No one cares who your investors are

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No one cares who your investors are.

I know way too many founders who get caught up trying to chase Tier 1 investors and entirely lose sight of what’s important.

In case you had any doubts, customers really don’t give a shit who’s on your cap table. Trust me. And if you feel the need to lead with who backed you, then you’re probably overcompensating for something else.

My advice: take whatever money you can get and get back to building. If you build a great business, the Tier 1s will come to you. beehiiv is just one example of this reality.

Despite all of the founders who will nodded their while head reading that, I’ve met so many who will think themselves into a pretzel over this stuff.

One of the founders I backed had a term sheet in hand but spent a full month chasing “better” investors only to land right back where he started. What a waste of time.

Capital is more commoditized today than ever before. Everyone from Kevin Duran to Robert Downey Jr. has a fund. Hell, I’ve met three (relatively unimpressive) people in the past week who also have their own venture fund.

You spend the money the same way, regardless of where it came from.

I’ve raised $50M for beehiiv; I know a thing or two about how time consuming and exhausting it is. Worse, it dilutes your time away from focusing on what’s actually important: building your business.

As I wrote that last sentence, I legit received this text from a founder whose company I recently invested in:

If you can close your entire seed round with high value angels who believe in what you’re doing, why would you spend the extra time making the rounds with VC funds. It’s weeks of unnecessary time and effort. (Just make sure to use an RUV to keep the cap table clean).

Plus, raising from strategic angels can be a massive unlock for early startups.

People always ask me how we got our first users, especially because we launched beehiiv into a ridiculously competitive industry. A lot of them were actually our early investors.

When I began to raise money for our seed, I reached out to dozens of notable people who already had large newsletters. The thinking was pretty simple: they would be financially incentivized to use beehiiv because they just invested in the company.

And because they had large newsletters, others would see that and follow suit (i.e. social proof).

It worked. Some of our earliest users were Samir Chaudry (The Publish Press), Litquidity (Exec Sum), Quinn Emmet (Important, Not Important), Jason Yanowitz (Blockworks), and a handful of others.

If I could have filled the entire seed round with angels, I would have. But we needed $2.5M which required getting an early stage fund on board. I spent an entire month taking calls and pitching fund after fund until I met Howard Lindzon.

He was the first real believer who was willing to take a bet on us when no one else was. His fund, Social Leverage, ended up leading our seed round along with a few dozen of those strategic angels.

Social Leverage is a really great fund that you probably haven’t heard much about. I could have spent weeks shopping around the term sheet… but I genuinely didn’t care to.

I was thankful to finally have someone who really believed in what we were doing. And after a month of striking out with other funds, I was so excited to finally cash the check, quit my job, and start building.

Fast forward six months and I learned the hard way that building a high growth startup is pretty expensive. We needed to hit the market again to raise a seed extension.

It was the spring of 2022 and there was a massive pullback after the highs of 2021. I could get a call with nearly any early stage fund, but seemingly no one was willing to write a check at that time.

Sasha from Creator Ventures actually participated in our seed round and caught wind that we were looking to raise additional capital. He pulled in one of his LPs, Blue Wire Capital, and they collectively decided to co-lead our seed extension.

Conventional Silicon Valley thinking would have you believe that it’s a “negative signal” to have two UK-based funds lead our round… or at least, that’s what a lot of these early stage founders think. The truth is: I couldn’t give a shit about conventional Silicon Valley thinking.

As long as their pounds converted into dollars, it was all of the same use to me.

It’s also worth calling out that Social Leverage, Creator Ventures, and BWC have all been incredible partners in the beehiiv journey. Reliable, supportive, and punching well above their weight every step of the way.

And as it turns out, not having a Tier 1 on the cap table didn’t make much of a difference after all.

When you execute well and build an attractive business, it doesn’t really matter. Suddenly every Tier 1 fund was in my inbox asking to grab coffee and inviting me to events.

After ignoring Faraz from Lightspeed for 4 months, he finally got my attention by inviting me to a founders dinner in LA (and sitting me next to Jessica Alba). A few weeks later they ended up leading our $12.5M Series A.

Side note: Jessica still has not replied to the dm I sent her after the dinner (she’s probably just really busy).

Meanwhile, we just kept on executing and making charts that looked like this:

A few months later we had a handful of term sheets from some of the top funds, and NEA ended up leading our $33M Series B.

So to summarize who led each of our rounds:

Look, there’s a reason why the Tier 1 funds have the reputation that they do. Between their track record, network, and resources I’m sure they provide a ton of value to their portfolio companies.

This isn’t a knock on them, it’s more so a rallying cry for the 99% of startups who won’t have them on their cap table. The truth is that it doesn’t matter, and beehiiv is just one of the many examples to prove that.

If you have capital available to you, don’t overthink it. Just build baby build.

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