Living Entrepreneurship Blog / Babson Entrepreneurs

4 Reasons Why VC Won’t Work for Us Right Now

In building our business, we have flirted with the idea of raising institutional funds, thinking it would be the savior of us all, or the doom of our company and our general happiness as entrepreneurs.

Of course, we are still on the fence, after realizing that funds would be valuable for us especially as we plan for growth and plan to hire more experienced human resources to help us in growing. But here are a few reasons why VC just doesn’t make sense right now.

1. We don’t need that much money.

Money is almost always a good thing, to have extra cash reserves for a rainy day, to ensure salaries are paid on time, to ensure we’re able to make key hires when we find the best candidates available. But VC would give us too much money, and we are probably more in the seed and angel funding stages far more than we would be ready to accept VC.

2. VCs are aggressive.

We want to see fantastic growth with Blank Label too, but we’re not sure how to make that happen and we’re not sure if as a business we’re able to support as much growth as would be required from the VCs who would be breathing down our necks everyday if things weren’t going according to plan.

3. We like our independence.

We like answering to ourselves and being accountable to #1, that’s why we became entrepreneurs, that and the fact that we really like custom dress shirts and fitted dress shirts, which are nice perks of the job. It would be like we were working for someone else if we had to answer to investors.

4. Angel investors and independent investors can do the job just as well or better.

One of the benefits in taking investment is the opportunity to work with some of the brighter minds who have done the hard parts in growing a business and can help support us in our growth, while having access to great networks of talent which can lead to key hires in building our business. It’s arguable that VCs might have better knowledge and networks, but we can do just fine with the support of angels and individuals.

Danny Wong is the entrepreneur on-the-fence about funding for his startups Blank Label, Thread Tradition and RE:custom. Danny also writes about his startup musings at HuffingtonPost, TheNextWeb and ReadWriteWeb.