How we got investor intros
Why 80% of pre-seed/seed fundraising happens before you pitch investors, starts years before you start a company, and what to do about it.
I’ve recently written and spoken publicly about our experience raising an “oversubscribed” ~$2.7M pre-seed at the end of 2023. Without fail, the number 1 question that gets asked is how we got introductions to investors.
Most first-time founders (even those with experience working in tech/startups) feel a lot of anxiety and/or frustration with the cold-start of building investor relationships.
This topic is especially charged for outsiders (the folks with less pedigree and/or non-traditional resumes). You can see it in the comments on this LinkedIn post.
I get it. It’s annoying when you hear about some young tech bro (someone once told me that my face looks like the postcard for white privilege lol) that raised money in a relatively short period of time when you’ve been fighting and hustling to raise with little to no success to show for it.
I’ve been that person.
I’ve been the outsider with no connections and no clue how to get from where I was, to where I wanted to be.
I’ve felt the frustration and envy for all those other people whose paths seemed so much easier than my own. Still do sometimes if I’m being honest.
But our story is mostly grounded in simple things that are achievable for most ambitious people. Not easy things, but simple things.
I’m writing a separate post on the fundraising process itself, but today I want to address the boringly simple stuff we did before our startup that laid the foundation for what we’re doing today.
You see, we did have unfair advantages. But we built those advantages brick by brick. And so can you.
Quick note before we move on – The world is not a fair place, nor can I make it one. What I have to say is only going to be helpful to those that want to help themselves. If you want a therapy session on why life is unfair, I’d advise you to not read further.
The secret hack that got us investor introductions
My co-founder and I spent 4-5 years putting ourselves in a position to build this company and get the 100+ VC intros that allowed us to raise this round.
No shortcuts. We worked really hard in startups, earned the respect of those we worked with, built relationships, helped as many people as we could, etc.
This is the real answer. It’s not sexy. It’s not what most people want to hear.
There were no trust funds involved, no daddy’s golf buddies, no Ivy League pedigree – just good old fashioned hard work.
Starting points
Everyone has to start somewhere. No two people have identical starting points. “Privilege” is a spectrum.
Some people are born on third base or get a small $1M loan to start their first business. Others start in Cameroon and traverse a continent in the life or death pursuit of their dreams. Some of us were born in Ohio (gasps).
Where I started
I grew up in poor, mostly rural, working class Ohio.
My parents never finished college or collectively made more than $50k a year in income. (50k would have been a good year tbh).
We did not know rich and successful people. The most successful person I knew at 18 was a grocery store manager.
From age 16-20, I did school full time + worked 80 hours a week across multiple jobs (full-time & part-time).
I paid every dime of my college tuition out of money I made working in grocery stores.
I went to an objectively bad college.
So bad that an angel investor I met kindly told me I should remove it from my LinkedIn profile once and for all (lol).
During an interview with an investment banker after my first startup didn’t work out:
"Your school is so off the radar that it's not even good enough to be non-target for us. I only took the interview out of curiosity." — lol
My first startup Olympus was co-founded with two serial entrepreneurs who had just sold their last company. They gave me the title of co-founder. I didn’t deserve it. I was super f*cking junior. I was literally an intern at the company they had just sold. It was in the Midwest. Not really a tech company. And Olympus f*cking failed. The angel investors in that business did not invest because of me but because of my co-founders. They weren’t even real angel investors. They were just a few rich dudes that knew the primary founders of the business. The acquisition was a hail mary that only returned angel capital and happened over a year after I left. No one in tech has ever heard of it. It did not help me get my next job in venture (which was my first real gig in tech). I was broke at the end of Olympus because the company couldn’t afford to pay me a salary. When I moved to Columbus to join a venture fund called Ikove Capital, I literally didn’t have enough money to buy groceries.
The point is not to look at how hard my life was. The point is that I was not an insider. I did not start with a legion of people waiting to make intros based on my Stanford pedigree.
Where Steven started
Steven has a slightly more traditional background than me, but does not come from mounds of wealth or insiderness either.
He grew up middle-class in Detroit.
His dad worked his whole life in the automotive industry as an engineer.
Went to Michigan for college, a good school but not Stanford/Harvard.
Stumbled into programming super young, which got him into the hacker culture in college, which led to him getting exposed to startups fairly early on.
While our paths are not identical, it’s fair to say that both of us at age 22 were not the world’s most sought after founders. VCs were not lining up at the door to give us money. We both would have had a hard time starting our current company as 22-year-old nobodies with limited experiences and networks.
So that’s where we started. Now let’s run through how we built from there to here.
How we built our unfair advantages
Steven and I both were involved in multiple startup roles over the years leading up to this company. Steven even more so than me (because he’s dope and significantly cooler than I am if we’re being honest). So I’m just going to emphasize the roles which impacted our trajectories the most.
Steven’s career in startups
Sharing this quote from Steven’s read me in our internal company Notion as it does a better job of describing his work in startups and engineering than I will.
I stumbled into programming in middle school in 2009 when a local bookstore was doing a fire sale and the only books left there were O’Reilly programming textbooks. I thought “what a deal, 90% off”, bought a book on iOS 2, and started making apps. I then got deep into science in high school and did some research internships in chemistry and bioinformatics, including Harvard Medical where I was working on protein structure prediction. I soon went to my first hackathon, MHacks, and decided startups were more fun and I wanted to go to University of Michigan and spend more time with these hackers.
