Do I REALLY have to give my whole life to my startup? And did Elizabeth Holmes hurt all women trying to fundraise?

Straight to you from Denver, Colorado, this is Precursa: The Startup Journey. We share the ins and outs of building a tech startup from inception to launch to revenue and beyond. If you’ve ever wondered what building a startup from scratch really looks like, you’re in the right place. With full transparency and honesty, we reveal it all about Precursa on our ride from idea to exit: the wins, the lessons learned, and the unexpected twists and turns.

Hey, Hey, welcome back. This is Precursa: The Startup Journey. I am your host, Cynthia Del’Aria, and I’m thrilled to be back with you again. So this week I’m going to answer a couple of questions that have come in, and I’m really hoping that next week is going to be our next founder session. I know you guys love when we do those because you just get different perspective, right. But two different topics came in over the past couple of weeks and I just thought they were really interesting. And so I kind of wanted to address them because they’re things that we’ve talked about at least a couple of times. And in one case, we actually talk about it quite a bit. And so I think there’s some different perspective that could be offered and I want to offer it. So, all right. So here we go. So the first question that I’ve gotten and I’ve gotten it in quite a few different ways from quite a few different people, which is why I think this is a really good one to address is do you really like really, really, Cynthia, do you really have to give up your whole life, like isn’t normal life and normal hours and normal pay and being able to like, that should be a thing, right? Or is that a fairy tale? And what’s interesting is I think last time I talked about this podcast called the pitch it’s on Spotify, it’s by Gimlet media. And one of the episodes that I listened to just in the last like week or so is an episode. I forget what her company was, but it was a woman who was building a company as she was pitching to the investor. She was like seven months pregnant, right. Or eight months pregnant. And when they came back around to sort of get the update, she basically said, yeah, I mean, I, I took two months off, had the baby, you know, took some time with the baby to get us into a rhythm and a routine. She’s like, I, we don’t do, you know, quote unquote traditional startup life where we’re not working 80 hours a week. We work nine to five and you know, so she described her startup and, and the way she’s building it in a way that just sounds like, man, that would be amazing if that was the case. And unfortunately, without being able to dig in with her and say, well, how are you doing that? How are you paying the bills? Are you cashflow positive? Was it always that way? Right. She kind of painted this picture. Like it doesn’t have to be that way in startups where your whole life is your startup. Here’s the thing for me, there is going to come a point when you won’t have to do that anymore. And like I said, without being able to dig in, you know, if I was the host, I would have asked some really different questions of her about that. Of course we would rather people not be working 60, 70, 80 hours a week. Of course we would like to be able to have a social life and be able to go on vacation and be able to like, of course that’s our goal, right? But the reality is when you are building something new, you don’t always have the resources to be able to do that. And so the trade off is that for a while, it is your life. I mean, it is the thing that you’re doing. And I’ve, I talk about this a lot. You know, we go, we have our Friday night dinners with our friends. Most of whom don’t really understand what it is I do. And so if I do have to miss a dinner or I’ve, you know, I’ve had to miss a birthday or two over the last, you know, six months as we’ve been been doing this thing. And you know, the way I explain it is this is the equivalent of actually, it’s kind of funny that I’m gonna describe it this way, but this is the equivalent of me being pregnant. When you’re a pregnant woman, you’re always pregnant. You’re always walking around pregnant. That’s the foremost thing on your mind, you may be doing other things like going to work or going to dinners or going to movies or hanging out with your friends or, you know, cleaning your house on the weekend. But that thing is sort of like the one thing you drop everything for, because if something’s not going right with a pregnancy, or if you don’t feel well, everything else takes a back seat, building a startup, particularly in the first year or two is a lot like being pregnant with a baby. It is the thing. It can’t survive with that. You, your ability to do the work that there is to do to prioritize that thing is the difference between its success or failure. And so do you really have to give up your whole life? No, I don’t give up my whole life, but I also have different resources than a lot of people who are doing this first time. And I think you do have to get creative and you do have to make it your number one priority. Now I think that that is a disadvantage for a lot of people who have families for a lot of people who have, I have a lot of responsibilities you’re going to have to get more creative in order to not. And I’m putting in quotes, give up your whole life. Okay. But nurturing a startup, building a startup, turning it into something that actually produces.

