How to Raise Your First Round (When You Know No One) | Aman Mann, Founder of Procurify

Aman (00:00):

I’m not even kidding. This guy sits me down. He’s like, “Okay, you got your notebook ready, your pen?” He’s like, “I’m going to tell you how to build your startup.” I’m like, “Okay, here we go. Yes.” Smartest guy I’ve ever met. Mathematical genius. He’s like, “People, product, funding, all those things you think that matter, throw it out the window.” He’s like, “The only thing that matters is that your limit is just above your dreams.”

Pablo (00:20):

Interesting.

Aman (00:22):

I’m like, “What?”

Pablo (00:23):

Welcome to the Product Market Fit Show, brought to you by Mistral, a seed stage firm based in Canada. I’m Pablo. I’m a founder turned VC. My goal is to help early-stage founders like you find product market fit. Today our guest is Aman, the founder and CEO of Procurify, which is a spend management and procurement software startup out of Vancouver. The topic of today’s episode is how to raise your first round. Welcome to the show, Aman. It’s a pleasure to have you.

Aman (00:56):

Thanks, Pablo. Excited to be here.

Pablo (00:58):

Maybe we start diving in, I’m just curious. To date, how much have you raised over at Procurify?

Aman (01:05):

I would put it somewhere between 25, 30 million USD.

Pablo (01:09):

If you think about the perspective of a first-time founder, especially one that doesn’t necessarily have a baked in network, I think raising those first rounds – I’ve gone through it. It’s pretty daunting. It’s kind of like, where do I really start? Who are these angel investors? How do I find them? All these sort of questions. I think the best way to learn really is by example. I don’t think there’s a clear playbook for this yet. What’s the origin story around Procurify? Where were you when you came up with the idea? Just to set some groundwork, some context.

Aman (01:40):

I’ve been telling people lately Procurify was never started as a tech company. We actually started by just three of us, my two other co-founders, on just wanting to solve a problem inside organizations we saw was a repeated pattern. Our goal was just how do we solve that problem. Inadvertently, it turned into a tech company. It wasn’t like we had a bunch of technology and we were like, “We want to go solve a problem.” As we were going into these organizations, we saw just a repeated pattern of problem, which was this inherent lack of management around the decision making of spending money. That caused a ridiculous amount of problems from bottlenecks, from companies being shut down from overspending, people losing their jobs, projects, delays and frustrations and just mismanagement of funds. 

Aman (02:31):

We just thought, okay, how do we solve this problem? We found technology to be an underlying factor to this. It was really about how do they think about their processes, how do they think about the systems, what kind of decisions do they want to make. Then we were building technology around that. That’s really the formation of how it happened. Then we just started to find ourselves leveraging more and more technology to solve this problem and then started getting ourselves into the technology space.

Pablo (02:59):

You mentioned you’re going into these companies. Were you a consultant? First of all, what year is it? Were you a consultant at first, or were you working for some company, helping companies with their spend?

Aman (03:07):

We actually just a vision of three components. We’re actually looking at a few different problems inside organizations. We’re using what is the future, is it going to be sustainable. Technology is going to be an underlying factor to that sustainability. Then innovation is going to be critical to move those two layers forward. We started to see a few different problems in about 2012. At the end of 2012 we really got critical about Procurify being the core focus, which is just spend. That hit all three intersection pillars for us on how to manage this side of the organization. We’re really passionate about helping organizations make better decisions so that people don’t lose their jobs, so that they can commit to their own mission and drive that forward. How do we just help them with this area that has such a lack of visibility and experience inside most?

Aman (03:57):

This was us as – graduating school was where we – we all went to school in Vancouver, and we met there actually. We were just put in a group together. We decided to look at these problems. Post-school, I actually just went around as a student to organizations and just knocked on their door. I’m like, “I’m in school. Let me learn about your organization,” because trust me, going as a random stranger and saying, “Hey, tell me your problems,” they’re like, “Who are you? Get out.” Then it’s like, “I’m a student.” Then they’re like, “Oh great, we’ll be happy to share everything.” I was like, “Cool.” Then just a pattern – just after a hundred companies or organizations, talking to them, the pattern was clear.

