_privateer

To give this question some context, I'm not someone lacking total knowledge on this subject. I'm familiar with how things work in regards to acquiring funding and what to do with it afterwards. I'm missing knowledge for the in-between part. Maybe this can help me and others who are questioning this as well.

To better help me explain this I'll put it in a hypothetical situation.

Say I have a company that's wanting to raise a seed round. We crunch the numbers and find that $2 million is a suitable amount for what we want to accomplish. Now, because we want to have a good chance at capturing these funds we'll be splitting the $2 million that we want into eight individual investments of $250,000 from individual investors. So just to check, that's 8 x 250,000 = 2,000,000. Ok, cool.

So first question, is this a normal way to approach what we're doing?

Second part is going to deal with how the equity is distributed. So, if there's going to be eight investors in this seed round, they're going to want a chunk of the company. No problem, but this is where I (and others) can get confused. Say we figure that a good percentage for this amount of $200,000 is at 7%. So if we give everyone equal equity for the seed round, 8 x 7% equates to 56%, which is over half of the company for just the seed round.

Is there where dilution comes in? How do we get equity back to raise money down the road? Are we supposed to be offering really low equity? If we are, that can't look too attractive to investors, right?

Ultimately, is there something I' missing for how this works?

I like to think of myself as a fairly well rounded individual in most things. In saying that, I'm wanting to pursue a living in web/app development and design, as I'm already trying to do so. I want to be able to create great products and contribute to the lives of everyday people. I want to be the master of my own domain, able to get things up and running without having to spend hours looking at tutorials, or asking some pretty basic questions on Stack Exchange without looking out of place. I want to get better at the things I already do, and be able to learn and pick up new things at a decent pace.

I see my peers excel at what they do while I constantly wonder "Why can't I do that?" or "Why can't I be as smart as X in Y?", or "What's stopping me from doing that too?"

How can fully unleash my potential if it hasn't already been reached?

While I'm asking this, yes I know everybody is different in how they learn things, and you shouldn't compare yourself to others, as you're your own individual, but can't I compare myself to others to help motivate me? Is my answer to read more books on topic "X" or to dive into "X" and break things?

What can I do to find my own path for learning?