I wasn’t lying when I said I funded my first company with personal credit cards
Raghu (a great friend and one of my partners at Spunlogic) recently found this print out of the credit cards that laid out their balances and APR as of 6/8/06. As I’ve mentioned before, we self-funded Spunlogic through personal credit cards until we were able to get a line of credit with Suntrust (you can see we had $273k used at that point in time) and until Raghu came in and invested in the business.
I remember these times so clearly. Each month I would look at which cards had the best APR and if any were offering deals – my favorite being 0% interest for 6 months on balances transfers up to $X – and then I would start moving money around and paying the minimum on all the cards. I even, and I’m not too proud to admit this, once or twice sent a check in and purposely “forgot” to sign it, buying myself about a week before the credit card company would call and inform me of my mistake.
I’m not saying this is what anyone should be doing in order to fund their startup. Not at all. But we were young and didn’t know any better and thankfully it all worked out.
But its fun to reminisce.
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