Pablo (04:39):

I could tell you about that student line. I’ve used it. Speaking with other founders – actually Mallory from Bridget I remember used it. It’s just such a good line, especially if you’re a first-time founder. You may very likely be on the younger side. If you are a student or were just a student and can –

Aman (04:54):

Exactly. Definitely.

Pablo (04:57):

I would definitely leverage that for customer discovery. I think it’s great. You go through a hundred conversations, a lot of customer discovery. You start identifying this problem around spend. When is it that you start to decide – because as you said, at first it was in technology, so you may not have been thinking too much about the fundraising element of it. At some point it seems like you start realizing that technology can really help solve this. Is that when you started to realize we may need some funding to do this, or do you start building things on your own? When does the fundraising piece enter the picture?

Aman (05:24):

I’m going to just tell you how it happened for me. It was very serendipitous.

Pablo (05:27):

That’s the best way to do it. That’s right. All right, man.

Aman (05:29):

We had started solving this, looking at this problem. We had got a $400-a-month office. It was just ghetto. We just started making calls to see if we could solve this problem for companies. We’re like, “We want to solve this problem for you.” I was cold calling and doing that stuff. We were just trying to – again, focused on we have this tiny little thing we’ve created. We’re trying to just get into companies and put it in and solve that problem. We were trying to self-generate our revenue. We were doing small things during that time to try and keep moving forward. I was sleeping in that office. I can’t suggest that. What ended up happening was there was just this pitch competition that was held by Startup Canada or something like that.

Aman (06:09):

It was like, what’s your aha moment? I was like, “I’m never going to get into that, but I’ll tell you what isn’t my aha moment,” or something. I was going to tell them the exact opposite of what they want to hear. I was like, “Cool.” I never thought about it. A few weeks later, I get a response going, “Hey, we really want you to be part of this pitch competition.” I was like, “What the... “ I was like, “All right.” I went there and I had some fun, in the sense I didn’t think anybody really cared about our space, and it wasn’t really sexy. I put a card under everyone’s chair. I did some theatrics on that side. The card said grateful on one side, and the other side – which is I believe you need to be grateful to really have a perspective and empathy for people. 

Aman (06:50):

You have to come from a grounded gratitude state. The other side was, “There is no such thing as failure, only outcomes.” I really believe that we get too caught up in the idea of failure versus science. The scientific method is just not looking at it as a failure point, but an outcome to the next stage to learn from and iterate to the ultimate outcome, or you find something innovative and cool during those outcomes. We as humans typically associate it as a failure point versus an outcome. That was important for me.

Pablo (07:22):

Sorry, just to be clear, you went in for the event and Oprah style put these things below everyone?

Aman (07:27):

Yeah, 450 chairs. At the pitch, I’m like, “Let me tell you other things, because I know you don’t care probably what I do. Reach under your chairs.” They were like, “What is this?” I actually keep the – I always keep a memory of the card just with me. Then I did a Gagnam dance at the end. Listen, I get no one probably even had a clue within 90 seconds what we actually did, but it got people’s attention. I won second. I didn’t win first. Actually, first was Thinkific. We had this small thing going on. I was second. I was like, “Cool, you got a better pitch.” He was good.

Aman (08:13):

The prize was meet Ryan Holmes, a lunch with an investor, a thousand dollar Xbox package. I was trying to get to Ryan Holmes. Greg at Thinkific, he was first. He picked Ryan. It was between a Xbox package and a lunch with an investor. I was like, “Man.” I’m like, “A thousand dollar lunch with an investor?” because it was a thousand dollars Xbox package. I don’t have money. I’m like, “Man, Xbox would be cool right now.” I’m like, “What the hell? I’ll wing it. I’ll meet this investor.” I don’t even know anything about him. I go to lunch. It’s sushi. It’s a $20 lunch. This isn’t anything. I meet with him.

Pablo (08:54):

Doesn’t look like good ROI so far.

Aman (08:55):

<Laugh> Exactly. I meet with him, and he’s like, “I like what you’re doing.” I wasn’t even thinking about investment. I was just like, “Who is this guy?” At that time I started picking up 37 Signals books and things like that around what they did, bootstrap and those kind of things. I was starting to learn more about technology space.