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It takes a lot of work and it takes all of your energy and it takes most of your creative thinking. And if you aren’t constantly watching the world and figuring out how do I fit and how does this work? And do I need to like all the, all the questions and answering them in the context of what’s next, your startup, you’re probably not going to be very successful. You know, I wish I could remember what the name I want to say. I know what it is, but I don’t want to be wrong. And I don’t want to put that out on the air, but I would love to actually what I might do is go see if I can track her down and see if she would come on our podcast and talk a little bit about, was it always like that? Or was there a point in time when you did actually, and if you never had to, if it was always a nine to five and you know, reasonable hours and all that kind of stuff for you, how did you do that? You know, do, do you have other support systems in place where other people are making sure that your bills are getting paid? Or do you know what I’m saying? I just, the reason this is so important and I get it from your perspective as the entrepreneur, you want to be able to build a startup and you want to still have your life and enjoy your life and live in the moment. And, and I get that. Okay, I’m look. And, and I, you know, through COVID, obviously we didn’t go anywhere and we really haven’t done any, we have not done any meaningful travel yet in August. We’re going to Blackberry farm in Tennessee for four days. Now that terrifies me to be quite honest, because I’m literally taking four days off, but I know it’s going to be really good. And I know I need to do it. And Paige and Sarah are going to hold up the Fort and make sure that things keep going and make sure that we’re good while I’m gone. Right? No big deal two months, you know, considering that we’re about three months out from our launch date feels a little scary, right. But am I giving up my entire life? No, of course not. But most of the time, my number one priority. So just to be totally transparent, we missed our Friday podcasting session this week because of some other things that we’ve got going on. So I replaced that time slot with talking to some investors and a couple of these mentors, accelerator mentors. So I’m actually here on a Saturday recording, you know, a lot of people have said to me, well, why does it matter? Like, can’t you skip one week? Yes. But the more I don’t skip weeks, the further out we are. So right now we’re about three or four weeks ahead when we’re recording from when these sessions actually get launched. And what that does for me is because I have to take the files and prep all of them and get them over and create the title of the episode and the description for the episode and get that to our editing company so that then they can do all the production and then launch it on the day when it’s supposed to go live. That takes me time. I don’t always have time to do that consistently every week. And I definitely don’t write after our sessions because we record at 9:00 AM on Fridays and I have client meetings and everything else throughout the day on Fridays. And then we have our Friday dinner. So a lot of times it takes me a few days, sometimes as much as long as a week to get one of these prepped and over to the production company, reducing the buffer of that time by a whole week by missing an episode actually makes me nauseous. It makes me uncomfortable because I don’t like being that close to the wire, right. My personality, I was the kid in high school, in college, whatever who wrote the essay when it was assigned and then would take the two weeks that we actually had. You got two weeks to turn in this essay on whatever. I would write it in the first couple of days. And then I would take the rest of the two weeks and edit and revise, maybe rewrite a new edition of it. You know, that was me. I want to be ahead. I never want to be last minute emergency. I just don’t operate that way. I won’t sleep. And that will mess with me more than feeling like, okay, I’m giving up a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon to be here podcasting in order to keep making all the pieces of the, of my startup work. Right? So when I say it’s everything, and when I say it’s not for the faint of heart, and when I say it really does take a level of dedication that is beyond just a nine to five job or just a career. I’m not saying you have to give up your whole life. I’m saying it’s going to take a lot more than you think. And you need to be honest with yourself about is the value of what I’m trying to create is the worth to me and the why to me, of what I’m trying to create, is it big enough for me to keep going when it gets hard? And when I do have to do extra hours and extra days and nights and weekends, and like all the things that are, you know, I have to make that decision to not go to a friend’s birthday.

