Most Founders Don’t Need VC
Lessons from Buyback Ventures
👋 Hi, it’s Zdenko and welcome to Seedstrapped, my newsletter about funding and building profitably growing SaaS businesses in the age of AI.
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When I sat down with Andy White, I expected a conversation about venture capital. Instead, I walked away with something else: a reminder that most founders are playing the wrong game.
Andy has been around startups for more than 30 years. He’s built companies, supported startup ecosystems across the U.S. and now runs Buyback Ventures, a fund designed for bootstrapped and seedstrapped founders who want to keep ownership while still accelerating growth.
His message was simple: 99.99% of businesses will never raise venture capital - and that’s okay. In fact, those businesses are the backbone of the economy. They are smaller teams solving focused problems, growing profitably and creating meaningful outcomes for their founders and employees.
The mistake is believing that if you’re not chasing unicorn status, you’re not building something worthwhile.
Here's my 5 biggest learnings from the conversation:
1. Rethinking what success looks like
Andy believes we should celebrate $20m-$30m exits more. For most founders this are life-changing amounts, enough to secure their future, reward their team and keep control over the company’s destiny. But in the VC model, those outcomes are often considered failures - because the investor needs a billion-dollar story to make the fund work.
That misalignment is where so much founder frustration comes from. You end up running your company for someone else’s goals.
2. Experiments, not absolutes
One of Andy’s lines stuck with me: “There’s no such thing as a failed experiment, only unexpected results.”
The best founders approach building this way - run constant tests, learn fast and double down only when customers pay. Raising money doesn’t replace this discipline. If anything, it makes bad experiments more expensive.
3. The middle ground: seedstrapping
This is where seedstrapping comes in. It’s not bootstrapping forever, and it’s not venture hyper-growth. It’s raising once, to accelerate what already works.
That might mean staffing up for a large customer, building a second product users are asking for, or shortening a project timeline from nine months to three. The point is using capital as a catalyst, not a crutch.
4. The buyback twist
Buyback Ventures takes this further. They invest $50k–$500k into LLCs (doesn't work for C-corp and outside of US for now), and give founders the chance to buy back their equity on a clear schedule. Repurchase early at 2x and the investor keeps just 2%. Wait until later and it’s 5x with 5% retained.
Either way, founders end up with 95–98% of their company - and complete control.
It flips the script: instead of chasing valuations, everything is about increasing high-quality revenue so you can buy back your cap table.
More about the Buyback Ventures model here.
5. A different future
Andy’s vision is not a handful of unicorn headlines. It’s thousands of profitable, founder-led companies in the $10m – $50m range. Businesses that enrich their ecosystems, reward their teams, and let founders define success on their own terms.
That’s a future worth betting on.
🤞
What's your take on this model:
Would you give up 50% ownership short-term if you could buy back to 95% later?
Do you think similar buyback model could work in Europe?
PS: If you are building with a seedstrapping mindset, here are 3 ways I can help:
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