Backing IRL Social Clubs
Don't know what an IRL Social Club is? I wrote a background here. There is a spectrum from co-working spaces that call themselves communities to the book club that gets together once a month, but for our purposes, I'm focusing on the middle - communities that have a dedicated space in at least some markets, and whose main purpose is community, not office space. In this essay, I'll call them IRL Clubs.
In early December, venture capitalist, podcast host, and OnDeck co-founder Erik Torenberg tweeted a question that's been on my mind since.
Part of the reason this question has haunted my dreams and filled many of my waking hours is that I'm starting an IRL Club myself, and part of the reason is that it is an open question. I've talked to some really smart people in real estate, venture capital, and community, and no one is sure what the right answer is.
And it's not just IRL Clubs. There is consensus around venture capital being the right money for high-growth software, deep-tech, and other businesses that require high upfront investment and have the potential for near-zero-cost scale.
But venture capital has also been the go-to money for all sorts of other businesses: place-based business like WeWork, Breather, and Knotel, Direct-to-Consumer brands like Warby Parker, Casper, and Hims, and media businesses like Buzzfeed, Vice, and Mashable, to mixed and sometimes disastrous results. That's out of scope for this post, but may be informed by it. In this post, we're just going to focus on IRL Clubs.
The lack of a clear answer to this question hasn't stopped VCs from funding IRL Clubs. The Wing has raised $117 million from VCs including Sequoia, The Riveter has raised $37.5 million, Chief has raised $25 million, Fitler Club has raised $23 million, and Betaworks Studios has raised $8 million. There are a handful of newer entrants that have raised small amounts from angels and seed funds, with more coming like a cavalry on the horizon.
That's one of the beautiful parts of venture capital - unlike most other investors, VCs make investments in companies and industries rife with unanswered questions. They fund the attempts to answer.
It's also why it's so tempting to raise venture capital, even when other sources of funding might be more appropriate. Unless you're independently wealthy or have access to people who are, it is the most accessible form of capital at the earliest stages. There may be no other way to get your company off the ground and put your product into the world!
VCs are willing to take bets on great teams and great products early, with the belief that great people with great products can figure out how to scale and generate returns. And if they don't, that's OK, because VCs make a portfolio of investments, and they expect that many of those investments will go to $0.
As the entrepreneur, though, going to $0 isn't quite as palatable. Starting a company means putting many of the most productive years of your career, your social capital, your capital capital, and your reputation on the line in pursuit of an idea that will change your life and the life of others for the better. And raising venture capital narrows the universe of available positive scenarios.
It is not good enough for the entrepreneur to just raise money and hope for the best. To be comfortable raising venture capital, I need to answer this question based on the fundamentals.
That requires answering two key questions:
What makes a venture backable business?
Can IRL Clubs be venture backable businesses?
What makes a venture backable business?
Finding an agreed upon definition of "venture backable" is surprisingly hard, given how many venture backed companies are out there. So to make this easier, we need to define a "venture backable business." This post is not about whether IRL Clubs should exist, or whether they can be good businesses. It's about whether they are venture backable.
The definition of a venture backable business can vary depend on who you're asking, but generally, venture backable businesses have at least some of the following characteristics:
Very large Total Addressable Market (at least $1 billion)
Leverage Technology
Exponential Growth
Build a Moat
High Upfront Costs and Low Marginal Costs
Likelihood of a Major Liquidity Event (Sale or IPO)
For our purposes, a simple rule of thumb is whether or not a venture capitalist's investment in a company can generate at least 10x (and closer to 100x the earlier the investment comes) returns.
Oversimplified: if a VC invests $10 million at a $100 million valuation, there is an expectation the company will sell or IPO at a $1 billion valuation, returning $100 million to the investor, or even better, $10 billion, returning $1 billion to the investor.
For that to happen, the company needs to get to a place where its revenue or earnings and growth are in line with similar companies who have achieved that price in an acquisition or an IPO, or that there is some aspect of the business valuable enough to a potential acquirer to warrant a price higher than its revenues, earnings, and growth would otherwise dictate.
Oh, and the company needs to get there within 7-10 years so investors can provide a return to their investors within the expected time frame.
Part of the reason we're still debating this question is that there aren't any clear cut comparable transactions that meet this criteria. We can’t just say, "Yes - IRL Clubs are venture backable because Company X, Company Y, and Company Z have all earned outsized returns for their investors in a short amount of time."
