About
Since 1977, I have worked in the computer industry, building software companies. Then, about three years ago, I retired from the corporate world of venture capital firms, bankers, and hundreds of employees and started a YouTube channel as a hobby. So I was surprised when the channel MakeWithTech past 1,000 subscribers, 10,000, 50,000, and now 70,000 subscribers. People have watched my videos over 5 million times. When I could no longer keep up with replies to comments, I started forum.makewithtech.com to provide my viewers with a place to exchange ideas and then models.makewithtech.com, a place to find custom 3d models. Now I find myself back running a company. A "learning company" focused on helping people learn how to be "makers" using desktop technologies.
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What's one piece of generally accepted advice that didn't work out for you?
I thought it would be interesting to start a discussion on this because I think specific individual experiences that go against the grain can be invaluable when it comes to growth and learning. It can be related to whatever - launching on PH, work, organization, anything really!
Should you raise capital from Venture Capital Funds?
I will launch a new product, models.makewithtech.com, on Product Hunt on Wednesday, March 1st. While this product has been bootstrapped, I have founded three other companies, 2 with outside capital. The first company, a system integration firm that built software for enterprise companies, grew to over 500 employees with no outside capital other than a traditional bank loan personally signed. This company was quite successful and sold to a publicly traded company. For the second company, I hired an outside CEO to run it and raised about 7 million dollars from angel investors and family offices. It failed when the dot com boom crashed, and we could not raise any more money. The third company, I started myself as CEO/CTO and raised $60 million over 5 rounds. Over 12 years, my board "suggested" that I give up the CTO role, change my product strategy, and generally do things their way. Ultimately they fired me and brought in someone as the new CEO, who watched the company decline in size over the next few years. While it was sold for a lot of money, I lost most of my seed investment, and the only people who would make much money were the late-stage VCs. My new company is a spin-off of a YouTube channel I started as a hobby. I wrote all of the MVP code and then hired talented people from around the world to help me out part-time. I have no outside investors, no VCs, no board of directors, and an entirely virtual team. I'm having a blast, and my children joke that this will be my most successful company. So, do you need to raise a lot of capital to succeed? Is your value as a CEO measured by how much money you raise? Let's start this conversation by saying NO to both questions.