Suppose you've started a company. You have a product. You have a team. You have a market. What you're missing is capital. So the next step is fundraising: meeting investors, pitching, getting rejected, meeting more investors, getting rejected again. Coinbase CEO Brian Armstrong put it this way:
"Every entrepreneur finds the fundraising process incredibly painful. It typically takes two to three months, during which everything else grinds to a halt. You go through a huge number of pitch meetings, and you get rejected 19 times out of 20."
Even once the money is raised, another set of hurdles awaits: legal fees, international wire transfers, cap table management, investment agreements. The startup ecosystem is full of "middlemen" who chip away at founders' time and money at every turn.