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Cause I really need that few hours to get some stuff done. Right? I’m trying to give you the starkest viewpoint on that because if the, why is big enough that doesn’t seem stark at all. I’m not upset to be here on a Saturday afternoon talking to you, not for a second because my why is bigger than a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, it’s bigger than the relative comfort of a nine to five job and a big, huge six figure salary. There’s more at stake here than that to me, not in regards to money, but in regards to never a Doug again. Okay. And that’s why talk about the, why so much the why is what makes this question kind of moot you don’t ask, do you really have to give up your whole life to build a startup? If you’d be willing to give up your whole life for the people who you care about getting their problem solved, I would give up everything to be able to guarantee no one ever has Doug’s experience ever again. And that’s what I’m doing. So understand that if you’re asking that question and is it really true? No, David and I are going on a vacation for a week in August. We’re going to take a long weekend and go to Orlando for and go to universal studios for the horror nights. We love doing that every year. And Hollywood’s been Hollywood was closed while they were all closed last year during COVID. And then this year we usually go to Hollywood because we have connections in LA and we’ve both lived there and all that. We really little of LA, but this year they’re only doing four houses and no scare zones. And they’re, they’re just still really locked down. So the experience is just really limited, Florida. They’re wide open, they’ve got 11 houses, they’ve got like six scare zones. They’ve got the whole, uh, they call it the rip tour, which is really funny. And so we’re going to go there. So we’re taking, you know, an extra day and going to visit a friend of ours. Who’s a guide at Disney. And so you’re not giving up your whole life. That’s not what I’m saying. I’m saying the why should be worth giving up your whole life in order to have that, why be executed in order to have the group of people or the problem that you’re trying to solve, have that get solved and have those people be served. That is what makes it worth giving up everything. Okay. So if that’s still not clear, there was a bunch of you that actually sent me that question in the last two weeks. So if that’s still not clear, let me know. Or if you, you know, want to argue with me about it, let me know. I love to argue. And maybe if your arguments are cut, I’ll bring on their podcast. We can argue in public. Okay. So here. So, so that’s the first topic. The other question that I got, which I thought was really, really interesting. I’ve talked a few times about how one of the other pieces, that’s a big why for me, and that’s always on my heart and that’s really important to me, why I want big wealth. And I think I talked about this a couple of episodes ago, but one of the reasons I want big wealth is because I want to be able to take a bunch of money, a hundred million dollars and throw it into a fund to start to address the inequity in funding and startups. Right? So my startup, this first startup in ç, it is about solving the problem. So that entrepreneurs are actually building companies and building products and doing things that have, that are viable and that can be successful. The next stage of that is okay. If we know that we’ve solved that piece of the problem, and in general entrepreneurs are in a better able to build something viable and something that people want the next stage is now, how do I get more projects that have a better shot at success, but who don’t get investment? Because the investors have biases that they’re unaware of, or, you know, whatever that is like, I haven’t dug into the problem enough. I have a little bit, but not enough to be able to say how I would solve it yet. That’s the next piece of the problem. But in order to do that, I need the money. Like, what I need to do is I need to make a bunch of money. So then I can go invest a bunch of money in a bunch of other people’s companies improve that I’m right. Investing in women is just good business. Investing in women of color is amazing business. Black women are the largest segment of, of everyone who are building businesses in record numbers right now. And they have the least access to capital across any type of whether it’s banks or investors or VC or whatever. And the only types of funds that exist out there for them are largely grants, which totally diminishes the value that they bring as business owners, that this is a business, not a charity. So a big part of my goal in building wealth for myself is to be able to tackle that next problem. And the best way to do it is to say my investment thesis is I invest in women and people of color. And I am going to use a Precursa will be part of my sort of underlying metric. If it is a good idea, women generally tend to be, have higher customer satisfaction and retention rates, higher employees, satisfaction, and retention rates.

