Fundraising Panel at Female Founders Conference 2015

Wow, this is awesome! There are so many women in the audience, and I am so happy to be here with you. So, um, I'm Danielle, as Cat introduced, and I want to talk to you a little bit about fundraising. We're going to have a panel in just a minute and have four different founders share their stories, but before they do that, I'm going to share with you mine.

So, in December, Mattermark announced we'd raised a $6.5 million Series A. You know how it goes with TechCrunch stories or, you know, news in general—it looks so perfect. It's all curated, it's kind of like my Instagram feed, but in reality, you know, if you ever were to judge your insides versus the outsides of any founder’s perfectly crafted storyline, that doesn’t really tell you what it’s been like fundraising pretty much non-stop for the past three years.

So, I want to tell you what really has happened so that when you’re in the same situation that I found myself in time and time again, you will know that you’re normal and that not everything actually looks as perfect as we make it look in the press. I mentioned I’ve been fundraising for three years. Literally, I have been fundraising non-stop for three years, and this is the first couple of months where I haven’t been doing that. So, how does that even happen?

My company got into Y Combinator in the summer of 2012. I had been in the Bay Area for a few years; I had been working as the first employee at Twilio, and kind of on a whim, I applied to YC. I got some encouragement from friends who had done the program before. Literally, I clicked the button to submit my application minutes before the deadline and I was shocked when I got a request to do an interview. I was totally shocked.

Um, but it’s kind of funny in retrospect: why was I so shocked? I had raised $100,000, I had a product I had coded myself, and I had revenue! It’s pretty good in terms of review applications now—it’s definitely pretty good. So, I get into Y Combinator, and I was a solo founder, so quickly I recruited my husband to be my co-founder. I basically proposed— you know how they say being co-founders is like marriage? I basically got to propose to my husband! It was actually pretty cool.

Um, flipping the tables on him, and then we raised a million dollars. So, raising the first million kind of tricked me; I tricked myself into thinking raising seed money and raising all money was going to be so easy. The first million wasn't easy because those investors are like easy money, though it was easy because I raised money from people I knew. I'd known them a long time, so a couple people I'll shout out to—I hope they're listening on the live feed—are Michelle Goldberg, who had been my mentor for about three and a half years at that point. She had followed the whole progression of this side project.

Um, Dave McClure, who was on the board at Twilio, had seen my work. Uh, you’re going to notice this pattern later: you know, the people that first invested in my company were investing in me, and they knew me. I didn’t fully grasp this—I mean, people said the words, but I didn’t fully understand how powerful that was. So, the first million felt easy.

A couple of funny stories out of the first million of funding—this is the part from before YC to right after demo day. I kind of love fundraising. I'm sure there are some YC Partners who are laughing, um, because I definitely—were they warned me? Like, Danielle, you’re really way too into this! You need to like go love working on the company as much as you love fundraising right now. It was just, you know, it gave me that sense that I was making progress. It made me feel like I was achieving something, and I mean, I was achieving something.

And the three main things that the founder is supposed to do: money in the bank, the right vision, and the right team. I was like, I’m killing this! Money in the bank! Can I just keep doing this? So, it turns out you can’t keep doing that.

Um, but a couple of cool things that happened—one, you don’t have to take all your co-founders with you. I fundraised by myself as a woman. I’m sure that terrible things happen; I’ve heard some bad stories, but I was very fortunate to meet with great people who were very honest with me about what they thought of the business and the company and the team and me.

The second thing I learned was that I didn’t really know anything about fundraising or venture capital or startups or the money side of things. Things—I literally met with an associate from—uh, well I’ll say because they invested, NEA—which is a very, very large venture capital firm. Um, she and I went out and got coffee. I didn’t know I was pitching! I thought, oh, he just wants to like meet up and chat, right?

So, he’s like, tell me the story about how you started your company. I had so much fun telling the story; the pressure was off! And then, he was like, you know, we’re the biggest venture capital firm in the world by assets under management. I was like—no, you’re not! And then he went to the bathroom and I checked on Wikipedia and I was like, oh! Like, all right, we’ll have a good laugh.

So, we had a good laugh about that. And funny story, you know, he followed up a week later— I have been warned by YC, you know, don’t meet with these VCs during YC; they’re just unfortunately probably going to waste your time. They just don’t do deals that are so small. So, I said no! I was like no, you can't, you can't invest; we’ll just, we’ll talk at demo day.

