If someone said “startup” while we were playing a word association game, I’d respond with “fundraising.” (I bet you would, too.)
Asking people for money is a key aspect of every founder’s journey, but Techstars Managing Director Collin Wallace says it can also “accelerate your demise.”
For example, raising a round to rev up engineering, sales and marketing sounds positive — but what if the business itself has negative unit economics?
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“Most of the time, what stands between a company and its ability to achieve scale is not a lack of money,” writes Wallace in TC+.
“It’s better to ask: Do we have hustle problems? Product problems? Process problems? People problems? Is my business model fundamentally flawed?”
In th …