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You absolutely cannot start a business without reading Peter Thiel's "Zero to One." He basically lays out whether or not your business can succeed or not. It's maybe the most amazing book I've ever read. I was so blown away by it that I stopped part of the way through, went back and started taking detailed notes, comparing my start-up idea to his roadmap.
(Of course, we're not talking about small businesses; we're talking about businesses that you hope to sell for "f*ck you" money).
Honestly, the hardest part for me is the fact that the rest of the world can’t see my vision of how my industry (healthcare) should work. That might be on me for lacking sufficient evangelistic qualities.
We started with something that we knew would work from real world observations from a doctor, and it works great clinically and scales well. The biggest problem was/is that healthcare wants to package us in a legacy model that is broken. That is hard to overcome.
It’s taken us 7 years and a ton of great customer validation that our approach works, and people are finally getting onboard. 7 years is a LONG freaking time to live in complete uncertainty.
My biggest takeaways are:
That its lonely as fuck. I left PE after 2 years and I've been working to buy a business for past 18 months and every transaction I worked on fell apart (about 8, one even had LOI and financing term sheet signed). I stop talking to my finance peers about what I do because I've pivoted so many times in the past year and lots just consider me as some unemployed finance guy that didnt make it.
I basically have nothing to show for in 2017 and 2018 except some very nice CIMs I made to raise capital, terms sheet I received and LOIs I sent out.
The bright side is I have made some entrepreneur friends and almost solely hangout with them as they are the only ones that understand the hustle. My finance peers talk about their bonus, exit ops, comp increase and my entrepreneur friends talk about ideas and how to execute them and tend to have more frugal hobbies.
HOWEVER! Every transaction and meeting I go into I better and more polished and I did get significant traction in the past 4 months. I have been doing consulting on the side for startups raising capital to pay bills until I close my first transaction and one is about to close a $10MM round and I always ask for 25-100 basis points of the raise, so pretty stoked. Also, getting deep in the process to buyout a local telecom co with ~$1MM EBITDA to be financed almost solely with senior debt and seller financing.
Going into 2019 the same as 2017 and 2018. Lots of traction and high hopes. This might be the year my dudes. Just need 1 to close and we set.
keep grinding