Like no, he calls me back like two days later. He’s like, look, I’ll come to the house! We’re all living in this house in Mountain View—I, we make a decision in 48 hours. Like, we won’t waste your time! When he said he’d come to the house, I was like, okay, you come to the house! So, just— it wasn’t the person I thought I was going to raise money from. Later on, they ended up bridging us through a really hard time. We have an awesome relationship with that firm.

Um, so lesson learned: sometimes the things that you think are not a good use of time are, and sometimes the things you think are a great use of time, like fundraising, at some point stop being so. Fast-forwarding, my company didn’t work out. So, the company I joined Y Combinator with was making money, but we had a business that was all about gross merchandise value. For those of you who are in e-commerce, you know what I’m talking about. Basically, we realized that the way we were running our company, we had about a 5% margin. That’s not really software economics! Right? I mean, we want like an 80% margin! We want a business where writing code makes sense, where you don’t have to have your whole content team be the core headcount of the business.

So, it was really weird. You know, we had this graph that was beautiful; it went up and to the right. But under the surface, we knew this is going to be a terrible grind, and we actually wanted to build a software company. So, we told all of our investors up to that point, hey, we have about $300,000 left of the million, and we are going to stop working on this, and we’re going to work on something else.

And so, it was very scary, really, because I had to fire the whole team—12 people. And not only did we have to let the team go, we let one of our co-founders go, and had to do a lot of soul searching at that point. You know, I won’t bore you because I like don’t even really enjoy talking about my previous company that much anymore, but basically we were reselling stuff you could buy on Amazon. So, my life felt kind of meaningless to me at that point. Like, what I was building felt kind of meaningless.

So, I had to figure out what to build next with my team, and I also had to tell my investors that we had no idea what we were doing. Um, so I still remember the first time I told someone we wanted to build the Bloomberg for startup investors. Um, it was a few months later, and it sounded really stupid. Like I said it out loud in a meeting—it sounded really stupid. And I said, you know, I want you to invest! And they invested on the spot! And I was like, what the...

You might be thinking, oh, look, it’s going to be really easy again. So, what ended up happening is we thought we were going to build a TechCrunch killer. We started building a data product and we raised $300,000. Three co-founders, so we liked $600k. And we decided, all right, we’re really jaded—we’re like this close to leaving the valley. So, we went and we rented the apartment that's on the top of the One Rincon Hill Tower, which is the tallest skyscraper in San Francisco. We consolidated all of our expenses, we stopped paying ourselves. We were like, okay, we're going to stay together for one year, no matter what.

We prepaid rent for the whole year; we’re going to stay together, and something good is going to happen or I’m like getting out of this town! So that’s what really happened, right? That’s not what you put in the TechCrunch story. We had like a $500-a-month budget for food, so we cooked all of our meals. We cooked all the meals for our team. Um, as we started hiring people, we had to kind of convince the people who ran the building that we were just like this rich couple that had all these contractors that would like come by. It’s really, really funny—you know, your psychology is, I have no money at all! Like literally, I have a $500 food budget and that is it. And I’m trying to convince people, like, I would put on my best clothes to like go downstairs! Like, it’s ridiculous!

So, you know, we were pretty quickly making money. So the good news is we truly got lucky in one way, which is that Mattermark found product-market fit very, very early. And it really is luck. Product-market fit is hard. And so I don’t think that a lot of this other stuff was luck. I’m proud of all the hustle. But since we got lucky, we had revenue. But then we fell into this really fun place in SaaS where we had some revenue but not enough to really be anything other than a really cool lifestyle business. And we were selling to VCs, so we were selling to this niche market.

So, the whole time I’m trying to find money because every time I look at—I use IndaEuro, and it has this great thing where it tells you how much runway you have left—I think for two years we never had that number go above six months. That just really messes with your head! You’re like, I really do want to pay these people! So we kind of keep progressing, and the business is making more money.

We got to $500k of annual recurring revenue by the end of—this is end of 2013—and we realized, okay, we should probably start thinking about raising a Series A. We’re not going to be able to hire or grow unless we can actually build a team, which slowly got up to about seven people just on revenue. So I go home to my parents' house in Seattle, starting to build out the deck for the Series A fundraise that we’re going to try to do in Q1. By the way, everyone tries to raise in Q1—everyone! So, I go home building the deck, Christmas comes and goes, and I’m like okay, I’m feeling really ready.

