketplace will be up in June, and you'll be able to use them to get swag, book meetings with me, or whatever else comes to my mind!

Click here if you have no idea what a ✌️ $Victory is.

See you next week. 🚀

-- Jon V (as in Victory)

- Thu 26 May 2022