Soon thereafter, I was drawn to SF. I took some time off school to explore building startups while freelancing to pay the bills. It was a lot of fun, and I built some MVPs I was really proud of, both for me and for my friends’ startups. I met some great people and ultimately grew a lot, but I decided I wanted more math and theory work, so I went back to school to study ML.
I studied reinforcement learning and did my Master’s degree in it. I went back out to SF to intern at Google and Quora. I loved my experience at both. I was working on NLP for Search at Google and Ads Ranking at Quora.
I ultimately still found I loved early stage startups more than anything, so decided to join my friend’s proptech startup. Built my first “real world” web and mobile products. Even though COVID happened, that startup still managed to survive and even grow and was acquired by Landing. It was a great experience and I was given full control over the product engineering with a team of 4 engineers.
I later decided to join On Deck, which was - at the time - looking to reinvent education by centering around digital, cohort-based communities. I joined as one of the first engineers and later became one of the first managers and eventually Head of Engineering. In 2021 we skyrocketed from < $1M revenue to > $20M revenue in just a few years. At its peak, we were nearly 25 engineers. I still stuck with it through a handful of these layoffs and we built some beloved things for our community, including being early on using GPT for semantic search through our community knowledge. It was an exciting time. I met lots of incredible people through On Deck, including Andrew.
Ultimately, when Andrew told me he was starting a company, it was an easy decision to join him.
Steven’s literally been working on his craft as an engineer since before he was a teenager. He’s hacked on dozens of products and companies over the years. And he had two very serious tours of duty at different startups in senior engineering roles.
When you spend time with him and observe the people he surrounds himself with, you can see the passion for his work and dedication to mastery he exudes. None of that happened overnight.
My career in startups
My really big break was convincing On Deck to hire me right as they started to kick into hypergrowth. On Deck put the first recognizable stamp on my resume. The founders were respected, known commodities in Silicon Valley, etc. And for a couple years we were one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley, raising $100M+ from Founders Fund, Tiger, and other names you’d know (it was kind of a party round of the “it’s time to build” crowd + Tiger because they invested in everything back then).
I had several roles at On Deck (most notable was building On Deck Angels), got promoted a few times, and built the foundation of what is my network today.
On Deck is also how I started angel investing. Not because I was rich. But because I had access to good companies raising money + people with money that invested in startups – all at a time when the market had never been hotter.
On Deck is where I met Jordi (founder/CEO of Capital) and Josh (first or second employee depending on who you ask). Party Round / Capital went through a lot of ups and downs, but for most of 2022, we were one of the hottest startups in tech. Our marketing owned Twitter. Our customers and investors included some of the most notable names in tech.
Hard work compounds
So when you sum up what amounts to several years of hard work that Steven and I put into our respective startup careers, it’s actually pretty simple to back your way into how we built our networks and earned a degree of credibility in the startup ecosystem.
I met thousands of founders, investors, and operators at On Deck and Capital and became a young but moderately respected startup operator myself (emphasis on the moderate).
Steven became a deeply respected engineer with offers to be head of eng or co-founder/CTO at multiple other companies post-On Deck.
Build don’t network
A key thing to underscore here isn’t that we did a lot of networking through these roles.
The work we did and the way we did it matters just as much. People won’t respect you just because you briefly met at some happy hour and connected on LinkedIn. Respect and trust is built, earned, and compounded over long periods of time.
Also, if you think of networking as networking and not building relationships, helping folks when you can, and idk – being a good human – you’re probably ngmi.
Why network & credibility matters
All of this matters because 1. Silicon Valley is a highly networked place, and 2. The world runs on credibility and relationships.
No investor is going to trust someone they don’t know with capital. It's really damn hard to succeed and get anything done if you're not part of some network and don’t have some form of credibility.
The world runs on this stuff.
A founder who went to Stanford, worked at Stripe or Ramp, is mutuals with a bunch of the same people, etc. – is going to more easily get investor meetings. That's just the way the world works.
There are two ways to respond to this reality.
One is to be upset about it and complain about how unfair the world is.
The other is to figure out how you become one of those people who has the network and respect to accomplish the things you want to accomplish.
You don’t need to be ex-Open AI, Paul Graham’s favorite child, or whatever. You just need to earn enough credibility to get the doors to open and make shit happen.
Steven and I were not part of some unicorn outcome. None of the startups we’ve worked at ultimately had stratospheric success. Capital had a mediocre exit. On Deck has been through many well documented struggles. Barsala’s exit was okay but nothing out of this world. Neither of us have ever made any money from our equity in these companies. As a matter of fact, I’ve lost money on it.
Micro easy. Macro hard
I’ll end on this. Our paths to this point, to build the “advantages” that we have, are both hard and easy at the same time.
The formula
Join a startup(s)
Work really hard
Do what you say you’ll do
Do the best you can to act with high integrity and treat people well
Build real relationships (meaning you help people not just take)
And keep doing it for years
It's actually quite easy to do the above in the micro, but it's macro hard because you have to spend years doing it.
Our paths don’t require that much luck. You just need some founder or startup to give you a chance and then work your way up from there.
What this pathway does require is carving out your own path to some degree and playing the long game. Like I said, simple not easy.
Subscribe if you want to receive the post I’m writing on running the fundraising process itself. Thanks to Jack, Rameel, and Steven for edits/feedback and to Matt for pushing me to write more about this stuff.