Three pieces of great content, only one of which is by us (Oversubscribed Weekly #14)

February 12, 2019 by Max

Max here. We’ve got a great tweet and two great articles for you today, so let’s dive right in.

A new fundraising approach from Semil Shah

It’s extremely rare that we hear of a completely new fundraising strategy, but that’s exactly what happened with this recent tweet from Haystack founder Semil Shah. While Mike and I find this approach fascinating, it’s so new that we can’t recommend it just yet—we haven’t heard of any real-world examples of a technique like this actually working. So we’ll turn it over to you: have any of you heard of someone using this strategy, or used it yourselves? We’d love to hear from you!

A post from YC that reminds us why we wrote Oversubscribed

First, let us say that we’re huge fans of YC. Their advice is top-notch, and going through the W2016 batch was a fundamentally transformative experience for me and my company (I wrote about it here back in 2017). And their latest blog post about preemptive funding offers, from Aaron Harris (one of my group partners), continues this trend. It’s great advice—if you’re in the rare position to take advantage of it.

But let’s face it: the “problem” of navigating a preemptive fundraising offer is a pretty damn great one to have, since it’s the rare founder who’s ever going to encounter one. The prevalance of advice like this—and the relative lack of advice about what to do when, say, you’re a nobody in Detroit who barely even knows what an investor is, like I was when I first started out—is a big part of why we wrote Oversubscribed. It reminds me of one of our rejected taglines: “fundraising advice for the 99%.”

A great article that I swear I’d totally recommend even if I wasn’t the author

I recently watched Hulu’s Fyre Festival documentary and was struck by the way the line between legitimat entrepreneurship and something like Fyre isn’t as clear as you might think. So I wrote a short essay about it. This is a little outside the bounds of the kind of content we usually link to, but I think it’s something Oversubscribed readers might enjoy. Take a look and let me know what you think!

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