Day 48 · Ninety Days of Runway · Pulse Beat
The second investor was kind, which was worse. Aravind ran a small fund in Bengaluru and listened for forty minutes without checking his phone. He asked sensible questions about retention, unit…
The second investor was kind, which was worse.
Aravind ran a small fund in Bengaluru and listened for forty minutes without checking his phone. He asked sensible questions about retention, unit economics, how she planned to reach the next ten thousand kitchens. She had answers to half of them.
At the end he said, "I think you're building something real. I also think it's a business that wants to be a profitable small company, not a venture-scale one. I am not the right investor."
"That's a no."
"It's a no, with an apology and a suggestion." He smiled, a little ruefully. "Don't raise money to prove you are serious. Make the product so useful that the money has to come to you. Or don't take it at all."
She thanked him. She meant it. She closed the laptop, and sat in the small room with its damp-stained ceiling, and felt something shift: not a loss, quite, but a door she had been leaning on quietly opening the other way.
The sticky note on the monitor said Day 90. Under it, in her own writing, Padma. Under that, Raju. She had not planned a list. It was growing anyway.