This is the afterword to a twenty-eight part series on our quest to raise funding for our first startup. — Three days after our meeting with Sean, I got a call from Kodak’s Global Head of Brand inviting me to join their CMO’s task force. Our mandate was to build a roadmap to rejuvenate the brand and transition their business from consumer products to commercial printing. It would be a…

@The Standard Hotel — It was a cloudy, dull and overcast day in the city and the impending threat of rain lurked on our mental horizon. Today, we were meeting with a start-up junky. …

@Email — We did not need twenty-four hours to respond to Mr. Skype. It was a gorgeous day, so Dave and I sat outside in Bryant Park and did a call to debrief Alex and Ackerly. We walked them through the changes Mr. Skype proposed around launching with fewer social sites, adding…

@Le Pain Quotidien, Bryant Park — Mr. Skype was an early investor in the VOIP service that was bought by Microsoft for $8.5 billion. He was from Eastern Europe and was visiting New York in search of early stage startups that were not on Silicon Valley’s radar. He was the investor Mr. G,. the merchant banker…

@Fifth Avenue — This was the one of the introductions my friend Saul had made (Read: 9th March: College Hustle). It was to Mr. G. who was the co founder of a boutique merchant bank that advises entrepreneurs, management teams and shareholders on M&A and growth strategies. Saul explained that while Mr. G.’s…

@Con call — This was the second introduction that my friend Mr. C. made (Read: 16th January, 2011 socialSOS Dry Run with Venture Capitalist). Mr. Y. was a managing partner at a renowned VC firm that had made investments and exited numerous successful tech-driven startups in both the business-to-business and consumer space. Mr…

@Conference Call — Earlier that week I had an epiphany. I had totally forgotten that a good friend from Boston University who was now a hot shot lawyer in the start-up and VC world. …

@Conference Call — Prior to our call with his IT folks, I had taken Mr. Independent through our financials. He was tough on our numbers; which was great because the man is a financial wizard. He challenged me on almost every line of my spreadsheet and wanted to know how and why I…

@Email — We were beginning understand that people in the Valley didn’t just use the phrase ‘time is money’ but that they actually lived those words. Nobody we met or dealt with ever wasted our time or strung us along in any way — we are grateful for that because there is…