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They tend to be better, more empathetic managers, and they tend to have cultures in their companies that are more like the type of culture everybody’s trying to work in. And that’s not because men don’t have those skills and abilities. They just don’t go there. Naturally. They’re more driven by different things in order to get to that place. I need to make a lot of money. So I am building Precursa and part of my, why is being able to do this other thing and actually prove, Hey, look, if women are 48% of startups that are out there trying to raise money, they should be getting 48% of the dollars. If people of color, 18% of the companies that are out there trying to raise money, you know, people of color founders, they should be getting at least 18% of the investment dollars that are available. And their ideas are just as good as the white dudes coming out of Wharton and Stanford with MBAs. They’re just as good. They’re just different. That’s all it is. So I’ve talked about this, some on this, on the podcast. And I also talked briefly, I mentioned something about Elizabeth Holmes and I wish I could remember the context. So I was trying to go find the episode, but I didn’t actually put it in the notes anywhere, but I was talking about Elizabeth Holmes and somebody sent me this question. I thought it was really fascinating. And then I had a discussion with David, my fiancé over dinner a few nights ago where he actually said, oh, I can totally see that the question was, does Elizabeth Holmes and what she did with Theranos, does that hurt other female founders for fundraising, like does hurt what she did and how she operated and the mistakes that she made, whether they were mistakes, where they were malicious or whatever, like the way that all turned out does that make the rest of us look bad and stand out in minds as well. But remember everybody invested in Elizabeth Holmes and that didn’t go well. What’s interesting. I found was when I said that to David, he was like, I can totally see that. And my follow-up was, but why doesn’t that turn investors off to investing in white men when you have Enron like Bernie Madoff, there it is. Thank you. Woo. Why is that? Not also the case for men white men, when you have examples like Bernie Madoff, when you have examples like Enron, like why is that not the same? Why is it so much, like, are we looking for a reason to say no to this group of people? I mean, it seems like they don’t really need a reason. They do it anyway, but are we looking for a reason to say no to this group of people? And that stands out as look, there’s an example of a woman who did get big funding and boy, did she screw that up? Right. And there’s just lots of examples that white men can produce outside of what happened. Like Madoff and that whole thing that’s rare, more rare. Right? I mean, so I thought it was a really interesting question. And here’s, here’s my perspective on this. I’m going to challenge the assumptions in this question before I actually answer it, the way that I view the world. Okay. To be fair. And this is an opinion of one person take it or leave it, but it is a really interesting conversation to be having. And I love the way that this question came in. Cause it’s no Richard juicy. So the first assumption that I’m going to challenge in this question is that all, all females stand together as a single organism. And when one of us wins, we all win. And one, one of us loses, we all lose or we all look bad. Or when one of us does something stupid, we all look bad. Women are more community oriented. For sure. I mean, if you look anthropologically speaking, more often than not women made up small groups, they raised their children together. The men were more solitary in a lot of cases. Are they grouped for different reasons? So women are very community-oriented that does not mean that I identify with every woman out there in every female founder out there and their journeys and their stories and what they’re doing and how they got there and blah, blah, right. No more than every white man who’s out there trying to raise money for his startup. Not all of them identify with mark Zuckerberg, right? Not all of them identify with Bernie Madoff. Not all of them identify with Jack what’s his face from Twitter, right? Like we’re not like a single organism that comes together and we all fail or we all lose.

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Now. I do believe that women in positions of power and women who able to be part of that 2.6% who are getting funding and building successful companies, you know, getting funding, I mean 2.6%. Can you even believe that? Uh, sorry. It’s just, it’s really bizarre. But I believe that women who are in those power positions have the opportunity to pave the way for us. But I challenge change this underlying one bad apple ruins the bunch or one person ruins it for everyone because I’m not Elizabeth Holmes and I’m not building something in biotech and I’m not building a device and I’m not making an enormous claim that really lives in the world of science fiction until it actually is proven to be true, which if she had done it, it would have been amazing, but it just, the science didn’t work. And they knew that for a long time. Right. I’m not bad. So it actually doesn’t bother me. It bothers me actually. I think it’s actually kind of funny and kind of ironic because the number of very successful, very powerful white men and men in power places, you know, government, oh my gosh, it’s a Saturday. My brain’s not working like who sit on government committees or who testify in front of Congress about very important things in business. Those are the people who invested in her. I mean, billions of dollars of investment money went into her company. And I mean, they lost everything now. She got rich doing it. The only reason that she even had a leg in, in that was because of where she went to school, who her family was and who her family knew. You know, there was a professor that at, I think she went to Stanford, there was a professor in the biome engineering class or something like that, who was like, I told her years ago, this, this was never going to work. Like the science just didn’t work. Now. Maybe that’s after the fact who knows. But the point is she had the opportunity to pave the way. But all of my head hopes that we can shift this conversation and shift this tide and have more great women be getting the funding