Dear Venture Capitalist

First of all, thank you for your email. I’m sure you did all the research yourself and didn’t use a scraping tool to find my email address.

I love that you’re really impressed by what we’ve built. My Mum is too. She told me when I took her out on my boat last weekend. Or did she tell me when I bought her an all expenses paid trip to Croatia last summer? I can’t quite remember, but I’m glad you’re impressed too.

It’s really amazing that you’re based in a big city that is nowhere near me and have raised so much money from your sugar daddies. I’m so pleased for you. Do you feel important?

To be honest, I don’t blame you wanting to get involved in our business, who wouldn’t? We have amazing customers, a class team and we get to make our own decisions - something we wouldn’t be able to do if we took your money.

So here’s the situation. Myself and my business partner own 100% of the business together, we are bringing in a pretty good amount of cash, have lots in the bank and get to do whatever we want without asking anyone.

If we were to take for example, $10,000,000 off you, you’d want at least 10% of the business (do you like the way I used your trick and valued it at $100m just by extrapolating numbers out?). And now you’re going to ask what I’m up to every day, want me to be hitting certain growth numbers which have been pulled out of your asshole and other corporate nonsense.

What I actually want to do instead is just put in a good honest day’s work (unless it’s a good boat day) and continue to make the best product possible for our 10,000+ customers.

Because that’s all that matters, isn’t it?

Except to you, it doesn’t. The customers are only important because we need them so you can get your 100x exit. They serve no other purpose because ultimately either we go public, you help flog us to HubSpot or something, or you sell us for spare parts and write us off. 

I’d rather you keep your sugar daddy money and I keep my profitable business, my amazing team and my lovely customers.

Kind regards

Adam Hempenstall
CEO, Better Proposals