Did you notice how these weak brothas and sistas we got today in the entrepreneurial startup field? Got no hustle, just want to pose and try to gaslight me and you when we all know what real work looks like. Especially the so-called Black in tech folks hanging around Blavity AfroTech talking about getting VC funding from Silicon Valley. There was a cringy video on YouTube with Harlem Capital characters smiling trying to impress some one VC character by explaining themselves. They all out there begging and trying to impress and doing everything except being true to themselves and true to the game of serving their customers.

That’s what all entrepreneurship and startups is about – creating value for your customers in exchange for a unit of value – money. Remember – you and your customers, not you and some magazine writeup, you and your customers, not you and some venture capital firm, you and your customers, not you and some folks you never met got comments on social media. But we got all these sideways clowns in the Black community who are more focused on keeping up appearance instead of creating value for their customers.

Look, real Black folks know how to raise funds to start their business. They do a bake sale, they sell t-shirts, they sell logo stickers you put on the back of the laptop. Nowadays, folks do crowdfund and folks do presale. What do you see as the common denominator of these techniques to raise funds? They all focused on their customer base to support their efforts to create value for their customers.

The most important conservation we need as entrepreneurs is the truth me and you want to know – how do we 100% own our own shit and call our own shots? Nobody Black wants to be sitting there trying to explain what they do to basically a white overseer and limit what they say, what they propose because the overseer is holding the purse strings – who wants to be a cornball like Tristan Walker? None of yall want that and none of yall doesn’t want to go there – you want your own business and you call your shots and you chart your own path.

There are plenty of innovative ways to raise funds for your startup nowadays. It is literally stupid to be asking someone else for money or funding then claim some “valuation” bullcrap as a bragging point. The goal is to own yours and run with it your way, not under someone else pressure to deliver or drop you because they gave you money to brag about to some social media following losers who personally are just a wannabee admiring someone else hustle.

Nowadays, you can create NFTs based on your business or theme and sell those for ether to establish funding for your business. The NFTs can be someone folks can share that is unique but always serve as a marketing tool for others to learn who you are and what you do. For example, we are going to do a Hustle Space NFT collection of hustlers and go-getters as an NFT portrait. This is to raise funds to launch a Hustle Space physical location. We may release a set every year but the takeaway is that our NFT is based on our mission and motto to enable entrepreneurs and showcase our vision through that NFT expression.

If you starting a kitchen, you can NFT a photo of yourself setting up the chairs in the morning on the first day of your opening as a historic photo to fundraise – that is a unique photo that you can offer that is related to your startup and your ambitions. Furthermore, you can do NFT drops and social gatherings as events to bring people out to bid on your NFTs while learning about your startup. It is very important to understand the one key thing why you want to use NFTs to help fund your business.

Because it puts you directly into a relationship with your customers, your supporters who speak with their money and you know they are getting true direct value from you – that is a morale booster and the real validation and acceptance, not cornballs looking at VCs and investors to give them the first round of funding, outdated 1990s stuff.

Funding with NFTs put you in the driver's seat of your company and you call the shots with the money you made to move forward. For real, let’s stop begging the man who doesn’t like us as a people and tell Silicon Valley and the VC scene to go f*ck off somewhere, I’m tired of seeing yall entertaining this VC funding ambition crap. We got too many ways to make this stuff happen our way and work directly with folks out there in the real world.

The real goal, the real truth is we run our businesses and startup our way, directly with our customers and we call the shots on how we move forward. Let’s start taking control of our destiny with our startups and stop begging folks to be put on, for real tho.