Tracy DiNunzio
speaker
440 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Tracy DiNunzio’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
But I don't know if I could have been as transparent about it earlier in my career and actually gotten over the early humps to bring on support for the business.
Yeah, it was very important to me that nothing ever be like influenced by that so that I could compete on the same playing field as everybody else, whatever, however they were coming to the field and win on my merits. And I don't think it really changed anything.
Yeah, I don't know if I won. My company was very successful. It got very big, and then it sold. It was not the biggest company in our category. There were companies that did even bigger and better, but there were also maybe 50 companies that completely failed. And so it was extremely competitive, and I'm very proud of how we came out, how we placed.
Thank you.
Of course. It's really fun, I think, to demystify. One of the things that I noticed when I came into the world of building big companies, building venture-backed startups, was that there was so much lingo. And I initially felt like such an outsider.
And then I learned that people were just using big words for simple concepts, which might be a way that business schools get to charge tuition or something. But it's really not that complicated. I think anyone can Pretty easily understand business fundamentals and build a great business if they have drive and vision and work really hard.
And so I love making it simple because it actually is simple.
The biggest thing you need to fundraise is confidence. And if you don't have confidence, you need to have the ability to fake confidence, which was what I had because I felt very unsure and very insecure and very out of my depth when I first started meeting investors for all kinds of reasons. And it just wasn't my world initially, but I was good at faking it, at putting on a bit of a
mask and putting out big CAC energy. I can tell you a bunch of other things that are helpful for fundraising, but those are all things you can Google, right? You can look up like the standard 10 slide deck that you should have and all of that. But investors are just human beings.
And as a human being, when you feel like someone is holding on to a magical secret and they're on a magic carpet ride, you just want to be part of it. And I think your energy when you go in to pitch an investor is so much more important. You have to have your T's crossed and your I's dotted. Your numbers have to fit. Your plan has to make sense. You have to know your business.
You have to understand your category. But you also have to walk in like you know the future. And it's so good that you can't even believe you might share a piece of it with these guys. And that's contagious. And that's actually what gets them to fund it. Did you instinctively know that or did you go in timid to start? I wrestled with getting my mask on straight.
So I had an investor tell me early on when I was in this incubator program, you feel defeated. And I was the last out of the 10 companies in the program to raise capital. I did feel defeated. I had pitched all the same investors that everybody else had pitched, and nobody wanted me. And everybody else was raising money.
And we had a bell that you could ring when you closed capital, and I just wasn't ringing the bell. So I did feel very defeated and he basically told me like he could smell it on me. And I took my business very personally. I felt like it was an extension of me for better or worse. It's not like a great way to live your life, but it is a great way to put all your heart and soul into your business.
So, yeah, I felt really bad every time an investor didn't jump at my pitch, but I got really good at hiding it.
Mm hmm.
Yeah. And it's nice to, I don't write big checks. I write little checks into promising companies, mostly with founders who I really believe in. And I look for the founders who are like how I was hungry with a chip on their shoulder and like very determined mostly in the AI space. But I have a broad variety of investments.
Totally. Yeah, it's such an asset. Like most founders, CEOs, business builders, people who just overachieve. tend to have a chip on their shoulder. And now I'm part of all these groups of CEOs and founders and have gotten to know people really deeply. And we're all a little bit crazy. We all had something that made us feel less than or different or not good enough. Something to prove.
Yeah, we had to come and prove ourselves to the world. I don't know if that's personally as a human being, I'm looking to move away from that feeling. And I don't want anybody to feel that way, but I do believe that for people trying to build something where it's a very uphill climb, that's good fuel.
Yeah, of course. Only with you. Yeah, I feel like why not at this point? I don't feel like I have anything to prove anymore. And if it's useful or helpful, then great. Yeah, I'm happy to talk about anything. Really? Yeah. What do you want to know?
Most of the stories are like me doing dumb and risky things to either get ahead or have fun and it backfires.
Showing 401–420 of 440 · page 21 of 22
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