Financing, Fundraising, and Bootstrapping

What to Look For in a Partner
Jessica Kim

Jessica Kim shares her entrepreneurship journey and discusses the importance of good partnerships. But more than just being complementary pieces of a puzzle, we need to understand and recognize the motivations of all parties involved. Afterall, mutually beneficial relationships that stand tall in the storms of business and life are not transactional. They are life-giving.

Discussion Questions

Love People

Jessica talks about the innocence she exhibited in her first start-up while in college. And it would be easy for us to brush it aside as youthful exuberance. And yet God calls us to rely completely on him as a child does a parent.

• How might you re-establish a childlike faith? And how might this simplifying of love for God translate into the ways we love people? Can our business partnerships reflect this same kind of love? 

Empathy for the End User

So often in our pursuit to create and build businesses, we focus more on acquiring than caring for our customers and partners. But as Faith Driven Entrepreneurs, we can have both a mind for profits and a heart for serving.  

• In what ways does your venture care for others? How might that become more of an integrated way that you can love people with the same intent that you love God? How can you monetize this approach while still holding strong to the heart posture of making the world a better place?

Seek True Partnership

The entrepreneur/investor relationship is ripe for posturing. The entrepreneur puffs up in order to look bigger and more impressive than what the numbers might suggest. The investor fears missing out on the next big hit. In both cases, a relationship is built on shifting sand.

• In what ways might you be posturing in order to gain or give financing? How might you realign your vision and your business to invite a more transparent partnership?