The Venture Capitalist model is broken and does not serve entrepreneurs - Bird Lovegod

Sometimes community is used to describe groups of millions of people, the LBGTQIA ‘community’ is no such thing, it’s just a way of grouping non-heterosexual people for the purposes of generalisation. One may as well speak of the ‘straight community’. See, it doesn’t exist.

I’m unsure communities can even exist beyond a few hundred people, more than that and they tend to subdivide. So the whole thing about ‘building communities’ is rather a red herring.

It’s actually just what businesses tend to call their mailing list, to make themselves feel more important, impactful, and inclusive. ‘Our community’. But really, they’re just people buying the service, or deleting an email once a week. The people don’t consider themselves to be part of a community of that business, so why are the businesses being so deluded as to consider them to be so? Community, in the sense it is used in business,

I’m not sure that’s even a real thing. I’m calling naked emperor on it.

So much of what business used to say and do is becoming either obsolete, or just exposed as nonsense. The entire start-up sector and the way that operates is included in this disintegration. Thousands of start-ups, all thinking they’re innovative, all thinking they’re disruptive, and all of them trying to do the same thing in the same way.

All of them trying to enter and head down an ever-narrowing funnel run by VCs for the benefit of VCs. The entire model is malformed and counter to the founders’ best interests. All these start-ups, they’re all painting slightly different pictures, but they’re all in a bent studio designed to sift them for the one per cent capable of super high growth. The rest are a waste of space.

It’s the actual definition of exploitation and the fact founders are begging to be exploited doesn’t make it less so.

The existing funding model would rather the founders liquidated a business than run it as a comfortable, profitable, enjoyable life’s work with no exit.

The VC model only counts success as more of itself, eventually leading to a huge exit for themselves in a tiny fraction of instances.

The entire system is a dream, sold to a conveyor belt of hope-fuelled founders, there’s no visible alternative, it’s the default, and they buy in. There’s an immaturity to it, wanting to be accepted, approved, loved enough by a VC to be offered a term sheet, totally one-sided of course. The ‘success’ stories are spun into legend, the 99 per cent are buried in unmarked graves.

And that’s just how it is. Start-ups have a masochistic desire to be part of this, to be accepted into this, and when you step outside it you see it as the hyped up death wish it is.

If you’re thinking about starting a start-up, here’s a good piece of advice. Create something B2C, to sell to consumers, and package it on a subscription basis. Something you can start small and easy, really local and simple. Then refine it and make it better.

And when it’s time to grow, don’t sell equity. Don’t even go down that twisted fundraising path at all. Instead, give equity to your subscriber customers. Make them part of the business.

Rather than trying to sell 30 per cent of your business to raise funds, give away 30 per cent of your business to your soon to be very loyal customers. That 30 per cent might buy you enough customers to make a very successful business. Let them have ordinary shares, let them be part of the process.

And hey presto. You just disintermediated the entire dysfunctional waste of time funding sector.

You just started building a business based on adding value to customers, and they’re more than customers, they’re shareholders, they’re part of the company.

Hey. Maybe you just reinvented how to build and scale a business in 2020.