At 11:43 a.m. on August 5, 2019, our beautiful start-up came into the world measuring 25 inches, weighing 7 lbs, 4 oz., and valued at approximately $800,000 based on its nine-month seed round funding. On the small side, but there’s room to grow! As such, we have decided that our sweet little bundle of disruption will spend some time in an incubator before moving to headquarters in Menlo Park as a Series A company.
We, the proud co-founders of this start-up, could not be more thrilled to share this news with you, the public and other potential investors.
We feel as though we’ve been preparing to be co-founders our whole lives. When you’re young, you’re always told you’ll find a partner and create a groundbreaking start-up together. It just feels so different when you’re actually doing it! It feels so new to us, like our start-up could be the biggest disrupter of them all! When my friends started having start-ups I was never interested, but now I think my start-up is just about the most miraculous, fascinating thing there is.
Our start-up is our angel, and we the angel investors. We also serve as executives, and on our Board of Directors sit some seasoned industry veterans, including both our own co-founders as well as my sister corporation, who has successfully raised three start-ups to maturation. We would like to thank the Board for their investments and wisdom. You know what they say: It takes a village — or in this case, a Pacific Northwest Bay Area urban center — to raise a start-up.
We’re trying to savor every moment. Before we know it, it’ll be learning its Series ABCs. Of course, we’re looking forward to every major milestone such as speech, ambulation, all right up to that IPO. Oh, I’m getting dewy-eyed just thinking about the day it goes public. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves!
Things have been chaotic, but we’ve been having the time of our lives planning for this. You should see the headquarters, all decked out in unicorns! And there are letters and numbers everywhere to stimulate learning — like B2B and B2C!
There has been much discussion of our start-up’s potential focus. Law? Medicine? Technology? What high-need area should we address? What untapped markets are there? And, how can we maximize ROI? If our beloved company wants to focus on liberal arts or the humanities, we’ll give our support all the same, though we all know how risky and competitive that market is.
Don’t get us wrong — we’re not all business! We love to have fun! Ah, we mean, funds. We love various rounds of funding. That’s why we make a great team: While one of us runs headquarters, the other goes out and finds venture capitalists to watch over our little one.
We think we understand the risks. So many of our closest colleagues have told us your start-up becomes your whole world. You obsess over the competition, you second-guess yourself, and fixate on what all the other co-founders are doing. Should crisis care be in-house or should we hire an agency? What if one of us comes down with founder-itis and we’re forced to, God forbid, find someone else to lead the company? What if our brainchild becomes a… nonprofit?
We’re sorry, we’re just emotional right now. We haven’t slept in days. We will love our start-up no matter where the pivots take us.
Above all, we know that right now, when there is a glut of start-ups in the world, when we are facing more and more crises every day, maybe having a start-up isn’t such a great idea. The average start-up loses so much money before it can even dream of making money. But you know what? We make a damn good team and we are confident our start-up will contribute to making the world a better place.
For now, we’re exhausted but so, so happy. Please join us next month when we gift our precious start-up with its very first Patagonia fleece vest.