Brandon Dawson

And you gotta remember 97% of all businesses fail.

So if I'm a VC and I've got $100 million,

and I'm going to go put $3 million into 33 companies, I only need one of them to work, and I can still get my returns marked at three, four, 500%.

Whereas if you're the entrepreneur, and you're one of the 33 that succeeds, that's great.

But if you're one of the 32 that fails, they'll also cut you off the knees faster than you can blink.

So

It's not for the faint of heart.

And you better have a solid plan.

And here's the thing about businesses, and you'll know this more than most people understand, that what you do is only going to get you so far.

It's who you do it with and how you do it that's going to scale and create value.

And so you can have the greatest idea and be the smartest technician and be the greatest inventor, but most likely at some point,

point, you're going to screw it all up because you don't understand leadership.

You don't understand all the science behind actually finding, attracting, aligning and developing and keeping great people.

You don't understand how to actually properly run a sophisticated financial organization that's responsible like a public company would need to be.

And so all these things get learned through trial and error.

And VC is not patient money.

And private equity usually has a fuse on it somewhere between four and seven years.

And if you're trying to personally scale up and learn all these different things, at the same time, you've got to create the product, deliver the product, make the product work, make sure it's differentiated in the marketplace.

that timing usually doesn't work out.

So they start bringing new people in and they start cramming down and you need more funding.