Soho House is valued at over $1 billion, but it's over 20 years old and has had to recapitalize itself on the path to that valuation.
ClubCorp, the largest owner and operator of private country clubs in the United States, went public at a valuation near $1 billion in 2013... 56 years after it was founded in 1957.
But this is the fun part! Since it hasn't been done before, we get to look at the fundamentals. And since it hasn't been done before, there isn't the competition and overload faced by new entrants in social networking, SaaS, or photo sharing. So let's take a look.
Are IRL Clubs Venture Backable Businesses?
In September (it seems so much longer), when WeWork was preparing to IPO at a valuation north of $50 billion, this isn't a question we would have needed to ask. As long as investors were willing to assign software multiples to place-based businesses, there was a clear path to massive exits. Acquire square feet wholesale, sell them to customers retail, count the full transaction as revenue, apply a 15x multiple. Rinse, wash, repeat.
But WeWork's downfall changed the game. I wrote about the Eight Reasons WeWork's Downfall is Great for Real Estate Startups, and highlighted some of the reasons that place-based businesses can thrive in the wake of WeWork's collapse. But for IRL Clubs, the question remains: can they be venture backable businesses?
In other words, how can IRL Clubs reach the scale required in the right time frame to return 10x - 100x to venture investors?
Let's get this out of the way upfront: Not every IRL Club should raise venture capital.
For starters, many of them have no desire to scale. For them, the magic is in a small, dedicated community of likeminded people. And that's awesome. Others have a desire to get huge, but don't have a clear path to making revenue in any way that doesn't necessitate adding more locations. If the product is the space, as it is for WeWork, there are better ways to finance the business than by raising venture capital.
But I can see a path to venture scale for the IRL Clubs who are able to scale revenue by tapping into the power of their communities to build new networks, sell products, and yes, sell high-dollar memberships to spaces where the community can gather.
In a sentence: IRL Clubs are tapping into a growing need for community, acquiring highly-engaged, highly-targeted members at low costs, and building relationships with them that they can nurture to generate revenue independent from growing square footage; if financed appropriately, IRL Clubs present a large opportunity for founders and venture capitalists.
Expanded, there are five main reasons IRL Clubs can be venture backable:
Big Market with a Felt Need
Recurring Revenue plus High Dollar Amounts
Scarcity —> Low Customer Acquisition Costs
Scaling Beyond the Four Walls
New Financing and Partnership Models
1. Big and Growing Market with a Felt Need
In December, a16z's D'Arcy Coolican wrote a post on Product Zeitgeist Fit (PZF): when a product resonates with the mood of its times.
IRL connection and its evil twin, loneliness, are in the early 2020s zeitgeist.
Three stats tell the story: 1) 47% of Americans report often feeling lonely or left out, 2) the number of people who identify as religiously non-affiliated has grown from 17% to 26% in the past decade, a 52% increase, and 3) the average American hasn't made a new friend in five years. Statistics are impersonal, though, and statistics don't a zeitgeist make.
Stephanie Engle put it best:
IRL Connection is in the zeitgeist right now because we all feel the need for it in one way or another. Religion's role in American society is shrinking. Remote work is on the rise, bringing with it myriad benefits, but contributing to a rise in isolation. COVID-19 has forced more people to work from home, and within days, they are realizing that it's not as wonderful as they would have thought. Little daily things accumulate to have a big impact - we bank online, instead of going to the local branch; we get our groceries delivered in one-click instead of shopping among our neighbors at the grocery store; we even get diagnosed and prescribed online instead of seeing a doctor.
But in this challenge lies an opportunity.
Remote workers need new solutions to build community, and office workers need places to build networks that outlast increasingly short-lived jobs. As Torenberg tweeted in a reply to the tweet that spawned this post, "Since work will be remote and people will increasingly be entrepreneurs, there will be increased demand for IRL networks." We save time by not commuting, not going to the grocery store, and not waiting in line that we can spend doing things we enjoy with old friends and new ones. As organized religion's role in society declines, we will need new institutions to meet the very real human needs for connection, meaning, and belonging that religion has traditionally met. This is where IRL Clubs come in.
Because of our genetic need for community, novelty, and connection, the markets for third places, communities, and experiences are massive. The experience economy is growing four times faster than the consumption economy, Starbucks is worth $103 billion, Country Clubs alone are a $24.5 billion industry in the United State, and the amount we spend on experiences is growing 4x faster than the amount we spend on things.
