Jeff Bezos was a Nastyass Honey Badger at fundraising

Jeff Bezos was a Nastyass Honey Badger at fundraising

If you haven't seen the hilarious viral honey badger youtube video, check it out before you read this.

I just read this awesome passage from TheNextWeb from Jeff Bezos when he was starting Amazon:

“I’ve been optimistic about Amazon since the early days,” says Bezos. “I was most pessimistic literally at the very beginning. It took sixty meetings to raise a million dollars, which I needed to get the company started. Twenty two people providing around $50,000 each, on average, to get me that million dollars. That was the riskiest time for Amazon, that’s when the whole thing may never have happened. Raising that money was very, very difficult.”

Reminds me of the nastyass honey badger.

And that's what any entrepreneur has to be -- an unrelenting, nastyass honey badger when things get tough.

I've compiled a lot of resources to help. Here's a search for the term "AngelList" on my blog, which contains a treasure trove of useful materials, including the Venture Hacks bible courtesy of the fine folks at AngelList.

Go get 'em, and never give up on what you believe in. Remember that by definition, you have to be a little crazy to be doing what you're doing as an entrepreneur, because if others believed in it, they'd be doing it themselves. Creating something from nothing means that nobody else saw the opportunity, which also often means that they didn't think there was an opportunity in what you're doing. If you want to ponder that one a bit more, read Paul Graham's excellent Black Swan Farming essay.

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Related: There's a lot of talk about a Series A fundraising crunch in the Valley right now. Some of you reading this may be going through it yourselves. With all of the angel-funded startups in the Valley, you have to be even more of a honey badger to secure future funding rounds.