A startup asked what lessons they should take away from fundraising. I told them: that fundraising sucks, and they never want to have to do this again.

It's ok if they raise money again. They should just never *have* to.

@paulg Best money is the one paid by customer for using the product

@paulg I'd love to hear your opinions about the merits of bootstrapping (aka. not fundraising even once, never mind fundraising *again*). I'm guessing somewhere between "raising funding typically increases P(success) enough to outweigh the suck factor" and "bootstrap if you can"?

@paulg Have idea, build team, test product, raise investment, iterate: these are all part of the startup process. What's painful is the way funding rounds are done today. At @seedlegals we're changing that. Raise money in 1/5th the time and cost, before, during and after a round.

@paulg save @perl_xyz "..that fundraising sucks, and they never want to have to do this again." #PaulGraham

@paulg You can't believed it if I told you we had been 8 months struggling to raise $67k in Nigeria.

@paulg Absolutely rightly said. Fundraising will distract the purpose and then starts a journey that Entrepreneur never wanted. So it's best to build a profitable venture and focus to scale with the customer being your investors/ get bigger accounts.

@paulg Always true. Fundraising is painful. Imagine you’re climbing a mountain, and you’re just about to get to the peak. You pull yourself up to the peak and someone kicks you off the peak and you fall all the way to the bottom. Now you have to start all over again. That’s fundraising.

@paulg @DraganaMendel Also try to be self-sufficient as fast as possible. The more more money you take the more you lose control.

@paulg @supr_strudl The funny thing is that most startups celebrate funding rounds.

@paulg If a startup can avoid taking money, by all means, they should never do it.

@paulg Hear Hear! We bootstrapped it all the way!

@paulg @asanwal @VictoriaBenhaim

@paulg @hackernoon I hope they don't pay you per advice.

@paulg @csavage Easy to find money when you don't need it.

@paulg Sir... Your sense of humour is at another level...always learning from you!

@paulg I was watching your conversation with Geoff at Startup School at it is so fascinating. Yes, fundraising sucks and it takes away the juice out of you, but there is no option but to keep doing it because its an integral part of company building.

@paulg I think startups should think of raising money and inventing as quickly as possible.