the difference between launching when you *have to* and when you *want to*

Back in 2008 at the Jewish High Tech Community meet up at the Fenwick and West offices in Mountain View I sat in the back of a room, it was probably fall or autumn time. I had never been an entrepreneur up to that point, just always a technical or software project manager but if there was one thing I was good at it was calculating budgets and timing. 

Romanian entrepreneur George Haber presented his startup to the group ( CrestaTech which has raised $20MM to date according to Crunchbase) and finished with the statement of, "We are raising XX in funding and launching DD-YY" and I thought to myself immediately-- wait a minute the math and launch date didn't line up. He wasn't actually able to launch by his launch date without raising money. In fact, he would barely be able to make it to launch. The project manager in me was so confused... "Why would anyone in their right mind be pushing a product they weren't prepared for or had the full budget allocated to execute?" It seemed insane, illogical. (Keep in mind around this time CrestaTech might have only raised, or publicly acknowledged raising $1MM...)

I raised my hand for the open Q and A session to ask George what-was-up with this.

"Mr. Haber, If your burn is x, and your launchdate is y, then you aren't launching on that date because the product will be ready, you are launching because that's exactly when you will run out of money."

George smiled, as if I had asked the most obvious question in the room that only I had been the last to figure out, "That's exactly right. We will launch then because we have to. That's life. That's why we do it."

He was smiling when he said it too, I couldn't believe it. Startup founders are insane I thought to myself. 

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On another note: a friend that was also there that night was David Ulevitch of OpenDNS. At the time OpenDNS had raised $2.5MM in a Series A.  Just last week OpenDNS was sold to Cisco for $635MM, so congrats to David and team, amazing how much can be done in 5-7 years!







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PS- What's up with this Founder Story?
Curious why I'm posting random stories? Its because I just finished a book and have time to download them. Have a question or something you want to talk about? Send me a note: e (dot) cachette (at) gmail (dot) com.