Pablo (09:15):

You weren’t even in fundraising mode. You weren’t doing pitches, pitch events. This was the first one just randomly.

Aman (09:20):

Yeah, randomly. He’s like, “I’ll watch you for six months, but I’m not interested right now.” I’m like, “Okay, cool.” He’s like, “I’ll make an intro to an accelerator that I think you should be a part of. It’s closed. The application process is closed, but I think you should meet them.” Next day I go to their office. I meet with them. They’re like, “Okay, you’re in.” During that time, we just started getting more excited about what is it if we wanted to create a tech company? What would we want to do? At that time we listed out advisors we would want to have. Mark Cuban’s name was on that list. In the back of his book, he had his email address. We just shipped him an email, and he responded, which was just – we were like giddy little schoolkids at that point to get a response from him. 

Pablo (10:10):

I have to ask the details. What’s the subject line of that email? What are you saying? <Laugh> I want to know. I emailed Mark Cuban, and he didn’t reply. I just want that to be out there. <Laugh> 

Aman (10:23):

It was ridiculous. It was just like, “Huge fans. We got to talk to you. Big things coming from Procurify.” It wasn’t about money. I think that was the thing. I think we were so genuinely looking for him to just talk to us about advice, he just said, “Okay, fine, I’ll talk to you.”

Pablo (10:43):

It was one email. It’s not like you send him one, didn’t reply.

Aman (10:46):

One email, yeah. I found out that this man is like a robot almost on emails. He does at any given point in his life reply if he wants to. It could be 3 a.m., 2 p.m., 9 a.m. It’s just wild. He replied and then he rejected us. He’s like, “I don’t have time for this. I don’t have time to advise.” We were like, “Oh, damn.” Then we got in a grow lab. We shot that over to him and was like, “Hey listen, we got into this accelerator. Here’s all the things we’re doing. You got to give us time.” He sends us actually a response. He’s like, “What do you want?” We’re like, “I don’t know, we were thinking advisor.” He’s like, “What do you want from me? You want me to invest?” We were like, “If you want to invest, that’s cool. We didn’t think about – we didn’t think about that.” He’s like, “Fine, I’ll take a look.” He put his team on us while we were going through the accelerator. He actually ended up becoming an investor three months later. He made us a deal. That was a wild journey. That was the circumstance of that. That wasn’t real fundraising. That wasn’t real investing.

Pablo (11:53):

Try to leverage that, you maybe had other conversations. You were like, “Hey, Mark Cuban’s investing. You guys got to go ahead and follow.”

Aman (11:58):

It’s crazy. I don’t think I was smart enough to do that. <Laugh> literally, I should have. Locally, it was a way for us to get out of the trenches, and we did start getting some degree of attention. We put Mark Cuban as our – his face on our website. It was his banner. It was just a tagline going, “These guys are doing some cool stuff. Mark Cuban.” That was our website for over a year.

Pablo (12:27):

That is epic. You did leverage it. You leveraged it somehow. I don’t know if that’s how you do it.

Aman (12:31):

Exactly. It was strategically like, “What do these people do?” I could tell you we were getting customer attention, because Mark Cuban started making it during that time in Shark Tank. I actually got not necessarily investor attention, but customers were coming towards our direction, because they’re like, “We like Mark Cuban. We watch his show. I’ll check out your product.” That was interesting for us. Again, at this time, I wasn’t thinking investors. I was thinking customers. I don’t know if that’s the nature of Canada and just the way we think. It was back then harder to raise. The only thing I was thinking about was how do I generate revenue? That will be the way we go forward. 

Aman (13:13):

Fast forward, we’re out of the accelerator. I don’t land any investors. Nothing really comes out of that. We’re just growing slightly and surviving on some revenue and Mark Cuban. Later that year, I end up going into this moment where it’s like, if we’re going to become the real technology company, we’re really going to focus on building that. We know what we want to be, and we know who we feel like we are at this stage, and we’ve got some traction. Everyone just keeps pointing to San Francisco. I had never been there. 

Pablo (13:46):

This is 2014-ish?

Aman (13:48):

Yeah, exactly.

Pablo (13:49):

This is back when it was SV or nothing. That’s right.