they need doesn’t rest on or die with her. So I I’m challenging the underlying assumption that all women sink or swim together. Okay. We don’t view men that way. We view them on the merits of themselves and their ideas. So why is it that we lump all women together? I think we do the same thing with people of color, right? Especially founders. We lumped them all together. Like, and again, one or two of them or a whole group of them, or a whole bunch of them becoming really successful in getting that traction does help normalize it for the rest of everybody else. But the individual founder does not have to sink or swim based on that. So that’s the other underlying assumption in this question, which is, is you, are you, you are not the sum of all the women who have come before you, you are in many times benefiting from the experiences and the work and all the things that came before you and the women who came before you or overcoming some of that stuff. But you are not them go be bigger than the statistic. Do the work, do the due diligence, dig in, get really solid, like follow the Precursa process and get so solid that when you walk into a room, investors don’t even have time to think about or consider their biases. They’re too in chanted by who you are and how passionate you are about your idea and how solid your idea is do that. So that’s the other assumption in this question, which is that someone else’s thing that they do can have some impact on you and what you’re doing. I challenged that. And I think as women, we definitely fall into that mentality and we had to cut that out. Like you are, you, you are amazing. You standing in front of an investor is not you holding hands or locking arms with Elizabeth Holmes, standing in front of an investor and say, okay, we’re going to try this again. And by the way, if you’re thinking Elizabeth Holmes would make a great co-founder for you, I’d say, don’t do that. That will definitely have this be a problem for you. Right? So going back to the original question then does Elizabeth Holmes and her journey and her experience and her path as a startup founder, does that hurt other female founders for fundraising?

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The answer is no, it does not. It just, doesn’t, it’s an example of how things can go really bad, really, really, really fast and really wrong, really fast. It’s an example of what happens when you’re a really great sales person and you have great strategy and great vision and very little ability to execute. Essentially. It’s proving the point that we make every day in Precursa, right? Actually, she was trying to solve a problem that a lot of people actually do experience. There are a lot of people who are afraid of needles and who don’t get. Sometimes don’t get the blood work they need or get the care they need because they’re afraid of needles. Oddly enough, my fiancé, David, who is a surgeon he’s terrified of needles. He will do anything to not have blood drawn. He will do anything to not have a needle coming at him, which means there are times where I’m like, you really need to go get this checked now because you are now messing with your health and that’s not good. And we have to put Emla cream on his hand or his arm where he’s going to get poked and S you know, I go with him so we can distract him enough. And the minute the needles in, or the minute the thing’s done, he’s perfectly fine. Right. That’s a real thing. So the problem she was trying to solve, you know, being able to take less blood, which is more beneficial, cause giving more blood is bad for people, right? I, it takes longer to bring that back. And if you’re already not feeling good or, you know, like all the things worthy, totally worthy and totally worth trying to solve. But if the science doesn’t work, the none of the rest of it matters. Right? And so it’s just proving the whole goal in pre curses. What’s the problem. Who are you solving it for? Will they change their habits and spend money to solve it? And can it actually work? So coming back to the question, no Elizabeth Holmes and how all that worked out, doesn’t hurt my chances of getting an investment money. One iota, what hurts my chances is if I am not clear, if I cannot speak intelligently about what I’m doing, if I don’t know my market, if I don’t know my Tam, Sam and som, if I don’t have a good, reasonable, conservative, understandable proforma, if I don’t know how to tell the story, if I don’t know my why, all of those things are what the investors looking for. They’re not sitting in a room looking at you, going, wow, this is such a great idea. And I totally see it in B2B, SAS. I love that. And this fits my investment thesis, but man, that Elizabeth Holmes sure. Screwed it up for every woman. So I don’t know, this is a one that’s just not there. They’re just disconnected things. So I appreciate the question and I understand where it’s coming from. And I even appreciate David’s perspective that he thinks. Yeah, it probably does. I just don’t because I’m not her and your, not her. And if you are a woman or a person of color or someone who has struggled to raise capital, it’s not because of anybody who’s come before you or something someone else is doing it’s because you haven’t hit all the edges and, and hit all the marks of how to tell your story, how to do it effectively. How to bring that all together for investors in a way where it’s really compelling and make someone to say, hell yes, I’m in, okay. Again, if you want to argue, let me know what your arguments are. If they sound good, I’ll bring you on the podcast and we’ll argue it in public. I don’t mind, I never did debate, but it always sounded like fun, but I also kind of really hate like confrontation and conflict. And so it’ll be a good, good way to stretch some muscles for me. So that’s my perspective on that. There’s something else that came up this week and this, so those are the two questions that I got asked and I definitely wanted to cover those things. Cause I just thought they were really interesting conversations. Something else crossed my path. And I’m actually going to kind of throw it out there as a question. And I’d love to hear your thoughts out there in the general listening audience about this too. So shoot me an email. Let me know what you think startup@precursa.com. But the topic is I recently saw more and more investors are, are digging like a three to five minute video pitch over just being sent like a pitch deck.

