How do founders handle a down round?

“But like, in those first few weeks, going back to the early, like before you obviously after you'd raised round after round and the people that, you know, the new worker or new hire turned to and said, hey, have you noticed the balance is going down? Like, guys, are we screwed? And of course, that person's like, oh, I've been here through several rounds. You know, that creates a lot of high trust. But what about the first round? You know, what about the first 10 people that you hired that you had that conversation with? Then did you have open financials all the way from the very beginning? And if so, they didn't have somebody to turn to. They were the person that was like, shit, are we gonna get our second round underway? Like, to me, as a, like, I could see founders getting really freaked out by doing something like that in the pre-second round.”

“Well, there's absolutely the no duh part around, you know, it is still a business. You've got to pay people, you've got to hire people, you've got to, you know, you do your annual returns, you've got to, there's auditing required, there's legals required. Like there's all the standards of running a business are there. Yeah. What I often say to founders, you know, when I'm talking to founders about, you know, they're doing their million-dollar seed round or pre-seed round, I'm like, well, yeah, building a VC fund for the first time is like doing 25 seed rounds, except you can't have any of the same investors again. So it's like, that was probably the biggest lesson for me is just how many people I'd have to talk to to get a fund closed. I think after coming off a reasonably, you know, fast, like accelerated growth corporate career into some reasonably successful software businesses, I thought it was probably going to be easier to build a fund than I did. I may have even at one stage said VC fund is kind of like my retirement job. At one, it was just kind of a joke I probably made to some of the founders that were in my circle. It's the opposite. I probably have never worked harder in my life building a VC fund.”