Why I Love Getting Rejected by VCs (And You Should, Too!)

Aaron Dinin, PhD
3 min readJan 7, 2020

I’ll never forget my first phone call with a venture capitalist. I was in my early-20s and a few months into working on a new startup.

The VC was a prominent, seed-stage investor out of the Bay Area. We spoke for 30 minutes, I shared my venture, he asked some thoughtful questions, and the call ended on what seemed like a clear highnote: “You’re doing some really…

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Aaron Dinin, PhD

I teach entrepreneurship at Duke. Software Engineer. PhD in English. I write about the mistakes entrepreneurs make since I’ve made plenty. More @ aarondinin.com