{"id":100,"date":"2012-08-20T14:22:24","date_gmt":"2012-08-20T19:22:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/openproduce.org\/blog\/?p=100"},"modified":"2012-08-20T14:22:24","modified_gmt":"2012-08-20T19:22:24","slug":"das-kapital","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/openproduce.org\/index.php\/2012\/08\/20\/das-kapital\/","title":{"rendered":"das kapital"},"content":{"rendered":"

All of you Marx-loving skeptics probably are wondering where all of our capital came from. After all, $153,000 (our losses to date) isn’t exactly the kind of change you find when you clean your sofa. (See our previous post<\/a> on profit\/loss over the past 4 years.)<\/p>\n

The answer is: we were under-capitalized in the beginning, and have been scrounging ever since. Banks do not lend to new businesses, or un-profitable businesses, making us double-disqualified. Venture capital might invest in your tech startup, but not in a local grocer. The only option available to many aspiring entrepreneurs is to put their house up as collateral on a business loan, but neither Andrew nor I owns a house. We started with about $8,000 of our own money, and Andrew at one point took a job downtown and added $14,000 over the course of a year. We also got a big start-up loan from Andrew’s dad, for $30,000 and later expanded to $35,000. Other than that, it’s been a mix of small and medium loans from friends, and $15,000 in high-interest credit card debt (which we were finally able to pay off this summer).<\/p>\n

If I were doing it again, I’d start with $250,000. There were so many points in our growth where we were constrained only by our access to cash. Not to mention the stress of always being $10,000 to $20,000 behind in paying bills.<\/p>\n

Here’s a chart of where our money came from:<\/p>\n