We entered an online voting competition for a $10,000 prize, which was crucial for our funding. After rallying support from friends and family, we won the competition by just 1% in the final hour.

We won the Huffington Post competition, which felt like a significant achievement and provided us with $10,000.

We started with bloggers to gain initial press coverage, which eventually led to national media attention, helping us gain traction despite being in debt.

After launching Watsi, we experienced a surge of interest, with major media outlets like TechCrunch, Huffington Post, and NBC covering us, leading to a rapid increase in donations that outpaced our ability to post new patients.

We decided to set an arbitrary deadline for fundraising, which surprisingly motivated people to make decisions within that timeframe.

When raising money, we had to articulate how big we thought Pinterest could be, which helped us attract ambitious and creative people to the team.

In the beginning, we did desperate things to attract users, like changing Apple Store computers to display Pinterest, hoping to create buzz.

I felt a lot of pressure during one of the most challenging periods of my life when our second attempt, Flock, also didn't work and we were running out of money.

We were confident about our startup, thinking we would get a lot of PR and funding, and we did receive significant media attention and raised $1.2 million in funding.