My First Rejection from a VC
By: Yasmin Karsan
Tags: Antler Founders, VC, Entrepreneurship, Rejection, Lessons Learned

My First Rejection from a VC

Today, I want to tell you the story of my first rejection from a venture capitalist (VC) fund.

Let me start at the beginning….I recently started my journey as a clinical entrepreneur. I am a pharmacist by background and decided to take the plunge to start my own business… so I joined the global early stage VC fund Antler global.

A few months ago I turned up at the Antler program in London, bright eyed and bushy tailed. It was held in a WeWork and let me tell you.. for someone who is used to working in the NHS, this place deserves a blog of its own. Plush meeting rooms, fancy desks and even a barista! I was already in love with the start up life.

As I walked in, I caught the eyes from other founders who had joined the program for the same reasons I had. We had the dream of building big companies with big impact.

While sitting down at one of the snazzy desks, I suddenly had the overwhelming thought — I had been thrown into this world where anything is possible, all the tools are given to you, you just have to find the right ones and use them at the right time.

Sounds easy right! Well, when you are all vying for the same tools, it almost becomes like the game Chips Challenge. So off I went… I found an amazing co-founder and friends. My co-founder and I, worked hard for 6 weeks developing our business idea, our pitch and traction. Every week we would pitch to our colleagues and the Antler team, to get much welcomed feedback, which would hopefully bring us one step closer to securing investment for our idea.

Fast forward to last week and it was suddenly our time to pitch to a committee of real investors. Straight after our pitch, we discussed how it went. We felt we did well as a team and did our business justice… A few days later, it was the morning of the investment results…

I felt this sunken feeling… I knew deep down we didn’t get the investment.

I wasn’t sure why, but as I was loading the washing machine (to take my mind off waiting) it suddenly dawned on me, did we do enough? Is this even the right time? Have we been ignoring the signs? — It had been difficult to explain the health-tech concept we had in mind during our weekly sessions for a few weeks now. That lunchtime my suspicions were confirmed… we didn’t get the investment due to a number of reasons (market size, scalability). We thought we had addressed these issues during our pitch, but obviously not convincingly enough.

I had to step back… I was putting on a brave face but was obviously disappointed. It was hard enough trying to convince my parents and family that this could be a ‘real’ job as much as standing in a pharmacy all day.

Having come from healthcare, it was already a struggle to explain the domain let alone convince investors this area is a good one to invest in. That night, I was torn — mentally. I knew I wanted to continue to pursue this, but could I let my family down again by earning zero dollar? A fire burned inside, I knew I had to really reflect on the core reasons of why I originally applied to Antler, why this area of health-tech?