Get a phone call: “Danielle, we have a cease-and-desist on your apartment, and you guys are going to have to move out like now if you were going to continue to run the business.” So we’re like, well, we kind of knew this was coming. So, suddenly I’m trying to raise a Series A, I’ve got a 10-person team, and we can’t let any of them come back to the apartment. So we basically have to tell this team of people who had only been working together about six months, hey, trust us, we’re going to keep paying you; it’s all going to be fine. We don’t have an office anymore, just, you know, work from your house; it’ll be fine.

Fortunately, this did work, and they did trust us, but it was a little bit weird. In my head, I felt like that— you know, you talk about imposter syndrome? Like, I was actually an imposter! Like, I was telling people that we were this rich couple who had contractors coming to the house and now I’m going to go raise a Series A for a company that didn’t have an office! Just like, like when is this going to end?

So, you might be thinking that like this is the end of the story, and it should be, 'cause I’m running out of time. But we went and raised—tried to raise our Series A, so long story short—and you're going to get a bunch of advice on this—I came up with a list of people we really wanted to work with, went out and met with them, and everyone said no! Like, okay, it’s kind of weird; you don’t think much about what you’re going to do after they all say no.

Um, a few people said yes in ways that didn’t really work for us. Like, we realized we were at this place where we kind of needed to either do one thing or another thing. We needed to either fly or like question whether this was a venture-backable company. So we had very little money at this point, and now we had payroll. So I think at this point in day 0, it’s like 2.5—I’m being optimistic here!

So we were really lucky. One of our customers, who is a VC, Boris Wartz at Version One Ventures, bridged us half a million dollars. So suddenly, this is the biggest single check we’ve received! It’s not a Series A, still seed money, and it just started this momentum. Like, this one investor—I didn’t experience this with the previous round because it was all people we knew—we just kind of called up everyone we knew!

And so then, a month later, Felus came in—this is not a Series A; this is like another $500,000 check! And then NEA came in, and then Andreessen came in, and we were like, what is this round? Like, this is not a Series A! Except for what ended up happening is we raised $3-$4 million this way. So we raised our Series A; we announced our Series A in December. But you know what? We could have called that a Series B and every single one of those checks— I like remember it! I think we’ve got 155 investors; every single check!

So, lessons learned. Um, in hindsight on this one, if you raise from lots of investors, it's awesome! And you can get momentum. We probably wouldn't have survived, but now, as we raised our round and gave everyone PR, it’s really hard. That is a party round! You heard of party rounds? That is a party round! Like, you could actually have a party with that many people—that's a party round!

So, you know, it's hard because people will give you advice like, don’t raise a party round! But on some level, it’s like surviving is more important! It’s more important than any other advice! It’s just—so, like, always temper that! Like, I could have sat there and been like, I shouldn’t raise a party round; maybe I should say no. Surviving is more important!

And finally, I want to talk a little bit about the last investor that we brought on. So, Brad Feld from Foundry Group led our Series A, and you might be wondering, like what were the terms of these deals? Has she sold her whole company, right? Like, 155 investors, kind of crazy! Um, so one of the things we knew were a couple rules of thumb that are really important.

Um, and these—I learned this one from YC, so I hope I’m not butchering it—but you know, we were told, hey, you can keep raising on notes as long as you don’t sell more than 25% of the company in your seed round. I’m putting these out there because I don’t know if they’re like commonly known or not. And then the second time around when we went to raise from Brad, he said, well, how much do you want to raise?

And I said, well, actually, I want to sell 20% of the company to you, and we need somewhere between $3 and $7 million to operate, so you tell me. You know, basically, there’s only three numbers: right amount of company I’m selling to you, the amount of money you’re giving me, and the price. Um, and ultimately, it’s weird because the Series A was both hard and easy; that final conversation was very straightforward because we reached $1.5 million of ARR.

We kind of kept pretending like we were going to get where we wanted to be! Um, but I couldn’t tell you in 15 minutes all the things that happened— all the little details. I’m going to post a bunch of links in case you want to know. But basically, the key thing to take away from my story is that no matter how perfect it looks on the outside, it’s a mess inside, and that’s okay.

And it’s just like life! It’s just like Instagram versus Facebook or—I don’t know, where is your life a mess on the Internet these days? Like, wherever that is, that’s what it is, and that’s fine! And when you get an offer from an investor that you think is great, just take the money and move forward! Um, and if you don’t get an offer, just keep assuming you’re going to get an offer. Like, kind of stay a little bit entitled—I mean, we got NOs way more than we got YESes! 80% of the time, we just kept thinking, yep, well, the next one could be a YES! Just keep going!

