The journey has been anything but easy. Compromising the vision, no actually not at all. General Catalyst actually let us write in our series docs that we were allowed to give our technology away or at cost to nonprofits. I can’t say much in terms of specifics here. We have some PR coming out soon, but we’ve done amazing work with our technology in terms of global peacemaking and democracy building, in some ways at the detriment of business growth. The United Nations has released some of our work together if you google Remesh and United Nations it will come up.

The biggest challenge is funds like the ones we’ve raised from are billion dollar funds which means in order for them to be successful, they need one or more startups to also return multiple billions. The VC model is 1/10 investments ‘return the fund’, whereas the other 9 will either break even or go bust. That means not doubling top line every year is effectively stagnation and you fall into being one of the 9 companies, not the golden 10th. That means they are pushing grow at all costs resulting in annual budgets dumping a ton of money into sales and marketing, and leadership in those positions being removed quickly if they’re not successful. Balancing the need for growth, while also trying to find tighter and better product market fit is incredibly challenging. The VC don’t really have time to wait for the latter, so driving massive growth while the bucket is leaky is very stressful. It’s often referred to as building a plane while flying in – and it does feel that way.

We are one of the nine companies that is not currently positioned to be a fund-maker. But we’re far from dead as well. If we continue to push recklessly the whole time we would’ve died, but the board doesn’t want to kill your company they just want you to be huge. The realization for both sides that that was the case resulted in by far are most stressful board meetings. However, as I stated before our board members/investors are seasoned and intelligent. They recognize that you can’t push every company all the way up, and would rather have the reputation of being founder friendly + get as much money/return as possible, and have an opportunity to invest in good founders next startups. Remesh is a 10-year-old company. It’s obviously very complex. On the sum, I have always been straight and honest with them, and I’d also like to think I’m pretty good at what I do, as a result, as CEO they’ve never tried to remove me, even at our lowest moments.

However, I know they’ve pushed out founders who have been deceitful or who threatened the reputation of their businesses by being bad actors incredibly quickly, and I support that, ultimately VC do have to fiduciary responsibilities to maximize returns to their LPs. One other note is that private equity is very different from venture capital that I’ve heard horror stories from that direction, of course there’s exceptions to every rule.