But the challenge with physical space-based businesses is not the size of the overall market, it's capturing enough of it in a scaleable way to build a venture backable business. A massive market with a felt need is necessary but not sufficient for venture scale growth.
Let's dive in and look at the factors specific to IRL Clubs that make them attractive venture investments.
2. Recurring Revenue at High Dollar Amounts
Most IRL Clubs derive the majority of their revenue from membership fees, paid monthly or annually. These are recurring revenues - revenue that can be counted on to repeat at regular intervals going forward with a relatively high degree of certainty. Recurring revenues are attractive because they make the business more predictable and reliable.
You are almost certainly a customer of a recurring revenue business. You might have bought a Quip toothbrush and receive new toothpaste and brush heads every three months, or belong to a gym you pay for monthly regardless of whether you use it. Your Netflix subscription allows the company to invest heavily in new content for you to enjoy, and your Amazon Prime membership allows Jeff Bezos to greenlight capital intensive projects that improve your experience as a customer, like same-day delivery or Prime Video.
At an average of $294 per month in New York City, though, IRL Clubs generate an order of magnitude more revenue from each member than Quip or Netflix. If you assume each member spends an additional 25% on top of their membership fee on food & beverage, and members typically sign up for annual memberships, then each member has a 12 month LTV of $4,410. That means to get to $1 million in Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), you only need 227 members, to get to $10 million in ARR, you only need 2,270 members, and to get to $100 million in ARR, you only need 22,700 members. This is before adding any additional revenue streams, which we'll discuss in point #5.
The flip side of all of that juicy recurring revenue: it's hard to acquire and hard to retain when renewal time comes! Building a community, a space, and programming that resonates deeply enough with even 227 people to get them to commit to spending over $4,000 per year and finding time in their busy schedules to spend engaging with the community is a difficult task. Keeping that magic with 100x the members is even more difficult because of the idea of evaporative cooling, best explained by the Groucho Marx quote, "I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member."
In order to generate and sustain demand, through good times and bad, IRL Clubs will need to provide unique and irreplaceable value to their members. They might also, as Chief has so successfully done, convince employers to pay for their star employees' memberships in the name of career advancement and retention. In an informal poll with an admittedly small sample size, people said they would rather their employer pay for an IRL Club membership than for an office with all of the amenities:
If they're able to convince members or their benefactors of their continued value, IRL Clubs can lock in eye-watering recurring revenue at high retention rates that can weather the worst storms. That's an important step on the way to being venture backable, but it's not sufficient. Let's keep going.
3. Scarcity —> Low Customer Acquisition Costs
A world of scarcity created the need for the internet and its ability to get anything to anyone anywhere. In turn, the internet has helped create a world of abundance. This world of abundance has made it easier than ever to start a software business, easier than ever to spin up a digital "community", and harder than ever to attract and retain customers who are bombarded with so much choice.
In other words, our world of abundance has shifted the bottleneck and created an opportunity for IRL Clubs that thrive on scarcity.
One of my favorite essays of 2019 was Alex Danco's post on Positional Scarcity. In it, Danco points out, "in conditions of abundance, relative position matters a great deal."
The pinnacle of “in conditions of abundance, relative position is scarce” is something called the loyalty business. In a world of abundant choice, one of the most valuable things you can have is an attractive, repeat customer that is loyal to you.
In the post, Danco cites examples like airline status programs and credit card reward programs, but, built correctly, IRL Clubs are the ultimate Loyalty Businesses. The best IRL Clubs fit in all three circles (and therefore sit at all three overlap points, and in the center of that big jumble):
Prestige - IRL Clubs are exclusive on one or many dimensions. Soho House is for a certain upper echelon of creative types, Chief is for VP-level and above women. Being accepted to an exclusive community is prestigious.
Access - when you belong to an IRL Club, you are one of a small group of people who has access to the people, space, amenities, and programming that come with it.
Curation - IRL Clubs curate the people you'll interact with, the programming you engage with, the music you listen to, and the products you buy. Ethel's Club, for example, has a shop featuring a selection of items from people of color, and The Wing sells branded merch that allows members to display their affiliation to the tribe.
Scarcity is important in the context of IRL Clubs because of the effect it has on customer acquisition and retention: scarcity of a desired product breeds low acquisition costs, and low acquisition costs generate strong margins.