Um, and that’s frankly what I have learned from fundraising so far. And I’m sure, um, given we want to build the B2B Google, we’re probably going to have to raise a lot more money! So, I’ll check back in with you guys next year and let you know how we’re doing.

Um, and now I would love to invite the panelists from the group to come up on stage! We have Susan, Mati, Nancy, and Marin. They’ve all raised—they’re all YC founders, and I wanted to ask them a bunch of hard-hitting questions so that they can tell us a little bit about their experiences. So, come on up! [Applause] Ladies!

All right, so I think to get us started, it would be really helpful if you could each introduce yourselves briefly, your company and how much you’ve raised to date or what you raised to date. Cool, I’ll start. Uh, I’m Susan Johnson. I’m the CEO and founder of women.com. Women.com is a women-only question and advice platform. We have raised $1.75 million to date. We did that about two weeks after demo day, and we have some of the best investors in the world. We have Lowercase Capital, Greylock, Tenson, uh, William Waris, Endeavor, and a bunch of angels.

So I’m Mat K. I’m the CEO of Front. We help companies manage shared inboxes, like info, contact at—we raised $3.1 million for a seed round, two weeks after YC, and we raised with two seed funds and 32 Angels. Hi, I’m Marin. I am the CEO of Clara Labs. I cannot tell you how much we’ve raised or from whom, and it is not because I am trying to be snarky. We just can’t yet. I’m Nancy; I’m the CEO of Optimize. We let mobile teams make instant updates to their native Android and iOS apps. Our Series A investors are Costa NOA, which is a fund in Palo Alto. Um, we are two years old, and we’ve raised more than $6 million.

Great! So I think to kick us off, I’d love to talk about Y Combinator a bit. I think, you know, where did you turn—obviously, YC Partners—when you were starting to think about fundraising? What did that process look like? Where did you turn for advice? Do you want to kick us off?

Sure! Um, so raising money was incredibly daunting to me. It seemed like this massive mountain that I would never climb up. And so the first person I talked to, other than, you know, the YC Partners, was actually my husband, who’s also a founder. And I was lucky enough to be able to go home at night and be able to, you know, complain or strategize or just ask a ton of questions and not feel stupid about, you know, those questions that I was asking. The best substitute for obviously not having a founder partner would be finding a mentor, someone who can be that safe zone for you that you can just go and unload to.

And you know, fundraising is a process. And by a process, I mean it’s a very manufactured schedule, so find that person who understands that process and just let them dig into it with you. Nancy, what do you think?

Um, when I talked with Paul Graham, he said, "You’re not going to have any trouble fundraising." He said that I have a really forceful and unique personality! So he kind of just ignored us, and he luckily was totally right! During—after demo day, we had a great time raising our seed, and he was saying, “Do not get addicted to this!” But we raised on literally the most founder favorable terms possible—$2 million! And, um, I think one of the main things that I wish I’d known is that raising the seed is totally different from raising a Series A!

And when we did our A, it was—I had to realize that I was completely wrong about a lot of the ideas I had for our seed. So switching gears a little bit, when you started getting advice, how did you decide who to pitch? There's lots of investors out there; how did you strategize around that?

Um, I think the one thing that we wanted to do was to raise quickly. A lot of people—so, I think the first person that I pitched, because I’ve got an email product, that were angels in the email space. So, the first person that I tried to convince to invest was Paul Baccae, from GMA, because then when I was going to see either other angels or V funds, it was like super easy to convince them if the founder of Gmail had invested! So, I chose like three key people, either in the SaaS industry or the email space, convinced them, and then a bunch of other people.

Does anyone else have any other strategies for picking the folks they wanted to raise from?

Okay, I’ll go. Um, so my background is in sales, and when I was first learning sales, way back, you know, 10 years ago, one of my mentors in sales said to me, you know, sales is a numbers game. It’s simply about getting as many people into the funnel and getting the NOs! And I was like, I don’t want NOs! You know, like I want to make my sale! The same principle applies to fundraising in my perspective—you want to get as many meetings as humanly possible and just start rapidly iterating through those meetings and getting the NOs, because every NO is going to get you to that YES!

