Fund Yourself: A Justin Bieber Startup Parody
Pop culture has a thing for startups. It's en vogue. Being an entrepreneur is painted as a glamorous endeavor.
Jack Dorsey gets on the cover of Vanity Fair.
Hollywood makes a movie about Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: The Social Network.
HBO starts a show called "Silicon Valley."
And it doesn't stop there... new hacker shows, and accelerators galore. Some of this is good. Most of it is bad.
I'll tell you what's not bad, but friggin awesome: First Round Capital and their Holiday parody videos. See this one from 2013 which has over 700K views. So epic.
I've dabbled in parody writing over the years - once at Central Pacific Bank I wrote a fake Asset Quality Report that I input into the monthly AQR review pile for a $125M loan on a to-be-formed island 100 miles off the coast of the Big Island. It went all the way up to the CEO and Executive Loan Committee for good laughs. Even shared it with the popular (amongst Community Bankers at least) Banc Investment Daily newsletter and they asked to share it with their audience.
So, I wrote a few parody bits on startups with recent top pop songs but haven't published them yet... Until now. A friend who I'd talked to about this Biebster parody writeup sent me this tweet from First Round's Josh Kopelman:
Theme for this year's @firstround holiday video: "Fund Yourself" by Justin Bieber? "My partner don't like you, and he like's everyone"
— Josh Kopelman (@joshk) May 1, 2016
The eery similarity of the "My Partner don't like you and he likes everyone", to my chorus parody lyrics was just uncanny. It was like Josh was reading my draft blog posts. So I named my song parody in homage to Josh's tweet. Thank you for the inspiration sir.
Of course, what's a parody song, without a video performance?
So here goes, the opportunity to thoroughly embarrass myself... I present to you the Love Yourself by Justin Bieber parody: Fund Yourself.
LYRICS:
For all the times that you pitched me your idea
And all the conference after party’s you get in using my name
You think you broke my heart, oh bro for goodness’ sake
You think I’m crying on my own, Well, I aint
And I didn’t wanna write a blog
Cause I didn’t want anyone thinking I still care. I don’t.
But you still hit my email up
And bro, I be movin on
And I think you should be somethin’ I don’t wanna hold back,
Maybe you should know that
My partners don’t like you and they like everyone.
And I never like to admit that I was wrong
And I’ve been so caught up in raising my new fund,
Didn’t see what was going on
But now I know
I’m better off for not investing
Cause if you like the way you look on demo day,
Oh maybe you should go and fund yourself
And if you think that I’m still interested…
Oh maybe you should go and fund yourself
And when you told me that you hated my terms
The only problem was with you and not them
And every time you told me my analyst was wrong
And tried to make me second guess my gut feeling
And I didn’t wanna write a medium post (pause: avg read - 20 minutes)
Cause I didn’t want anyone thinking I still care. I don’t.
But you still hit my email up
And bro, I be movin on
And I think you should be somethin’ I don’t wanna hold back,
Maybe you should know that
My partners don’t like you and they like everyone.
And I never like to admit that I was wrong
And I’ve been so caught up in raising my new fund,
Didn’t see what was going on
But now I know
I’m better off for not investing
Cause if you like the way you look on demo day,
Oh maybe you should go and fund yourself
And if you think that I’m still interested…
Oh maybe you should go and fund yourself
musical interlude (this is a story of man. A Venture Capital- ist man and an entrepreneur. A memoir of a lost opportunity. I feel you Page Craig)
For all the times that you made me feel FOMO,
I felt betrothed now I feel nothing but spite
And I never felt so willing to renegotiate
I was a fool for letting you move on my terms. (yes I was)
Cause if you like the way you look on demo day,
Oh maybe you should go and fund yourself
And if you think that I’m still interested…
Oh maybe you should go and fund yourself
Cause if you like the way you look on demo day,
Oh maybe you should go and fund yourself
And if you think that I’m still interested…
Oh maybe you should go and fund yourself