Pitch decks, the wild west and Amazon impressions

Hey folks, back with another update and solopreneur blog post. Let’s jump in:

My last week in business

If you read my weekly update from last week (who doesn’t??), you’ll know we decided to pull the trigger on a fundraise for my immigration tech company.

At the beginning, that usually means spending way too much time on a pitch deck, which of course is not wasted time assuming you reach your fundraise goal.

Anyway, that’s a long-winded way of saying I spent most of the week doing research, getting advice/feedback and polishing off our deck/projections.

You know when you’ve been reviewing something so often that you can’t see it objectively anymore? That happened about twice per day this week 😛

What I’m thinking about

In preparing the financials/projections for the raise, it got me thinking a lot more about costs, budgeting and the overall funding of a company.

Seeing startup numbers, valuations and costs fly around, especially when you see/hear the stories of some of these huge tech companies, can be pretty insane.

Especially when your background is mostly in solopreneur businesses and not in the tech world.

This company raised 25 million, that company raised 2 million (sometimes without a product or any revenue), this unicorn raised 100 million…

It’s a wild west in a way.

But a super interesting one nonetheless. My plan is to get conversations with investors going this week, and I will make sure to share my experiences and thoughts as things hopefully progress.

What I’m Reading

I finally finished The Everything Store this week (I usually finish about a book per week, but this one took me a bit longer as it’s about 350 pages and on the longer end for a business/biography book), and it was incredible.

Quite simply, if you like business, entrepreneurship and/or tech, you should read the book. The lessons were endless, the story is impressive, and I have too many thoughts to type out so I’ll include some in point form here:

  • Jeff is just a super impressive guy. You might love him, you might hate him (or Amazon), but you can’t deny he’s a smart dude who built an incredible company
  • Jeff and Amazon are ruthless. Again, I don’t want to take a stand on whether I think what they do is “right” or “wrong”, but these people have a goal and work tirelessly toward it, sometimes stepping over people or businesses if they have to
  • everything starts small. We think of Amazon as this massive trillion-dollar company that sells everything, but they started as a crappy website selling books. Don’t get lost in the big picture and other huge companies, instead, start small and grow from there

Again, a great read overall that I highly recommend.

Also, quick shoutout to the latest SG Podcast that just aired – episode 95 where I interview Zee about how he became an entrepreneur in Canada as an international student and built up a huge social media following (he has 10s of thousands of Youtube subs and thousands on FB/IG too).

That’s it for me, have a great week and keep grinding.

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