At last count, Soho House had 27,000 people on its waitlist, Chief had 7,500, and Ethel's Club had 4,300. Ethel's Club and Chief have both stated that they haven't acquired any customers via paid marketing (aside from small tests). Soho House's CFO told the WSJ, "marketing and customer acquisition costs are low because of its long waiting list."
Every once in a while, a software product like Gmail, Superhuman, or Pitch is able to create free demand for its product through perceived scarcity, but the powerhouses in this regard are IRL Clubs like Soho House, and elite schools like Harvard. Or if you want to see scarcity-as-customer-acquisition in action, walk down Lafayette street in NYC on a weekend and check out the lines forming outside of Supreme and Glossier. Limited physical space is a fantastic channel for a desired product, which is one of the reasons so many digitally native brands are finding physical homes IRL.
Chamath Palihapitiya pointed out in a 2018 interview that 40% of the money startups raise goes to buying ads on Facebook and Google. Many of the same investors and founders who are happy to pay Google and Facebook increasingly large percentages of the capital they raise balk at the fact that physical space costs a lot of money to build.
If you finance the space piece of your business appropriately (see #5), investing in a well-designed space starts to look like spending into an incredibly efficient customer acquisition channel.
With scarcity driving CACs near $0, IRL Clubs are able to invest in the employees, brand, products, programming, and processes that allow them to scale beyond their four walls.
4. Scaling Beyond the Four Walls
This is the most important point in this whole post.
Everything up to this point argues that IRL Clubs can be very strong businesses, but I'm still not satisfied we've seen enough proof that they should be financed by venture capital.
In order for IRL Clubs to be attractive venture investments, they need to scale beyond the four walls. They need to make money independent of adding more square feet.
I see this as the delineation between IRL Clubs 1.0 and IRL Clubs 2.0. In order to be venture backable, the new generation will have to take advantage of the points discussed in 1-4 and leverage its technology, community, and brand to scale beyond its four walls.
For IRL Clubs 1.0, the space was the product. For IRL Clubs 2.0, the space is a home base for the community, a place that facilitates interaction, community building, and growth. But it's not the product. The product is the facilitation of access to people who share your passions and help you achieve your goals.
Now if you've followed the WeWork saga even casually, this line of thinking is probably setting off alarm bells. Didn't WeWork claim that it was a community? Didn't it say it would be able to scale revenue beyond its four walls through a combination of cross-selling, technology, services, and magic? Yes and yes.
Ultimately, though, customers chose WeWork because it offered them a more flexible and affordable way to rent office space. And because WeWork let anyone who could pay them rent space, the common characteristic among customers was "people who work in offices and want lease flexibility." Hardly enough to bond over.
IRL Clubs' products, on the other hand, are the people they attract, and they attract certain types of people. Let’s look at some examples of how existing IRL Communities monetize their targeted communities to scale revenue beyond their four walls below:
Community is the New Moat
According to the founders surveyed for FirstRound's 2019 State of Startups report, "Community is the new moat." It's easier than ever to build new software startups, which means it's easier than ever for new competitors to come in and steal your customers if you don't build a moat around your business. Excellent product design is now table stakes; businesses need to build strong communities around their product to retain and grow their relationships with customers.
Done right, IRL Clubs have a built-in moat: the community is the product. There is a huge opportunity for IRL Clubs to leverage that moat to build new products and services that launch with a passionate and engaged community around them from Day 1.
For a precedent, we can look to media brands that have transitioned into venture scale companies.
Web Smith of 2PM has written about Linear Commerce, the idea that "for the brands that are most suited to the modern retail economy, media and commerce operations combine to optimize for audience and conversion." He wrote about companies like Glossier starting with a blog, Into the Gloss, using the content to build and connect with an audience, and then selling products to that audience. When distribution through Google or Facebook is too expensive, owning your own distribution becomes that much more valuable.
IRL Clubs naturally have a built-in engaged audience, which they can leverage to sell products - their own, their members', or brand partners'. One interesting model to look to here is Brooklinen, which recently launched Spaces, a platform offering curated products from partner brands. They have built a relationship with customers that they can leverage to sell third-party products that are related to their core product, sheets. The Wing has an online shop through which they sell their own merch, and it's not hard to imagine them opening it up to curated third-party brands.
Hybrid Physical / Digital Membership
When Soho House launched 20 years ago, texting was a brand new technology, enterprise-grade videoconferencing cost hundreds of thousands of dollars, and the closest thing we had to group chat were AOL chat rooms. So for Soho House members to derive value from each other, they needed to physically show up to the House.
Chief, on the other hand, launched with a treasure trove of communications technology at its disposal. Its members form Core Groups of 10 women who meet monthly at Chief's TriBeCa location, but do the majority of their communication via Chief's app. As a result, Chief is a community anchored and legitimized by a physical space, but not constrained by it.
New IRL Clubs are launching and testing in even lighter-weight ways. Revel, Coa, The Grand, Medley, Not Boring (shameless plug) and more are launching programming and digital communities before signing their first leases. This allows them to test what resonates with their communities before incurring heavy financial obligations. As they expand, these clubs will be able to test new markets and only commit to building space when demand is proven.
These IRL Clubs have an opportunity to continue to blur the lines between physical and digital even once they've acquired spaces in order to scale revenue beyond the four walls.
Allowing members to Zoom into interesting talks or conversations when they can't physically be there is a simple way to keep them engaged, and allows the club to sell more memberships per square foot. Facilitating conversation among members on Slack (and soon, Geneva) can keep the conversation and relationship-building among members going, even when they're not together or communicating synchronously. It's hard to imagine the advances that we'll achieve in video communication, VR, and messaging over the next ten years, but it's a safe bet to say that all will be far better than they are today.
We're humans. Meeting and talking face-to-face is and will continue to be key to happiness and relationship building. In-person is where deep relationships are built and solidified.
But with the in-person relationship as a keystone, members can and will use technology to keep in touch with each other and the larger community when they're not able to meet in person. Technology can provide the connective tissue that keeps relationships forged in-person going even when members aren't together in the space. Which, in turn, allows IRL Clubs to get more out of each square foot.
Sponsorships and Brand Partnerships
One way to look at IRL Clubs is as aggregators of targeted demand. As more IRL Clubs enable their members to form groups around shared interests, the opportunities for sponsorships will grow. Away might sponsor a group trip, Calm might sponsor morning meditations, and Nike might sponsor a running club. These sponsorships will enhance members' experiences, add high-margin revenue, and potentially provide financial support for people who fit membership criteria but can't afford the fees, deepening affinity and appreciation for the brand.
As one example, Glossier places its products in The Wing, the Wing's founder, Audrey Gelman, did an interview with Glossier's blog, Into the Gloss, Glossier's founder, Emily Weiss, attended The Wing's opening party in 2016, and Glossier reps host meetups at The Wing. These are deep, meaningful partnerships enabled by a physical space and an engaged, targeted community.
Content and Software
The rise of the Passion Economy means that there are more opportunities for individuals to monetize content that speaks to a particular audience. The same is true for IRL Clubs. These communities might write newsletters, record podcasts, teach online and in-person courses, and host online conferences (which are suddenly en vogue due to the Coronavirus) to reach likeminded people in cities where the Clubs haven't yet planted a flag. Because they have built-in audiences who themselves have networks of similar people, IRL Clubs can own their distribution and avoid the fate of media companies crushed by gatekeepers like Facebook.
Additionally, IRL Clubs need tools that enable their members to better communicate and connect with each other when they're not at the clubhouse, to help each other find jobs, to amplify each others' work, to organize events, to teach each other, and to help each other achieve their goals. Some of these tools can be bought off-the-shelf, and others will need to be built when existing solutions are insufficient.
If approached with intentionality, IRL Clubs can be laboratories for content and products that help people learn and connect with each other, and those products can find audiences beyond the four walls of the clubhouse.
New Professional Networks
The LinkedIn killer has been promised for years, but it's still not here. There will continue to be interesting digital attempts, and if history is any indicator, something will eventually succeed.
IRL Clubs have an opportunity to build new ways to passively network, anchored in real-world relationships and facilitated by software. Finding jobs and employees through relationships is an established behavior. Depending on which study you read, anywhere from 50% to 85% of jobs are filled through networking. But networking as such sucks. Studies show that attending networking events actually makes people feel physically dirty.
Outside of universities, companies, and other communities that require collaboration, networking is so active. Meetups, networking events, cold outreach, follow-ups, coffees, more follow-up. It's hard, transactional, awkward, and often fruitless. When networking is the objective and you fail to network, you waste all the time you spend on it.
IRL Clubs can facilitate programming that lets members develop and show off their skills and passions to each other while building relationships that make it more likely that they'll recommend each other for a job. The clubs that are successful at doing this will support small group experiences centered around learning, conversation, and shared passions.
If IRL Clubs can figure out a way to monetize these networking opportunities, there's tremendous upside; even if they don't, knowing that your community will help you find your next job or career is a great way to boost retention.
Not all of these routes to monetization will work for every community, and there are many more opportunities we haven’t covered. The challenge for IRL Member Communities will be staying focused on delivering an excellent experience to their members in the face of so many opportunities, but if done correctly, they can enhance their members' experience while creating new, scaleable opportunities for their business.
5. New Financing and Partnership Models
Even if an IRL Club is able to tick all of the boxes we've discussed, it still needs to be smart about how it capitalizes itself. Venture capital can be an important part of the capital structure, but it shouldn't be the only money. The space itself - which, remember, is a component of the offering but not the core product - should be financed separately.
Every time a company spends venture equity on CapEx and Security Deposits, an angel loses its wings. There's no way to generate 10x or 100x returns on the space itself (if you know of any, please let me know!), so the most appropriate way to finance an IRL Club is by effectively splitting it into two companies: an OpCo and a PropCo. The OpCo hires corporate employees, builds tech products, pays for marketing, creates content, puts on programming, and cultivates a brand, while the PropCo leases the physical asset and builds out the space.
The OpCo/PropCo structure typically comes into play when the PropCo buys a space and leases it back to the OpCo, separating out two very different types of investments, but new forms of financing are emerging that allows separate investors with different return goals to invest in 1) the the steadier, lower-return cashflows from the space itself, including the lease and buildout of the space, and 2) the higher-risk, higher-upside from returns above and beyond the payouts to the PropCo investor and from the types of brand extensions discussed above. As long as PropCo investors get their expected returns, they're happy, and the OpCo investors (VCs) can invest in the asset light portion of the business that has the potential to generate the home run returns they need to make their funds successful.
PropCo financing can take the form of raising debt for CapEx and security deposits. Danco recently wrote a post called Debt is Coming in which he argues that companies with predictable cashflows - like SaaS businesses with Annual Recurring Revenue - should raise debt to fund customer acquisition instead of only selling expensive equity. Nearly every other industry does. I believe that the same is true for IRL Clubs with predictable revenue from membership fees.
Companies can also fund the PropCo via new types of financing that create synthetic structures that look like asset light management agreements instead of lease obligations. By financing the PropCo that way, venture investors are left with an asset that looks more like the businesses they typically fund.
The more direct model is partnering directly with landlords who have excess retail space that they're having difficulty leasing. DTC brands are absorbing some of the space that Sears and Macy's once occupied, but there aren't enough DTC brands in the world to fill all of the vacancy. Particularly outside of major metropolitan areas, retail landlords are becoming more open to revenue share models in which they provide the space and the buildout in exchange for a percentage of revenue from the location.
No matter the specific structure, IRL Member Communities must fund the space separately from the rest of the core business.
Wrapping Up
Not all IRL Member Communities are venture backable. Amazing social clubs can be built that live in one location, or that add new locations slowly, without any desire to reach scale. That's great, and more of these should exist! These are best funded by high net worth individuals or others who just want to see the place exist.
For IRL Member Communities to be venture backable, they need to have a desire to build a big, fast-growing business that is anchored by, but not dependent on, thoughtfully-designed space to grow revenue. They should finance the space itself - at a minimum the buildout and security deposit costs, and at best, the full costs of the lease - through management agreements or synthetic structures that look like management agreements. They should use venture funding for what venture funding does best - building technology, brand, community, partnerships, and programming that can be scaled beyond the four walls of the clubhouse.
Writing this is an exercise in thinking through this question for myself. I am building an IRL Club, and I haven't taken any investment - venture or otherwise - yet. Taking the wrong type of money can doom a business, so I want to make sure that having venture capital as part of my investor mix actually makes sense for Not Boring.
I've also purposely left out some of the many reasons that it might not make sense for an IRL Club to raise venture capital. I know what I know, and I don't want to limit feedback that might be similar to what I would have written, but presented from a different angle or in a more insightful way.
To that end, if you see big holes that I've missed, disagree with anything that I've written, have strong feelings either way, have case studies or historical examples I should look at, or just want to bounce ideas around, I'm all ears.
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