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And I thought this was really interesting, you know, I was like, oh, I could totally do that. I mean, literally a huge, huge piece of Precursa is video content, right? Like I’m no stranger to cameras. We’ve been doing the startup therapy couch on, on YouTube for years. I could totally stand in front of a camera in do something in that format, no big deal. And apparently that’s becoming more common in Silicon valley. What I find interesting. And what I’m curious about is, is it actually truly delivering anything different in terms of value than the pitch deck and is it actually requiring more from an investor and more likely that they’ll end it sooner because they can flip through a pitch deck pretty quickly and look for the pieces they’re looking for, but a video you kind of got to watch the whole thing. Like you’re never know if you’re going to miss, you know, fast forward 15 seconds or, you know, or miss something, right. I mean, I guess you could do it at one and a half speed or something, but it’s sort of like you have a captive audience now for the entrepreneur. That would be amazing if you could actually get investors to watch a three minute video and you’re really have a compelling story and you really know how to tell it really well in a short period of time and you are compelling that actually may make an investor look at you twice or reach out to you where they wouldn’t have just buy your deck. So I can kind of get that side of it. I just wonder how realistic is it? So in one example, I know an investor who said that she reviews between 10 and 12,000 pitch decks a year. She’s a smaller investor, she’s a pre-seed investor. So she, she doesn’t mind investing companies. Pre-revenue pre-product, I mean, they’re small investments, 25 to $50,000 typically. But because of the space she’s in, she gets a lot of people who want to pitch to her. And so she sees, like I said, 10 to 12,000 decks a year. I wonder if she would be willing to watch 10 to 12,003 minute videos a year. That’s a lot of time. And she really, I mean, you couldn’t even do it. So the average work year is 2050 hours, 50 weeks, times 40 hours. So 2000, cause you figure people go on vacation. So 2000 hours. So she’s basically saying in order to do that, you would have to have 15 times that amount. I mean, 10,000 times, three minutes. That’s if they only did three minutes, I just don’t see the viability of this. And I’m wondering any of you out there, have you done this? What was the response or what was your experience? How acquainted with the investor, were you, was this a request they made or was this information that you got from like an incubator or accelerator program or something like that? Like on a recommendation from someone else. And do you feel like it increased your ability to get in front of the right investors and get traction or get investment dollars? So I wrote down video killed the radio star, like is video pitching, gonna kill the send away deck? My gut tells me no. And my gut tells me that investors don’t want to be that invested. And they want to be able to flip through your pitch deck in a minute or less and just get a sense of whether or not they’re willing to go further. And maybe that’s when the video’s valuable, if they want to go further and they already have the videos and they can get a little bit more. But to me, I just question whether or not this is somewhat fad, like, or is there really something here? So I’d be curious to hear from you, our listening audience and you know, what do you think about this? Cause I’m definitely going to be watching this trend and as I learn more, I’ll let you guys know more, but I’d love to hear from you as well. All right. So as always, if you have questions, if you want to argue with me, if you’re interested in being a guest on the podcast and talking about your startup journey, email me, startup@precursa.com as always happy entrepreneuring. And I will see y’all next time.

Thank you for listening to this episode of Precursa: The Startup Journey. If you have an idea for a startup and you want to explore the proven process of turning your idea into a viable business, check us out at precursa.com. Make sure to subscribe to this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts, so you never miss an episode. Until next time…