So, if you have, you know, 100 investors that you send emails to and you get 75 back, you’ll get, you know, 40 meetings, and so on and so forth! And so for me, it was just playing the numbers game, getting as many contacts out there, and eventually getting those YESes, but going through a whole ton of NOs to get there.

So Marin, I want to ask you, how do people actually get that first meeting? Like, that feels really daunting. How did you go about—did you just cold email people? What was your approach?

That’s a good question! Danielle knows exactly the answer to this question already. Danielle is amazing; she was a huge part of my being able to get my feet wet with people and get to talk to them! At least for Clara, uh, so the first person that I met with was somebody that I trusted because Danielle trusted them and already had a relationship with them, and getting that experience—that was really, it was an easy way to get started to learn how to talk about what you were doing and to see where people were going to push back on it.

Does anyone else have thoughts on that first meeting and just what worked well and what didn't work well, or do you have other thoughts, Marion?

Yes, I do! I’m going to keep going so just to make sure that I say this, because I think it’s probably the most important thing I’ve learned about fundraising: there are two things that are really important! Like, all of these other strategies and hacks to X or Y are interesting and they may help you a little bit, right? The first person you meet, the order, the specific people, and whether or not they have domain expertise is secondary entirely to—uh, two things.

Number one is just really fundamentally believing in what you are doing, like knowing that it is good! You have to know that what you are doing is good and that it needs to exist in the world. Because if you know that, then you are already setting yourself apart because very few people actually know that what they are doing is great! Um, so, so know that it’s good—prove it to yourself!

And then, secondly, I would say if it’s good, you should be able to prove it to other people, which is to say you should be able to have traction. So, get traction and know that thing you’re doing is good, and all of the rest of it is just like icing on the cake!

So how did being part of YC help with the fundraise? Um, especially if you’ve had the experience of fundraising without YC in the past—especially because I tried to raise in France before raising in here. So, I think it helped for like four main reasons. The first one is you get a lot of exposure, and that’s priceless because most of the time, lots of investors will reach out to you, and that’s a privilege.

The second one is you get a lot of credibility, and that’s even more true if you don’t come from the valley. Uh, I think I would have a really hard time to raise money here if I were not part of YC. And then I think the fact that all your batchmates are raising at the same period than you, I think it’s great because it’s hard for everyone! Even if you’re at YC, and I think it’s good to compare yourself and to have people around you.

And maybe the last thing is, of course, if there are some YC partners that can invest—but I’m not sure if it’s still allowed.

So how about in terms of preparation for fundraising? Just the process and maybe that first partner meeting? How did YC help you guys with that?

Um, I’ll take a step at it. Um, so YC for me was—awesome! I mean, you get like all these smart people who are thinking about your business, and any entrepreneur should be so lucky! But the biggest benefit that I can see from a fundraising perspective was, fundraising is all about the process. It’s all about this like momentum that you create during this set period of time that you’ve dedicated as the founder to raise money!

And say, you know, if you’re not in YC, you have three months to do it; it’s a full-time job. But what YC does is it basically manufactures this momentum to this demo day. So you spend three months at YC getting traction, believing in your product, like getting your stuff done, and then you’ve got this day where you’re on stage for two minutes in front of 500 of the best investors in the valley, and you’re like, hey, my deal is going to close! Like, I’m oversubscribed.

Either, you know, you’re in or you’re out, and it allows for you to take a position which you don’t often have as a founder, power! And so, YC really helps founders feel powerful and in control of this process!

So, Nancy, you mentioned that you have a very forceful personality, so I’m really curious—what was your mental state or your emotional state during the fundraise? Like, how did you psych yourself up for meetings, and like how can we basically kind of be a little bit more like you?

Um, well, I would recommend it for the seed round, and then I would recommend a pretty different—I think like Susan is here—Susan, right? Um, more like what Susan would do for the Series A. Because the seed, I think it’s about not wasting your time. That’s your most precious asset! So if at any moment you feel like this person is not going to give me money, or this line of questioning is not going to lead to them giving me money, then just shut that down as much as possible and go back to the path that is going to lead to money!

And so, I would be there to get money! Like, that was my goal. Whenever I'm meeting with people, that’s how I would prioritize the meetings. I’m like, this person’s more likely to give me more money, and that’s why I’m more likely to meet with them! And during the meeting, if it’s going down a weird path of questioning that I know is not that favorable or not a selling point for why they should give me money, I would just really just try to steer it back.

