http://www.nyoombl.com/nimble.php?view=Andrew+Hsu+banters+with+Lara+Druyan&am...

My friend Oladayo Olagunju started Nyoombl (pronounced Nimble), which is basically a combination of Skype and Youtube. It allows two people to have a conversation, and their two talking heads will be automatically combined into one video and posted for the world to view. The dream is to democratize conversations and allow, for example, a fisherman in Louisiana to converse publicly with UK Prime Minister David Cameron.

Nyoombl goes public with my conversation with the amazing Lara Druyan, who is a partner at Allegis Capital and on the Board of Trustees at Aim High, an award-winning academic/learning summer program for middle schoolers that’s been around for over 25 years.

Here’s something that Gideon Yu told me. Gideon is a partner at Khosla Ventures, previously CFO of Facebook, partner at Sequoia Capital, CFO of Youtube. 

He said that when building a startup, you should do everything within your power to grow the company and build the product and valuation and gain traction and social proof, completely independent of any dilution issues. 

As I think more about it, this is really great advice. It’s natural for entrepreneurs to not want to give up any equity in “their baby” and if they have to do so for investment, they do so grudgingly. Rather, what the entrepreneur should focus on is building out the product, growing the company with as much speed as possible, and investors will come knocking at your door - you won’t be beholden to the VC world.