Not being willing to talk about what you're doing to anyone is probably foolish, yes, but Elad's got some gems here, particularly around creating unnecessary competition.
In early 2008, when I was raising for Pinch Media, we got a bit lucky and managed to attract some name-brand investors extremely early in the life of our company. We hadn't figured out the business model yet, hadn't brought in a dime in revenue, and had barely launched, but I prematurely decided to make a big deal out of our funding from Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital.
In retrospect, this was stupid. Not every company that ended up competing with us did so because the USV hoopla introduced them to the opportunity, but a handful did. Worse yet, our competitors made the same 'give it all away for free' mistake we did, which made the mistake hard to fix. It's tricky to start charging for something that five other companies are giving away.
If I could do it again, I would've asked USV / FRC to keep quiet about the funding until we'd learned a bit more about our business - this isn't always possible, but other companies in their portfolio have done so. (Kickstarter, for example.) An extra six months or so of product development before the 'run as fast as you can to keep ahead of very similar competitors' phase would've been nice.
In early 2008, when I was raising for Pinch Media, we got a bit lucky and managed to attract some name-brand investors extremely early in the life of our company. We hadn't figured out the business model yet, hadn't brought in a dime in revenue, and had barely launched, but I prematurely decided to make a big deal out of our funding from Union Square Ventures and First Round Capital.
In retrospect, this was stupid. Not every company that ended up competing with us did so because the USV hoopla introduced them to the opportunity, but a handful did. Worse yet, our competitors made the same 'give it all away for free' mistake we did, which made the mistake hard to fix. It's tricky to start charging for something that five other companies are giving away.
If I could do it again, I would've asked USV / FRC to keep quiet about the funding until we'd learned a bit more about our business - this isn't always possible, but other companies in their portfolio have done so. (Kickstarter, for example.) An extra six months or so of product development before the 'run as fast as you can to keep ahead of very similar competitors' phase would've been nice.