29 July 2013

Probably how to not approach a bank

And somehow we found ourselves in a situation where they decided to invest, and I'm like oh my God this is amazing, and you know we're going through all this process and it happened pretty quickly, we showed up on a Friday, bit of handshake deal on Monday night, so one business day turnaround, which was pretty convenient. And then I had this new problem which was, the finance people are like emailing me like okay please send me your wiring instructions. I'm like wiring instructions, like the only training I had wiring instructions was, I think that happened in like James Bond movies, and I'm like I'm pretty sure we only have like the "my first business" checking account from Bank of America that we set up in the CambridgeSide Galleria Mall, and I'm like so this might be tough. So, Arash and I go to the North Beach branch of the Bank of America, and we we're like well, so you got the teller people, and you got the leather seat people, and we look at each other like, it's probably a leather seat problem. And we sit down and the woman was really nice, she was like, how can I help you, and I'm like is there a limit to how much a bank account can hold? And she was like, well what do you mean? And like I was dressed in shorts and a hoody and Arash was even more disheveled, and I'm like well, can it hold $1 million? And she was like yeah, and so, and I don't know if she thought it was like drugs or this kind of thing happens all the time out here, but both sides very quickly stopped asking questions and we got our routing number and everything and went back, but there is no like startup manual where you are like oh, well here is how that works, and so a lot of it is really, even when you look - at some of these amazingly successful companies and having had a chance to meet a lot of those people, so much of what makes startups crazy is just kind of this iterative process of just having these random things happen to you, or having these ideas and just kind of figuring it out. 

--Drew Houston, "Finding Your Way as an Entrepreneur

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