Basics | Motivation to fund

Hi, I’m Drew Monti, a technologist and entrepreneur. This is the first in a series of posts about my journey building a business and transforming my life through entrepreneurship. I’ll be chipping away at old ideas and sharing the lessons I’ve learned along the way. I hope it’s as useful to you as it is fun for me to write.

tl;dr: Starting up starts with you.

So, you’ve finally decided. After years of indecision and soul-searching, you‘re ready to build your first startup. Unsure where where to begin, you’ve been scouring the internet for guidance. And now, you’ve landed on my website—aren’t you lucky.

Well, forget everything you’ve learned about startups over the last 20 years—the game has changed. Buckle up and let’s start with a quick recap.

Previously in Startupland

Pre-2022, your typical Silicon Valley startup playbook went something like this:

Grow as fast as possible with investor money.
Make it impossible for anybody else to catch up.

This approach, driven by continuous rounds of equity and debt instead of organic sales growth, thrived in an era of low interest rates and/or booming stock market—when money was easy to come by. This was the formula behind the success of FAANGs and countless other startups built between the 1990s and the late 2010s.

Fast forward to 2022. After two years of unprecedented money printing to support pandemic-hit economies across the US and Europe, financial aid ended, ushering in a new environment of soaring inflation and high interest rates not seen in nearly 20 years.

The sharp slowdown in investments left many startups—built following the very same playbook above, and thus over-reliant on external capital—struggling, as VCs became much more cautious with their funding. Where before a sleek pitch deck would have landed you $500K in pre-seed funding within three months, now you needed clear traction and product-market fit just to get a screening interview with a junior analyst.

Thank you VCs, you’ve been amazing

On its own, this isn’t an unwelcome change. Silicon Valley’s easy money always smelled a little like bullshit—everyone knew it. Just take a look at some of the ideas that got VC-backing to see what I mean. You quickly get a sense that too many VCs don’t really know what they’re doing—far from being visionary gambles, too many of their investments reek of desperation and total lack of due diligence.

In fact, VCs are as desperate to make money as anybody else. They chase trends, suffer from FOMO, and scramble to position themselves as “experts” of complex new markets and technologies despite lacking full understanding (the kind not even specialists have). That’s why they sometimes invest ludicrous amounts of money in brand-new startups that don’t even have a product, in direct contradiction to their own advice.

Solid, fundamentals-driven businesses are always a good thing—Warren Buffet would back that. However, startups aren’t quite the same as traditional SMEs. Startups are experiments; they need time and resources to mess around a little and find their workable form. And while the amounts to get started are often small, not many people have got $100K (or even $10K) lying around.

It used to be ridiculously easy to get pocket money from investors to get started. It isn’t anymore.

What this means for you

If you’re thinking of launching a startup, there is good news and bad news.

The bad news is that starting up in the post-pandemic world means you’re on your own, now more than ever. Get ready to bootstrap, face longer fundraising cycles, and give up more equity for less cash. Due diligence is tougher and investor requirements are stricter. Generally speaking, VCs should be but one tool in your kit—you have to be prepared to go the distance alone. This is the new normal, so don’t set off hoping for better weather ahead.

The good news is that the new environment forces you to ignore traditional startup wisdom (i.e. mindless explosive growth and dumb focus on raising funds as soon as possible) and instead focus on the fundamentals. Money talks and bullshit walks.

This is good, really good. Let me explain.

In the last decade, there’s been a boom in the number of people getting into the startup game. For a while now, it’s felt like ‘everyone’ has been building a startup. More than that—it often feels like the default exit strategy for those dissatisfied with their career has become ‘I’m going to start my own business.’

I can’t help but see this as a sign that most of us are desperate for freedom, agency, and meaning—or, taking it down a notch, that “we all want to get rich”, amidst collapsing living standards and traditional careers no longer providing either prosperity or security.

Have startups become just another get-rich-quick scheme? An overarching salvific narrative that promises to fulfill all our needs for meaning, financial stability, and a sense of heroism or exceptionalism in one go?

Startups as snake oil

I can’t shake the feeling that we were sold a formula that might have once worked, just like the myth of higher education, but that now leads to incorrect assumptions and a false sense of “being on the right track”. We keep applying outdated knowledge to a new world.

Startups are failing at a record rate not because of the dry-up in funds, but because:

they lack basic business fundamentals; they were built on an alluring vision of exponential growth and overnight success which just doesn’t suit most startups.
they are addressing fake problems—or inventing new ones—in a twisted effort to win attention and keep the money flowing.

It’s basically bullshit bingo. An ego trap.

It reflects our cognitive dissonance, collective desperation, and the simple truth that life isn’t always that complicated. People always have the same problems. Not all problems have solutions. Not all solutions make viable businesses. With more aspiring millionaires than ever searching for opportunities, most solvable problems have already been solved. We can’t keep starting up forever.

This pervasive idea that there’s always some revolutionary new opportunity just around the corner—whether it’s VR, blockchain, or AI—is simply another take on the myth of forever growth. It makes for an impossibly attractive narrative, especially for certain character types, but sadly one that is also out of touch with the societal and economic realities of the post-financial-crisis, post-pandemic, and post-globalisation world.

We are throwing shit at the wall hoping it sticks, and we can’t even admit it to ourselves.

How about we start by admitting our ignorance first? The reality on the ground may not be as spellbinding as the stories we’ve been telling ourselves, but it can be refreshingly simplifying.

Building a business—whether it’s the next unicorn, a local cleaning service, or setting yourself up as a freelancer—ultimately obeys the same laws. Once you’ve mastered them, the difference is in degree, not in quality.

In my experience, first-time founders often have impressive intellectual and specialist expertise but lack the practical business skills needed for success—something the owner of the local laundromat likely understands better than they do. To make matters worse, they’re often guided by other founders, influencers, or early-stage VCs to focus on the wrong metrics—ones that completely ignore the specifics of their business, audience, and market.

In an industry where hardly anyone knows what they are doing, but the name of the game is to pretend they do, easy ‘I know it, you don’t’ one-size-fits-all wisdom is everywhere.

Tell me: Would you really trust yourself to launch a global startup if you’ve never even successfully run a market stall? Does this sound like a sensible undertaking?

Only fools rush in

So how about you decant for a while? Forget the self-aggrandising heroic narrative of the founder who, against all odds and advice, embarks on a perilous journey, defeats the monster, and returns victorious, achieving what everyone else tried and failed to do.

Get your story straight before latching onto the startup dream as the path to meaning, independence, and wealth that you couldn’t find elsewhere.

Why are you doing this? What are your true underlying motivations? Go deep when you ask yourself this. Are there other ways—faster, simpler, more manageable—that could give you some of what you seek, some relief, at least as a starting point, and give you space for pause and reflection?

Are you confident you’ve got the basics down? The learning experience is certainly exciting. While some skills can be learned on the job, have you considered how much you might need to learn, how quickly, and with minimal guidance—including the risk of making fatal mistakes despite your best intentions?

NB: If, while reading the words above, you heard a voice in your head saying, ‘Yes, yes I can!’—that’s exactly what I was referring to by “heroic narrative”. That voice is about 5 years old. It’s causing you to make false inferences. You don’t want to let 5-year old you run your life.

If your primary motivations to venture out on your own are independence, agency, and purpose, you don’t need a VC-backed startup to achieve the freedom and meaning you’re after. Trust me, I’ve been there and wish I’d figured it out sooner.

In fact, I urge you to start by finding freedom and meaning first, and then, if you still crave it, dive into the adventure of building a business.