Aman (13:52):

It’s a valley or nothing. That’s all I kept hearing. All the books I read with all the inspirational people and companies was like, San Francisco. We just took a one-way ticket, no return flight, said, “Okay, we’re going to go there for two weeks. If it doesn’t work out, we’ll turn back.” At that time, Palo Alto was still really heavily VC-oriented, because everyone over the last years had moved to San Francisco to be where all the cool kids are. San Francisco is now where you go to pitch and do those things. Palo Alto is where we landed. It was ridiculous. I hate spending money. We are limited on cash at this time. It was 300 bucks a night to sleep on a floor in a garage of a house that had 7 other people living in it. I was like, “What is this?” I was like, “All right, sure, I guess this is how we do it. I don’t know.”

Pablo (14:46):

Because you dropped in. You didn’t even have anything booked. You just literally went and you’re like, “All right.”

Aman (14:50):

Yeah, we dropped in. Then we found this network list of people’s emails, this network of entrepreneurs or Palo Alto people, SF people. It was just a list.

Pablo (15:08):

Sorry, where’d you come – that list was where?

Aman (15:09):

We were just searching online for networks to go to and to find. It was a list of just – I can’t even remember, just a list of a hundred people or something – I don’t know, 50, maybe a hundred. We send out a blast out at emails. At this point we’ve got nothing. There’s no meetings, nothing. We’re like, “We’ll try this blast out.” One person responds. I’m like, “Cool, I’ll go meet this person. He seems cool.” I meet on that Palo Alto Sand Hill Road. I’m learning all about this. Sand Hill Road, that’s where everything started, Facebook invested, Google got invested. I’m like, “Cool, this is pretty hype.” I’m feeling jazzed. I’m meeting this person at that Starbucks. I’m being told this is the famous Starbucks from the people I’m living with at this...

Aman (15:53):

If you ever go to San Francisco, I do suggest people go try and find hacker houses or those kind of thing. The network of people is really cool. You learn a lot from others and the cycle that they’re on. I got to pick up a lot of knowledge just in that moment through those relationships. I meet this guy. Fifteen minutes conversation, and he’s like, “What can I do for you?” As you know, I’m only focused on revenue. I’m still not thinking fundraising, nothing. I don’t know what I’m doing, by the way. 

Pablo (16:24):

Why are you in Palo Alto if you’re not thinking – you went to Palo Alto without thinking fundraising? You were thinking what?

Aman (16:29):

Learn. How do I learn from these amazing companies that have been super successful. What is out there? What is going on there? I’m naïve at this stage. Don’t tell my investors. Don’t tell people. I hope when you’re watching me, you don’t think of me as an idiot. I’m sitting with this guy for 15 minutes. By the way, I pitched in Vancouver to an investor. They said, “What is your 10-year business plan?” I was like, “If I had a 10-year business plan, for the love of God, I wouldn’t be here right now.” I didn’t understand the circumstances of what’s different, even the way people treat you in San Francisco. I’m in survival mode. I’m like, “Customers equals revenue.” The first thing that comes out of my mouth is like, “I would love introductions to customers, potential customers, anybody you think might want to use this product.”

Aman (17:11):

By the way, Mark Cuban is still on our website at that time. This guy, he’s like, “I can’t do that, but I can give you some money.” I was like, “Excuse me?” He’s like, “Yeah, a hundred, 150.” I think for just a slight split second I’m thinking $150. He’s like, “Yeah, 150,000.” I literally jaw dropped. I’m no one to this human. He’s like, “One second,” picks up his phone, calls his wife. He’s like, “She’s the CFO. She handles the finance.” Five minutes later, I’m in Great Clips while their son is getting a haircut. I’m pitching his wife. They become the most amazing investor advisors I could’ve ever dreamed of in my life. 

Aman (17:54):

This man sold his first company for half a billion dollars, which was Gluster. It was the backbone to Netflix and iTunes at the time – object storage. They now are doing their second startup, which raised I think above a billion dollar valuation just recently, MinIO, which is competing with S3 I believe, Amazon web service’s storage. Through that process of meeting him and him trusting me and me getting to get more – he taught me ridiculous lessons in life that just made me feel more confident in what I was wanting to build and where I wanted to go. The advice he gave me had nothing to do with business strategy, nothing to do with those things. The most brilliant guy I ever met gave me just motivational talks in the weirdest Yoda way that I could’ve ever imagined.

