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network2592 | 2 years ago
Indeed, you may feel like you are learning quite a bit. But that will generally be lessons that the vc investors want you to learn.
Your statements imply that there are lessons to be learned that can only be facilitated by the kind of money that vc investors offer. But your own company (Cloudflare) makes cloud technology more affordable and partially weakens the rationale for getting vc investments.
When you have a soft money bed to land on, you will be less incentivized to search for a broad range of knowledge. Arguably, you will be learning less as a result of this money safety net.
You will be operating under the vc cog thinking that you are learning significantly both quantitatively and qualitatively. As the vc cog wheel continues to churn, you have the illusion of epistemic progress.
eastdakota|2 years ago
We talked to our investors generally four times a year at Board meetings. We had a rule that no sentence we said in those meetings could end with a question mark. We recognized that we were the experts in our business. We used those checkins as opportunities to confirm ourselves that we were making progress. We focused on building great products for our customers and chose the KPIs to report based on measuring that. And we leveraged our success to meet thousands of people we’d never have had access to and try and learn from them all.
One thing that I think is natural if you have professional investors but is important to find way to create even if you’re bootstrapped: the regularly scheduled check-in. The most valuable part of a Board meeting isn’t the meeting itself. It’s the preparation for that meeting which forces you to assess how things are going.
Our trick was to pick 5 KPIs that indicated the true health of the business and track them relentlessly. The first 12 pages of our Board meeting presentation was exactly the same every time other than the numbers being updated. We picked the the metrics. We didn’t ask for our VCs input. But then we relentlessly stuck with them, quarter after quarter. It made preparing for Board meetings easy: just update the stats and prepare to talk about whatever is anomalous (good or bad). And the consistency built confidence from our investors. I remember one saying: “Cloudflare Board meetings are great: I know exactly how things are going by slide 4 of the presentation.”
No VC taught us that. We learned it by being curious, talking to other entrepreneurs, and experimenting ourselves. You can do the same if you’re bootstrapped, you just have to be more self-directed to create some cadence to check in with your business and keep yourself honest.
PS - sadly, there’s no Illuminati running the world either. “Sadly” because it’d certainly be comforting to think someone was in control and it’s scary to meet the people who supposedly are and realize they’re just making it up as they go along too.
network2592|2 years ago
But curiosity is not limitless. It is a function of time. And it would be disingenuous to completely refute the fact that a vc frame of reference will affect curiosity - perhaps even in an adverse manner that can reduce innovation.
Let's get practical and technical with a Cloudflare example. Arguably, there would be no Cloudflare without the ability to change nameservers from domain registrars. You spotted some network slack with the ability of people to easily move to Cloudflare with a relatively simple nameserver change.
That was innovative and surely a result of your curiosity. That allowed you to then build upon that traction and offer a wider range of cloud services.
However, Cloudflare itself eventually became a domain registrar. In the terms of service, Cloudflare blocks all nameserver changes for domains registered with Cloudflare - the very option that allowed Cloudflare to emerge in the first place.
There is no justifiable technical reason for this. It is essentially a political decision borne out of a vc frame of reference. Perhaps the political justification is : Let's lock in people that registered domains with us on Cloudflare. So, they will will be forced to use Cloudflare services.
Arguably, this is a violation of ICANN guidelines that allowed you to obtain your domain registrar license. The block is essentially pointless. Most people interested in nameserver changes for Cloudflare registered domains just want to coordinate across multiple Cloudflare accounts. Multiple questions have been posted in Cloudflare community forums for years. Yet, nothing gets done about it.[1]
The fundamental point is that curiosity led you to use nameserver changes to get some traction. As the vc frame of reference gained more importance over the years, it blocked your curiosity by nudging you to block nameserver changes.
You are undoubtedly still curious. But that curiosity time is spent on board meeting formats and and how to optimise slide presentations - instead of realizing that some curiosity doors that allowed the existence of Cloudflare in the first place are getting closed. Ramifications of that attitude and mindset going forward are overlooked.
So yes, curiosity is good. But, there is no inherent primacy of curiosity under vc versus outside vc. Highly curious people tend to be self directed in any context. If anything, the direction provided by vc can limit curiosity and be ultimately self defeating.
[1] https://community.cloudflare.com/t/unable-to-change-cloudfla... https://community.cloudflare.com/t/still-no-way-to-transfer-... https://community.cloudflare.com/t/how-can-i-change-nameserv...