Um, for the Series A, I think it’s about basically learning Enterprise sales. Raising a seed round is kind of like consumer sales, and the Series A is like Enterprise sales. It’s the difference between someone giving you money because they feel like it, and someone giving you money because they’re betting their career on you! And that’s a whole different process where you have to really get a relationship with a person and make sure that you educate your advocate on the space and make them also feel comfortable that they can defend their position against their other partners because they have to sell you to their partners when you’re not there!

For seed investing, you just have to persuade that one person in that moment, and they can just give you the money in the meeting. And I would—all of the seed investors I closed during the meeting, like just the first meeting we had, so I knew, like, okay, they’re at the moment that I felt they were ready to make that decision; I would instantly be like, so how much do you want to invest or whatever the question is to get them to tell me how much they want to invest! And then you just close it there, and then you’re like, great, I’ll send you the docs after today, and you can just kind of end the meeting!

And I think that’s the most efficient way because, uh, I also angel invest in some companies too who are my friends, and I can—they’ll like practice their pitches on me, and I can see, a lot of the times, um, they start talking about stuff that is not that persuasive or they’re targeting people who are never going to invest more than a really small amount or who don’t even really care about that space and are just never going to invest! Or if they say NO, like, they keep taking the follow-up meetings, and I’m like, don’t do that! Like, that’s a waste of time! You have to focus on like making sure that all of your time is dedicated to directly path of getting more money!

Did that make sense?

I explain that! Oh, that was a great overview! And so beyond that, what about the rest of the company? And maybe, um, Marin, maybe you can jump in—what do you say to your co-founders, the other people that aren’t in the meeting? How do you manage their feelings and expectations during the process?

I might have a better answer to that question had I thought about it before! I think that during Y Combinator, it kind of gives you the luxury of the entire company being focused on the fact that you know, what you're going for. So, every single week, we would sit down and say, okay, we are making X dollars. Next week, we’ll be making Y dollars! And I will get there if I have to sell my blood! So, it was pretty clear for raising seed that that’s what we were going for; the company was very, very small.

And so, to that end, I don’t know; they just had to believe in me and my ability to close money. And, you know, if you can—I guess I delivered on that! So I guess they still believe in me. But I’m sure for a Series A, it probably requires a lot of preparation for the team that I haven’t gone through yet.

Matilde, how big was your team while you were fundraising?

Uh, it was four of us!

So did you go back and tell them like every up and down and every detail, or how did you communicate internally?

Yeah, so first, I’m based because the product that I’m building is towards more email transfers. So, we like every email was shared with the whole team. And I think I’ve learned something. So, of course, when you’re a founder, you tend to think that your job is to make your team super enthusiastic, super engaged; and so you tend to share only the good news.

So at the beginning, I shared only the good news—so this investor said YES! And this one also YES! And then, in the end, you realize that, like, when you have a bad news—it’s so—and I think an investor that says NO is one of the worst things because they just say, I don’t see the potential of your product, I don’t see the potential of your team, or we just—we don’t believe in that!

And I think the fact that I will be the most affected by this news was worth sharing with the team, and so I shared everything! Like, I told them all the NOs, and it was overall for the company really better.

Mhm, so you get the round, get some PR, you don’t get PR, like who announced and was it valuable or not?

I think that I’m going to take this one just for our own perspective. Um, we raised a really, really good round from investors that I respect gigantically, and we got to choose who they are, and that was an incredible luxury! And I am really grateful for that.

Um, this advice isn’t necessarily universally applicable, but I would say that, you know, your story is really precious, right? The things that you are going to tell people about what you are and who you are is really important, and for us, we both decided to go off the record at demo day in spite of having customers and actually decided not to launch our press because that is launch press around our investors.

Because that’s a small part of our story, and our story is about our company; it’s not about our investors and the fact that they’re fantastic! So for us, people don’t know who they are, and that will be a small part of a story that we tell when we’re really, really looking forward to being able to share it with the world. But it is our company and our team and our product—not our investors!

Does anyone else have a different experience?

So I think we, we chose to announce and like take First Venture BP the daily ET because I think like for us, exposure was good for the company!

And I think it’s so tempting when you’re a startup to think that there will be a better moment to communicate because you will have more interesting things to say or because your product will be better. But I felt like exposure is like really cheap and super effective! And you’ll always find something to talk about, so we decided to communicate every time we could!

Great! Well, that is all the time we have for! Thank you, ladies, so much for sharing all your knowledge and wisdom with the audience! Thank you! [Applause]