Pablo (18:42):

What are some of the key principles?

Aman (18:44):

Oh, man, you want to know? The one I try to tell people was – I’m not even kidding. This guy sits me down. He’s like, “Okay, you got your notebook ready, your pen?” He’s like, “I’m going to tell you how to build your startup.” I’m like, “Okay, here we go, yes.” Smartest guy I’ve ever met, mathematical genius. His name is Nan Parizani. He’s like, “People, product, funding, all those things you think that matter, throw it out the window.” He’s like, “The only thing that matters is that your limit is just above your dreams.” I’m like, “What?” This man I’ve never met tells me this. I’m not kidding. It was crazy to me to have these types of conversations. Maybe this part is going to be more for people – resonate with me, which is you’re insecure.

Aman (19:33):

You have no idea how to do the things that you see other people who you believe are much smarter than you do. I’m sitting at this guy’s house. It was a pretty nice place. He’s got Stanford graduates coming in and out of his house, doctors, AI geniuses. They’re coming in and out of his house that entire day with brilliant ideas. I get this crazy sense of anxiety and panic. I stand up and I look at him. I’m not kidding. I literally said this. I’m like, “Why are you investing in us? You have no idea who we are. We’re nowhere near as smart as you. What are you doing? What in your right mind makes you think that this is a good idea to invest in us?” I’m like, “We’re nowhere near these people.” He looks at me. He stands up. He’s like, “Aman, Amazon started by selling used books. Integrity is everything.” He walked away. That’s it. I know. I’ve got a bunch of other ones, but those are the two I’ll stick with. Then this guy ends up making introductions to investors through that process of me getting to know him.

Pablo (20:41):

I have a couple questions. First, from Mark Cuban you’d raised how much, a couple hundred thousand?

Aman (20:46):

Yeah, a couple hundred thousand from him.

Pablo (20:47):

This guy, he comes in with another 150. That’s a meaningful amount at that point. The question that comes to my mind is you can easily look at this and just call it, because there’s people out there, and they’re struggling to raise half a million dollars, and they’re doing pitch after pitch after pitch, and they’re not raising. It sounds like you didn’t necessarily have insane revenue or crazy growth or something like that that makes it obvious, and yet you talked to Mark Cuban a few times, and he invests. You have a 15-minute meeting with this other guy. You’re not even trying to raise. He invests, when he’s not investing in these other really smart people. You’ve obviously had a lot of time to think about it. There’s obviously an element of luck to everything. Besides that, what do you think you were doing right that resonated with these two? Is it just pure luck, or is there something you can look at and say –

Aman (21:30):

It depends on who you’re going to go for. There are people that you’ll have to – you’ll have to go through a lot of rejections. I can tell you, post that experience, my fundraising experiences were 99% rejections. I had to deal with nos insanely throughout my years to survive and keep growing, because I – after I got through that fun little bit, which I was like, “This is amazing,” I also didn’t realize the fundraising cycles that I needed to take into account for the direction in which I wanted to go. I would always raise just slightly less than I actually needed versus raising more for the time frame in which you need to raise. I’ve learned the very hard way what that really means. You don’t want to be going out fundraising to survive and keep going because you didn’t hit the milestones which you needed more money for.

Aman (22:18):

There’s things there that I fully learned and understand that I didn’t understand prior to going through this initial journey. When I met these people, they I think resonated with the values perspective – this is my assumption – that I have. There’s some people that are going to invest in We Work and the Ubers, the confidence level of like, “I’m going to bulldoze. I’m going to achieve this result. I’m going to hit that number.” They want to get in on that. They want that human that’s going to cut and kill its way to the top. I definitely am not that person. I think a lot of people I’ve found have rejected me over the periods through some of that investor side. At that early stage, I got lucky in the sense to get myself in front of people who saw somebody trying to solve a problem for customers, because I really truly believed in it and I cared about helping. I want to believe that that was part of the nature in which the conversations went through.

Pablo (23:14):

That makes sense. I do think there’s a level of authenticity and integrity there that does matter. I think the best angel investors don’t invest, because in year 10 you’re going to do X revenue. They invest because they believe in you. There seems to be an element of that that happened in those first two. That’s helpful. Now you get into fundraising mode. How much are you trying to raise? Maybe take us through some of those discussions and how those went.

