Once you raise VC money, you are no longer building a business...… – Jean-Yves Delmotte

Jean-Yves Delmotte

$38k MRR. $0 raised. 0 employees. • Co-founder @ BuddiesHR.com • 5x SaaS Founder • YC alum • Aspiring Marathon Runner

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16 32 Comment on LinkedIn

May 12, 2025

Once you raise VC money, you are no longer building a business... You are building an OUTCOME And “outcome” means ONE thing: a liquidity event your investors can brag about at overpriced steak dinners. VCs don’t give a damn about your healthy, cash-flowing business. All they see is: exit, exit, exit. So what happens? You enter purgatory. You’re not free to sell. You’re not free to chill. You’re not free to profit. Let’s break down what most founders learn the hard way: 1/ You can’t sell. M&A market is anemic. Even if you find a buyer, guess who has veto power? Your investors — and they’ll block anything that doesn’t make their spreadsheet sing. 2/ You can’t raise more. Down rounds? Forget it. VCs ghost you faster than your “beta signups.” Nobody wants to follow a losing bet. 3/ You can’t take money out. Healthy profits? Congrats — you’re not seeing a dime. Every dollar must be “reinvested for growth.” Translation: pay for headcount bloat, pointless perks, and maybe another fruitless turn in the “pivot” hamster wheel. Net result: You’re running on someone else’s treadmill. No exit. No freedom. No cash. Just quiet desperation. And a cap table that reads like a ransom note. That’s why at BuddiesHR we said NO to this charade: ↳ No chasing phantom term sheets. ↳ No board meetings dictating nonsense. ↳ No “growth at all costs” — just growth that pays. Bootstrapping is the only way you keep options unclipped. You want to sell? Sell. You want to stay profitable? Smile and cash the checks. You want to chill out for a month and breathe? Go for it. VCs love to call themselves partners. But a real partner doesn’t keep you shackled to their outcome. Founders: pick your poison. Build a business, or build someone else’s exit. You can’t do both. _________________ Enjoyed this post? Drop it a like (👍) — or I'll take it personally. (And follow J.Y for more content like this)

16 Comment on LinkedIn

May 12, 2025

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“Vibe coding” is absolute sh*t. I don’t care what the Twitter threads say. I don’t care how cool that Notion-esque “collab with AI” demo looks. In real life? It’s a train wreck. Let me paint you the masterpiece: You finally hack one dumb feature into place. It barely works. It’s fragile, like Jenga at move 27. So naturally, you think, “Cool, let’s build feature two.” This is where the bomb detonates. Touch literally anything and feature one falls apart. You debug for hours, fix one thing, and now feature two is broken. Smash them together and your codebase is a landfill of duplication, hacks, and accidental copy-paste genius. And we’re not even talking about code quality. Or structure. Or actually understanding what it’s building behind your back. Survive that? You get spaghetti code that looks like it was written by four drunk interns and a golden retriever. GenAI gurus still act like it’s magic. Wrong. Quick check: Would you drive a car if you knew the self-driving software was vibe coded? Would you store your life savings in a bank with vibe-coded backend? Would you get on a plane if you learned “well, the AI did its best with autopilot, but wow, those first two buttons work great”? No. Nobody with survival instincts would. Here’s the reality, today: ↳ Vibe coding ≠ productivity. It's a slot machine. ↳ One feature “working” is pure luck. ↳ Add another? Enjoy the chaos. ↳ Your codebase becomes a museum of bugs and TODOs. Want code with integrity? Consistency? Something actual developers can ship, maintain, and scale? Forget it. Maybe one day these tools can take your napkin doodle and ship Stripe-level systems. Right now? It’s brute force, constant rollback, and praying nothing explodes when you add a second button. That’s why, at BuddiesHR, we still build the hard way. The proper way. Actual engineering discipline. Shipping features that stay shipped. No magic shortcuts. No AI hallucinations. Founders: stop deluding yourselves. You want one “Auto-GPT”-built feature? Maybe. A product? Not this decade. Stay sharp. Write real code. Ship things that last. Or strap in for the vibe-coded rollercoaster. Good luck getting off alive. ---------- 👋 Hey, I'm J.Y! I'm the co-founder of BuddiesHR, the #1 Employee Engagement Software that lives in Slack. I post 1x a day about my journey and share what I've learned along the way. Follow me for more content like this 👆 P.S. I'm writing a no-BS B2B SaaS playbook with everything I've learned. Want a free copy? Click “Visit my website” to sign up.

