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AK Arvid Kahl Arvid Kahl German-Canadian software engineer turned entrepreneur who bootstrapped FeedbackPanda, a teacher productivity tool he built with Danielle Simpson, from zero to a...

“It's not a happy path, it's a happy traveler that you care about.”

The Bootstrapped Founder · Bootstrapped & Indie SaaS · June 2024

“It's not a happy path, it's a happy traveler that you care about.” — Arvid Kahl, The Bootstrapped Founder

Context

Kahl's reaction after Tringas said his fund is equally happy with a solo dividend-paying business or a venture-scale one. Kahl sums it up as an arrangement centred on the founder rather than the investor's preferred route.

Transcript

The Bootstrapped Founder Around 37:33 into the episode
Speaker 2

…bootstrapper wants, the lifestyle business that just keeps going and keeps going better. And then you have this equity conversion thing where there's a shift where it turns more into a VC paradigm. So what's your ideal, what's the happy path for the Calm Fund in a relationship with the business?

Speaker 1

…know, between options that an entrepreneur might want to take and us, basically. So we don't have a preferred path, really, like genuinely. I mean, I think like we want to get a good return on our investment, but how that comes back to us, we actually are like trying to be quite flexible about it.

Speaker 2

I love that. It's not, it's not a happy path, it's a happy traveler that you care about. Oh, wow, that was really good already. Yeah, it's I had my morning coffee. That's all I need. Yeah. But yeah, but that's how I feel. You're making this not about you. You're making this about me. Yeah. As a person to get investment from the fund, that is really nice. It's a very comfy way of building this relationship when it's very clear that you just want the business to succeed. You don't…

Speaker 1

Yeah, totally. And I will say this is like probably the area of the entire new version of the document that I have the most flexibility and am excited to like discuss and flex and tweak and maybe edit on a case-by-case basis because it is a tricky thing. So just to say what we're talking about…

Speaker 2

I just wanted to really hear where this came from. The moment you mentioned these, it's almost what is it called, like a non-compete situation, right? That you used to, as an employee, first of all, you have the non-compete that you can never ever work for or talk about your work after you quit or…

Speaker 3

I think it's perfectly fair.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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