throwaway1182

Erm, nope. Unfortunately, I downloaded the iOS app before Apple finally stopped their annoying "growth hack" by introducing a permission for accessing the contact list.

To this day, I still have ex-girlfriends, one-time ridesharing buddies and even some fictuous people "waiting to connect with me" on LinkedIn.

Can relate, I failed at the game of academia as well. In the end, on LinkedIn I gave up and ended up just putting in my college, but without listing a degree. Funnily enough, it looks pretty much like I finished to the uninitiated outsider.

Now that I'm CTO of one of the more successful startups in Berlin, that's actually one of my pet peeves for rejecting job offers when applicable. Microsoft just offered me a very well paid startup CTO position, but I told the recruiter he must be wrong, as I didn't fit their requirements (i.e. a finished degree)...

Was it everyone agreeing to follow the "main founders" vision, and him being respectful and not ego driven (so that the vision became shared?)

Pretty much exactly that plus providing the seed round. In practice, this also definitely had a lot to do with things working out well to have a center piece that's stable, predictable and a little detached, quite the opposite of a show-off. Buying into a main vision and then transferring it into a vision for tech, marketing, sales, product and operations was much easier that way.

Equity split was 50:others by the way.

Now you might argue this isn't a "real" as in "more equal" cofounder dynamic, but giving away 50% of your company before even starting and then treating those people as equals made a lot of difference, including an enormous buy-in at all key builders of the company. After having experienced how well it played out, I'd do it the same way.

Interesting data point. However, we're happily chugging along with 6 co-founders, bootstrapped to currently 30 mln us$ valuation and we've only just begun.

Then again, your point about "visionaries" (with which you probably mean high-ego people needing a lot of approval) rings true to me. We're all pretty low-key hard-working people with a lot of self-reflection and humility - also it helps it's not the usual failing friends, family or uni buddies combo but we're really more of a casting band with a team mixed and matched from industry professionals by our main founder.

In this very setup, it's actually very enjoyable with a lot of pros: Scaling is much faster and easier with invested veterans at the helm, all important departments are headed by founders, also having same-level people in the same company helps enormously with the more difficult decisions and just professional exchange, growing as leaders and 1-1 mentoring. If - and only if - the base of trust is there and continuously honed through communication, this is an amazing way to work and learn.

10/10 would do it again.

Can't disclose for obvious reasons, but the potential isn't that hard to understand actually.

Still, the first big unexpected hurdle was that VCs were totally "blinded" by their previous expertise. They tried to apply numbers from their well-known business areas (social / saas / ecommerce) to our model, which simply didn't fit our business case. So we went out and built the product and sold it to large clients anyway.

Thing is: Our product by now outperforms the next best option for our clients by 100% with no alternatives or competitors in sight (it's a little niche-y, but still a multiple billion dollar market).

With a product like that, the second thing that we didn't expect was that we tripped the "too good to be true" sensor everywhere, raising doubts.

And when we were over it, VCs seemed to have an ego problem with being "too late", us not wanting to do a particularly large round, them not reaching their target multiple to save the fund, us being "too expensive already" or them always wanting to "advise" a team of industry veterans and second-time entrepreneurs that demonstrably knew better than them - instead of simply putting in their money and help with PR and their networks instead.

Thing is: All investors say they want a great team, stellar culture, demonstrated product-market fit, fast execution, great technology and hockeystick growth.

We brought it all to them and found out that if you know you have it and are asking a fair price for it, 99% of them are too scared to jump on board of a train that's already full steam ahead. They'd rather be the one discovering it.

What I took from it is that awesome VCs are just as hard to find as awesome start-ups.

Sure.

Although we have a rather nonstandard business area (not the usual ecommerce/saas/social/gaming stuff) and have no direct competitors, we could get a good grip at it by going down several routes: talking to industry experts, comparing indirect competitors' valuations and also by extrapolating from usual relevant business metrics such as current and projected revenue, traffic, margins, growth rates, and market size.

We also talked to quite some VCs who confirmed our range to be pretty spot on in initial negotiations.

Spot on. We're at a 8 digit dollar valuation here after just 2 years of hard work and nobody knows yet - as we don't hang out on shiny conferences or court "prestigious" VCs but simply put the pedal to the metal from day one with a kick-ass team.

Zero financing rounds and not a single name in our Crunchbase entry to date, and we'll come in with a bang one day.

VCs were simply too slow to follow our pace so far (by now we grew out of their typical round size & target multiple) and we'll probably grow profitable without them.

Sociomantic did the very same thing by the way and nobody was any wiser when they did a huge exit from nowhere. Thanks to the environment, it's still pretty easy to bootstrap in Berlin and go after alternative financing sources (it's starting to change though, starting at the rents).

There's still the usual Rocket copycats and some interesting SV-style overhyped BS startups too by now that won't survive - but by and large Berlin has a lot of humble, technically excellent and hard working startups to offer. It's definitely going to survive the down-market to come.