The hardest part of raising our Series A was overcoming the perception that we were just two academics without a viable business model.

Entering the Enterprise market can be daunting, but it's a necessary step for growth and innovation. An engineer left the company, stating that we wouldn't succeed in the enterprise market and that the company was going to fail.

As late as the late 2000s, customers told us we weren't an enterprise company, which was a significant challenge for us.

Building a transformative company requires a strong belief structure, as many in my generation learned that success often meant becoming political and trading genuine beliefs for acceptance.

Our ambition was always to build a world-dominating venture capital firm, not just a small boutique, as we believed it was equally hard to build either.

We had to do things differently to compete against incumbents like JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs.

Our startup's success was tied to our ego; failing meant failing at life, which motivated us to persevere.

We launched our product at a startup demo conference, despite initial skepticism from others about our idea, and faced challenges in recruiting a PR firm due to the prevailing negative sentiment. We decided to handle marketing ourselves instead of hiring a marketing person, and we had a memorable audition experience with two computers, one as a backup.

The founders of these successful startups had to be contrarian, often facing skepticism from experts and investors who thought their ideas were foolish.