I'm good friends with a startup that was trying to raise money for their Utah-based company. Really strong growth rate, revenue coming in, etc.
They went up and down sandhill road/SF, and got a couple really lousy offers for funding, and were shocked at how harsh the VC community can be.
Their board member (one of our closest/best mentors) recommended they go back, but make the first slide in their pitch deck "We're moving to San Francisco." They got five term sheets in the first two days, ended up raising from a top-tier firm.
Yes, this is anecdotal, but no, this is not an exaggeration. You can raise money being unwilling to go to the bay area, but you have to have a really compelling vision/growth rate. People have to be fighting over you.
VCs are weird.
Oakland or something may be a different situation (not sure if doing the South Bay thing would even save you any money - Palo Alto ain't cheap), but anecdotally people in Utah get told the same thing again and again. You can stay in Utah, and costs will be way lower, but you'll probably pay for it. (Note: our company is remote with headquarters in Utah)
That's how you do it. Rent a tiny space in SF for your token SF people, then open offices in Portland, Boulder, Austin, etc. You're still an SF company, but your runway is twice as long as everyone else's.
Yeah, I was riffing on the idea of finding a favorable municipality for business reasons and actually running your company where you actually want to run it.
Although given the history of this sort of thing, I guess it'd be more appropriate to call it the Maryland Shuffle.
They went up and down sandhill road/SF, and got a couple really lousy offers for funding, and were shocked at how harsh the VC community can be.
Their board member (one of our closest/best mentors) recommended they go back, but make the first slide in their pitch deck "We're moving to San Francisco." They got five term sheets in the first two days, ended up raising from a top-tier firm.
Yes, this is anecdotal, but no, this is not an exaggeration. You can raise money being unwilling to go to the bay area, but you have to have a really compelling vision/growth rate. People have to be fighting over you.
VCs are weird.
Oakland or something may be a different situation (not sure if doing the South Bay thing would even save you any money - Palo Alto ain't cheap), but anecdotally people in Utah get told the same thing again and again. You can stay in Utah, and costs will be way lower, but you'll probably pay for it. (Note: our company is remote with headquarters in Utah)