Kong CEO describes his early startup grind days, from living on $1,000 a month to sleeping on Travis Kalanick's couch

"Travis gave me his place to stay for a few weeks as long as I would cook carbonara for his better half once a week,"

""We had 90 days to just make it or break it," he said. "We knew that if we couldn't raise, we would go back to Italy broke, and that was it.""

""It's much harder hiring, recruiting a team, scaling a team, hiring leaders, building an executive team - like building a company that lasts, versus just building a pump-and-dump thing, it's much, much harder," Marietti told Business Insider."

Augusto Marietti and two cofounders lived on roughly $1,000 per month after moving to Silicon Valley and couch-surfed at Travis Kalanick's home in exchange for cooking carbonara weekly. The founders flew from Milan on tourist visas with their last funds and had roughly 90 days to secure funding before returning broke. Early traction came from cold-emailing hundreds of contacts obtained from a Stanford entrepreneurship event, which opened fundraising and network opportunities. Increased network density has eased initial entry, but heavier competition has made hiring, recruiting leaders, scaling teams, and building enduring executive structures significantly more difficult.

Read at Business Insider