This content was created by GHION.AI . This content was uploaded by GHION.AI . This is a YouTube video titled "Dan Berkenstock: The Excitement of Early Days" created on March 7, 2013, featuring Dan Berkenstock discussing the early days of starting a company, including setting up the business, pitching to venture capitalists, and eventually securing a $3 million Series A funding from Khosla Ventures.
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And so after the class finished, January, I think, 15th, we worked with the attorney we had met in the class to put in place the documentation to actually have a registered company. And at that point, you go out, you buy the GoDaddy domain, you get your email address set up, you put that signature line in there and you send yourself an email. And it's like the coolest thing ever. I just got an email from myself at my own company. And it felt like a company at the time, which is funny because it wasn't a company at all. It was just four of us hanging out in John's living room with his cats that scratched everything, including Ching Yu's face and Julian's arms and all of our MacBook Pros. And so from there it felt like a company where we had our Monday morning meetings. We still have Monday morning meetings today, and more people at them. But we sat down our action items and we went after trying to do them and trying to improve our story, and we started looking around for introductions to people that might be interested in financing something as different as an enterprise that involved satellites. And so, as I'm sure many of you have already seen and know, Stanford has an amazing set of resources to help get you out there and actually talk to people that can make these things a reality. And so we spent for six and a half months, we spent at least two days a week doing three pitches a day to over 50 different venture capital firms. I had more lattes at Koopa Cafe than a will ever be able to detox out of my system for the rest of my life. And we'd get to the third pitch of the day and we'd all be so slap happy that it'd be like throwing a football back and forth. We'd all deliver each other's lines and we just honed it and worked it and pushed it and called more customers and met more people and asked for more introductions. And eventually we got introduced to Vinod Khosla and we went and gave a pitch at Khosla Ventures, which after a lot of digging and fact checking, turned into a $3 million Series A, which allowed us to move out of John's living room into what we thought was an amazing 2,100 square foot office that had a nice little machine shop in the back with carpet on the ground in a conference room, but which felt like a real.