This developer makes $200,000/month. (Yep, you read that right) And yet, he writes SHITTY code. If you're a developer, you've probably heard of Pieter Levels. He gets bashed on X for embracing his "dirty" code: → Deploys directly to production from his personal machine → Codes all projects in PHP (in one file) → Uses only jQuery for the front-end → All commits say "x" But: → Handles 200M requests per month → Pushes 100+ times a day → Makes $200k+ per month → Has 500k+ followers He builds in public on X, where he regularly faces angry, skeptical developers who cry scandal over his practices. But Pieter doesn’t care what other developers think. Why? → While they debate architecture, he's converting clients. → While they optimize code endlessly, he's optimizing his business. → While they polish code, he's improving marketing. If you're a developer, your focus should be on sales and marketing. Stop being in love with your code. Code is just a tool for the business, not the other way around. It helps you make more money, not feed your developer ego. ________________________________ 👍 Enjoyed this post? I'd really appreciate it if you dropped a like to support me. If not, just know I'll take it personally. 👋 Don't know me? I'm J.Y! I've been building things and making money online since 2017, and I share my entrepreneurial journey here on LinkedIn.

VC funding is silently killing startups. Not because venture capital is toxic. Not because founders can't close rounds. But because raising money has replaced solving real problems as the North Star. TechCrunch headlines hype us up daily: ↳ "Startup secures $2M to revolutionize paper clips" ↳ "$5M seed raised to build Netflix for hamsters" Suddenly founders aren't chasing product-market fit. They're chasing term sheets, investor validations, and vanity headlines. Here's exactly what happens next: 1/ Startups pitch investors more than they talk to users. 2/ Teams design slides rather than solve critical pain points. 3/ Companies spend against money they haven't truly earned—burning runway and trust simultaneously. But here's the raw truth no one admits: ↳ Millions raised ≠ product validation. ↳ Buzz doesn't pay salaries. ↳ Most VC-backed startups still implode spectacularly. ↳ Secretly, overfunded founders envy ruthless, profitable bootstrappers. I know exactly WTF I’m saying — because I have "been there, done that": ↳ Got into YC. ↳ Raised a $6M seed. ↳ Lived that TechCrunch dopamine hit. But guess what? Raising doesn’t protect your startup from implosion. It speeds it up. Today, with BuddiesHR, I’m clean as ever: ↳ Bootstrapped. ↳ Profitable at $30K MRR. ↳ Lean. Free. Focused. No toxic cap tables. No investor breathing down my neck. No more chasing vanity metrics like a trained monkey. Founders: Solve real f*cking problems. Stack real revenue. Own every inch of your company. Because raising money isn't the real game. Survival, profitability, and freedom are. Stay lean. Stay focus. Stay bootstrapped. _________________ Enjoyed this post? Drop it a like (👍) — or I'll take it personally. (And follow J.Y for more content like this)

“Find a co-founder with complementary skills” is the biggest f*cking lie in startups. Yeah, I said it. Every advice thread, every startup blog, every VC panel parrots the same thing: 👉 “You need one hacker, one hustler, one hipster.” 👉 “You code, they sell.” 👉 “Balance your yin and yang.” Bullsh*t. You don’t need “complementary skills.” You need shared obsession. Same standards. Same war mindset. Let me tell you what happens when you optimize for “skills” instead of values: ↳ One wants to grind, the other wants to vibe ↳ One wants to launch, the other wants to polish pixels ↳ One wants to sell, the other wants to read yet another startup book And then it breaks. Fast. What actually works? ↳ You both want to win more than you want to sleep ↳ You both run toward pain, not away from it ↳ You both take feedback like a punch and ask for another ↳ You both do the f*cking work Skills can be learned. Grit can't. Discipline can't. Complementary skills don't build great companies. Aligned character does. Stay sharp. Choose your foxhole partner like your life depends on it. Because it does. _________________ Enjoyed this post? Drop it a like (👍) — or I'll take it personally. (And follow J.Y for more content like this)

FanDuel: acquired for $465M. Now worth $20B. Founders got... NOTHING (lol) If you think "that won’t happen to me," you’re not paying attention. Tech Twitter pumps you full of unicorn dreams. VCs sell you “partnership.” But here’s how it really plays out: Founders build a beast. 9-figure revenue, market heat, timing so perfect you can smell the gold rush. But somewhere between all those “raising our next round” PR blasts, they surrender control. Board flips. Investors pile on $550M+ in liquidation preferences. Suddenly, “drag-along rights” means they can unload the whole company… founders be damned. That’s exactly how FanDuel’s founders ended up owning zero from a $465M acquisition. The investors walked with the winnings. The people who built it walked away empty, watching their creation soar to $20B while lawyers fight over the crumbs. You think this is rare? That’s cute. Every month another founder show up, eyes wide, cap table bleeding, shocked that the board cashed out and left them holding air. Here’s the game: ↳ You never really own your company once you lose the board. ↳ Preferences > passion, every single time. ↳ If the people writing checks want out, you’re a passenger, not the driver. At BuddiesHR, we chose our path early. No mystery terms. No board filled with strangers. No upside casino. Founders: Don’t become another FanDuel headline. 1/ Learn the f*cking math. $465M can = $0 for you. 2/ Control your board until it hurts. 3/ You’re not building for a press release — you’re building for freedom. Real game = survive, grow, own your f*cking outcome. _________________ Enjoyed this post? Drop it a like (👍) — or I'll take it personally. (And follow J.Y for more content like this)