TMBA480: Thoughts on Funding Options for Bootstrappers with Rob Walling
Tropical MBA: Entrepreneurship & Founder Lifestyle
Dan Andrews; Ian Schoen
4.9 • 527 Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2019
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A few weeks ago, Dan and Ian had a conversation on this podcast where they shared some of their feelings about venture capital.
This is an important topic to a lot of entrepreneurs, and it's one that we plan to cover a lot more throughout 2019.
Some of the opinions we shared in that episode were rather controversial. Several of our listeners actually called us out on being a little bit vague about our thoughts, and we thought it was a good chance to revisit the topic.
One of the people that reached out to us about that episode was Rob Walling.
Rob is someone who should be very familiar to the listeners of this show. He hosts one of our favorite podcasts, Startups for the Rest of Us, organizes his own annual conference called MicroConf, and has previously owned and sold several startups, including a Software-as-a-Service company called Drip.
Rob has also recently started his own startup accelerator fund called TinySeed, which is specifically designed to help bootstrappers grow their businesses.
On today's show, Rob has joined us to share his thoughts about venture capital, bootstrapping, and what he hopes to accomplish with TinySeed.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | So there's almost this, you know, I think aversion to spending money. I've been like that for years. |
| 0:04.8 | Drip is a seven-figure SaaS business before we got acquired. And I was still doing things I should |
| 0:10.1 | not have been doing because I was so traumatized by the early days where you have no money. |
| 0:18.4 | Hey, podcast, listener. Even if you are alone in your entrepreneurial journey, |
| 0:22.3 | know that today, right now in your earbuds, |
| 0:24.4 | you are joined by thousands of entrepreneurs |
| 0:26.6 | from all around the globe seeking to grow better, |
| 0:29.6 | more profitable, location-independent businesses. |
| 0:32.5 | If you'd like to learn more about what we do |
| 0:34.6 | and download our entire back catalog, |
| 0:37.7 | check out tropical MBA.com. |
| 0:46.8 | A few weeks ago on this podcast, Ian and myself reflected a little bit on our feelings about |
| 0:53.1 | venture capital and this new trend of |
| 0:56.5 | accelerators, funds, and investors that are focused on businesses in our community. And we got |
| 1:03.8 | a little rantey and we talked about some of the maybe more negative elements. And yeah, |
| 1:08.8 | in our fairness to our reflections, they were a bit of a rant. |
| 1:11.4 | And unsurprisingly, several listeners of this show called us out on being a little bit too |
| 1:16.0 | general and vague in our thoughts. And fair enough, absolutely right. It's an important topic, |
| 1:22.2 | obviously one that we're really passionate about. And so this year in 2019, we plan to do a few shows about the topic, |
| 1:29.6 | and this is one of the first. So one of the people who reached out to us after the introduction |
| 1:35.3 | to that show a few weeks back was someone who had previously owned and then sold a successful |
| 1:40.5 | software as a service company and has actually recently started an accelerator fund |
... |
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