Aman (23:40):

Man, I had no idea how much I was raising. I could barely tell myself when they had given me that. It was crazy. I’m probably going to look like – I realize I’m probably digging my own grave here for people’s opinion of me. I genuinely was not – I had no clue what I was doing. When I was pitching, I created a deck that week in that garage place. That guy let me use his computer. I created a deck. My advisor helped me through some of that initial deck. I just put 500,000. I just put 500,000. I was like, “What could I not do with 500,000 when I haven’t had anything in the first place?” Was that smart? Should I have looked for more? Should I have leveraged the fact that I did have some momentum in those things? I probably should’ve done that. Five hundred is good, but it’s not great, especially when you’re –

Pablo (24:31):

I’ll say this. I have to mention, it’s crazy how much in the earliest days when you’re used to bootstrapping – my co-founder’s name was Lee. He said to me – he’s like, “If we had a million dollars, we could do anything. If we had a million dollars, we could do anything.”

Aman (24:50):

That’s right. I know.

Pablo (24:51):

Half a million dollars in my bank account, I’m good to go. Are you kidding me?

Aman (24:55):

I’m going to build the world.

Pablo (24:57):

It’s crazy. Then you start spending. It’s just like personal life. Once you start spending, it’s so easy to spend.

Aman (25:04):

Exactly. It was crazy. You just start to realize what it takes to truly build a company and what it truly takes to make the mistakes you need to. If I had thoughtfully thought – and understanding what I understand today, I would go back in time and tell myself, “The product you’re going to build is going to take many years to hit the specific product market fit that you’re looking for.” You can get earlier stage customers to invest into continuously delivering on that longer-term goal. You’ve got to raise more. Otherwise, you’re going to keep going back. If I had built out that narrative, the complexity of the problem we were solving in the infrastructure it would take to build that, I believe I probably could’ve raised money earlier at a much – more money. Maybe I would’ve got nothing. I don’t know. I feel like that’s the perspective in which I’m learning from my past.

Pablo (25:58):

Makes sense. Going back to it, so you set on 500,000. You start getting intros. How do those conversations go?

Aman (26:06):

I don’t know. They’re like, “Who is this guy? You’ve got Mark Cuban on your team. Who are you? What is this? You’re from what town in where?” Vancouver at that time, trust me, was not on any map. What’s amazing about San Francisco and Palo Alto, there have been amazing people that just want to help you and pay it forward. Once you get somebody interested, you continuously have this flow of introductions to introductions to introductions. People are willing to take 10, 15 minutes with you just to see, because they’ve been there. They’ve gone through it. That was the catalyst at that point. I just started meeting new people, getting new introductions from them and my current advisor investor – introductions from him. The process kept flowing.

Aman (26:57):

I had never pitched really to an investor with a deck. I’d done that accelerator thing. I can tell you it’s far different when you’re in the real world. I went through the process of just pitching a bunch of investors. I actually stopped at – I pitched a few, but I stopped at one investor that I just found aligned to my values and integrity at the same time. I actually didn’t go looking for others. I just made it my mission to get them on board. Initially they were thinking about it – wonderful humans, Nexus venture partners. They just cared. They were super supportive. Naren Gupta, who passed away end of last year, the founder of the fund, was an amazing, brilliant mind who just was super kind and humble.

Aman (27:48):

I found that the whole team were just humble humans. I just wanted to really work with them and then heard really engaging, high references to that state of working with them. I’ll tell you the story. They made me an offer. I thought it was too low. This guy who had never had anything all of a sudden thinks he can say it’s too low, just because Mark Cuban got in. I needed to create some – I wanted to create depth and a gap between that so it was continuous improvement. I said no to their offer initially. I went home, curled myself in a ball. I’m pretty sure I had a panic attack. I don’t know if there was tears or not. I was like, “What did I do?

