Epilogue: The Little Startup that Wasn’t…

This is the afterword to a twenty-eight part series on our quest to raise funding for our first startup.

3 min readSep 7, 2022

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 full-time assignment that would last four to six months and this meant I would no longer have time to devote to securing funding for socialSOS.

However, in the end my lack of time is not why we decided to stop pursuing investors; nor was it a lack of faith in our solution. We decided not to continue for two reasons:

1. It was clear that investors did not see that privacy and ownership and portability of content would important to users in the future.

2. While we could have bootstrapped something, but we had decided that based on the complexity of what we were building, it needed to be pretty intuitive to use and well-designed, right our the gate, to get traction with users who had not yet fully recognized this problem.

That said, while we were disappointed with the outcome, not for a moment did we feel like we had wasted our time. The lessons we learned were invaluable.

Without an inside track into Silicon Valley we had hustled, used creativity and ingenuity to get meetings with big name angels and VCs. And we had delivered a strong, compelling and persuasive pitch; albeit solving a problem that was ahead of its time*.

The lessons we learned were applied to our next startup idea: CanIStream.It

*Today, the whole philosophy behind Web3 is rooted in people having complete ownership of their content the ability to port it easily from Facebook to Tik Tok to the next big thing. Privacy is also a major issue for consumer, and with globally lawmakers have been working on various bills and passing regulation around protecting user data and ensuring privacy.

P.S. Here’s an index of all the articles in this series:

Epilogue: The Little Startup that Wasn’t…

This is the afterword to a twenty-eight part series on our quest to raise funding for our first startup.

Written by Nikhil Vaish