Tom Blomfield: Do the Best All Raise Pre-Demo Day & YC's Fundraising Advice to Startups | E 1152

I don't think founders are necessarily the most likable people, honestly. If you just agree with everything that happens around you, you're never gonna create something different. So, this is a key skill of a founder, which is holding these two realities in your head simultaneously, cognitive dissonance or driving yourself crazy. One is the big vision of the 1% best outcome. "If this really, really works, what could this become?" And then you have to hold the, "What is my top priority today and this week and this month?" Which is very, very different from this billion people around the world, right? And you have to execute on that and get your team to focus on it. But you have to have both.

Ready to go? Tom, I am so excited for this, dude. We've known each other for many years, but thank you so much for joining me today.

I'm delighted to be here.

Now, I always think that people are shaped by early years and childhood. When you think back to the 10-year-old Tom, how would your parents and teachers have described you?

Precocious, probably. Um, uh, I d- I d- I don't think I listened very well. I was, uh, I was fascinated by lots of different things. I got into computers very, very young. And I was honestly trying to start businesses from when I was about six or seven, I think. I stole a bunch of my mum's jewelry and tried to sell it on the street outside her house before she s- she saw me.

(laughs)

Literally age seven, I think. It was a, it was a strange childhood.

So I always ask founders when I'm investing, "How did you first make money?" Because I always think that actually exceptionalism shows itself early in life like that.

Yeah.

And no one comes out of Cambridge and just makes money at Bain for the first time.

Yep.

Do you agree with that, or do you think that exceptionalism and entrepreneurialism can be later, and actually you'd miss the sway of the founders?

I think it can be later. But often, certainly for myself, I started building websites as, what, 14, 15, and convinced my local estate agent to pay me three or four hundred quid for a, an, uh, a website. So that, I do fit that mold I guess, and I, in general, I do agree. But, you know, there are, it takes many different types to start companies. I think to be so prescript is probably, you'll probably miss people, but...

I always think, like, yeses and nos. Yeses can make careers and nos can be incredibly hard and painful to, to hear. When you think about the yes that you think made you most, what yes was that?

Very easy answer. Um, getting onto Y Combinator in 2011. Getting the call. I thought we'd bombed the interview. The problem-