Aman (28:30):

Why did I do this? Am I an idiot?” That’s clearly a pattern on my side. I called them the nextk day. I was like, “Listen, I want to talk to you guys. I want to work this out.” I go to their office. I meet with two of the partners. We sit in the office. I’m like, “I’m not leaving here until we have a deal.” He looks at his – he looks at the clock. He looks at the clock, and he was like, “I have to be out of this room at 3.” It’s an hour from – it’s 2. He’s like, “I have to be out of here at 3 for my next meeting.” I’m like, “I’m not leaving here until 3,” when you don’t know what you’re doing.

Pablo (29:09):

It’s true.

Aman (29:09):

I walked out of that room with a deal.

Pablo (29:15):

One that was better than the original one, maybe not exactly what you wanted, or somewhere in between?

Aman (29:20):

I was happy. It was crazy. They took a chance too. I’m very grateful for that chance they took.

Pablo (29:26):

If you could dig into that a little bit – and I’ll say this. Every now and then, founder meets an investor and puts more time into that one than others. The regular advice is it’s a numbers game. Just go out, meet people. Obviously, you don’t want somebody you have a bad vibe with. Otherwise, if somebody’s not interested, move on to the next sort of thing. You seem to have taken a little bit of a different approach. Obviously, there was someone interested. It’s not like they totally said no. They had some interest. They just weren’t there. You got them all the way through, which is unconventional. Then to try and raise the price without competing offers is really –

Aman (29:58):

I know. That’s ridiculous. In my head I’m like, I could’ve taken that offer to a bunch of places. I could’ve probably built out this round. It was ridiculous. 

Pablo (30:08):

What argument did you use to them to say, hey, you should just up your valuation.

Aman (30:13):

I wish I could go back to – I think I blanked. I blanked out in that timeframe. I wish I could share that. I have no clue what happened in that hour. It was clearly something.

Pablo (30:27):

Some black box stuff went down, and you walked out. That was what? Was that half a million or was that more that round?

Aman (30:34):

Half a million at the time.

Pablo (30:36):

That was the end of – would you say that was the end of the – obviously, you raised a lot more money, but did you stop fundraising then and go build, or did you keep stacking on top?

Aman (30:44):

I did, but that was a mistake. I just took the money thinking I’m going to go build the world. Then I was like, “Okay.” Let’s say six months later I was like, “Oh, snap. Okay.” It took me a few returns to learn my lesson. People who don’t know and don’t know where to start, the biggest lesson I’ve learned is just start. Just try. Understand it’s going to be failures. Those are just outcomes. You’re just going to keep iterating from those outcomes. Just keep making action. Even if it’s just getting up in the morning and sending one more email, it’s just momentum to a direction that something will be learned from that process. It’s when we stop – and I think if you’re out to build a tech company or you’re out to raise a bunch of money or you’re out because you want to be that next rock star, that can work, but the funnel of how many people make it through that lens is a lot smaller than if you go and say, “I’m really trying to solve a problem. Here’s the people I want to help. Here’s why I care about building this organization to solve these problems and the type of organization I want to build.” If you can come from that lens, I’ve seen there’s a lot more opportunity for people to find the right people to connect with.

Pablo (31:58):

Absolutely. We’ll stop there. That was an amazing set of stories. I do think that’s the lesson is that – because you could look at this and say this guy gets lucky a couple times and then somehow mysteriously just re-negotiates a valuation, and he walks out with this round. The reality is underlying all that is – you kept saying this. You were focused on revenue. You were focused on customers. That matters. That matters a lot to not buy – you didn’t buy into the hype. Things started happening and so you went into it. It wasn’t a, “I’m going to raise this money money. This valuation is what I’m going to do,” as the first principle. The first principle was, “I’m going to deliver value to this set of customers that genuinely believe in it.”

Pablo (32:36):

Then you went from there. I think that’s truly important. The other piece that really stands out is a certain level of authenticity and of doing these low probability things that could work, like this email to Mark Cuban, this crazy thing at the pitch event, these things that you’re like – they’re wild, but they came to you, and you did them. You went forward with it. There’s a serendipity element there that is really common, frankly, with fundraising. Anyways, Aman, thanks a lot for taking the time to chat with us. It was super, super helpful.

Aman (33:08):

Thank you for having me.

Pablo (33:09):

No worries. Thank you very much. Have a good one. Thank you so much for listening all the way through. It’s been a pleasure having you here. Make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode.