Venture Capital will kill you if you are not ready

I see too many founders operating as if raising investment were their core business model, chasing funding rounds before looking for real customers, a brutal mistake that took me three startups to understand.

I have built three startups raising capital in all of them, but funnily enough I did not understand what Venture Capital really meant until the last one. The first time I believed that raising money was winning in itself, guarding every penny and trying to extend our runway, optimizing a fund-backed company as if it were a traditional business and prolonging the life of something that should have died much earlier.

The second time we mixed Latin American capital with United States capital and I discovered that they play on completely different fields, while in our region they demand profitability and cash flow control, in the north they demand massive scale and disproportionate returns. By the third company we managed to be profitable with sustained growth and I thought we had won, but I crashed against the reality that an excellent business can be a mediocre investment for a fund, because by accepting their money you stop building the company you want and you start building the beast their financial model needs.

Now I am building my fourth company trying something different, not because I am against Venture Capital, but because this time capital will only enter when we truly have something worth accelerating to industrial levels. If the market demands money, we will take it, but only when the business screams for it to grow, never to survive.