Kate McAndrew - Raising Venture Capital - Venture 101

Foreign. We're talking about venture capital today. How, when to use it, what to know about it, particular early stage vc, but talk about it in general. Got a great guest coming up. Everyone. My name is Bill Gallagher, scaling coach and host of this Scaling up business podcast. Podcast. Our show comes to you every week with something to do with the world of growing your company. So mostly a little bit later stage, but many of our client companies are venture funded and of course around California. I'm in Seattle today, but in general based out of the Bay Area, we have a lot of companies that build something really cool with some venture backing. So that's what we're talking about today. And in the world of scaling up, of course, we've got all our shows, hundreds of shows now. Wherever you're watching this now, LinkedIn, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, even Spotify might be listening. Apple podcasts our biggest audience really. So wherever it is, like subscribe, turn on your notifications, get it every week. We do a couple a week most weeks. So happy to have you here. You can find all those shows and more, hundreds of them. Now the back catalog@scalingcoach.com to scalingcoach.com find out about not only the shows but also all our other programs and offerings, that kind of thing there. All right, I want to Bring on Kate McAndrew. Kate. So Kate is a co founder and general partner at B. It's a proper, that's not a common kind of a name or pronunciation in the United States, but founder of Women in Hardware and she's been a partner at Bolt and helped build the whole world of venture and accelerator sort of early stage, first round lead investor, board member. She's been involved in a lot of stuff for a long time and she's going to tell us more about all that in the world of venture. Kate, welcome to the show.

Thank you for having me. I'm delighted to be here on a beautiful Friday morning in San Francisco.

Is it beautiful in San Francisco?

It is. I'm looking out my office window and it's blue skies and cypress trees and I have no complaints.

I'm up in Seattle where it's rainy today.

Aha. Well, I'm winning then.

It, it fits the stereotype, actually. It was really beautiful here for a couple days, but then the rain came back in, so. So we're going to get into all of your world a little bit. You know, before we talk about balconst and your work and some gifts, share some stories, tell us a little bit more about how you came to this. You have an interesting story about getting into venture and accelerator programs and things like that. So tell a little bit of that story.

Sure. So I grew up in Pasadena, California and went off to college to double major in art history and cultural studies.

Which is about very VC background.

Yeah, it's about what you would think if you knew 100%, you would never go into like an industry that's generally oriented around finance and engineering. Right. So my history and cultural studies, I graduated in 2009 into the teeth of the global financial crisis. There were very few jobs, let alone art world jobs. And so I found myself in this self reflective moment of like, well, what can I do that people will pay me for? And so I found this interesting.

That makes money.

Yeah, gotta pay your bills. Right. So I found this interesting niche working with founders and executives in the Los Angeles area, teaching them about social media and social media strategy. And if you can imagine, back in 2009, there was no such thing as a Facebook business page. Right. We were still hacking like personal profiles to look like business profiles and was kind of the wild, wild west. And I did that for about a year and a half. And what was really interesting about it was I figured out that I had a couple of skills. One, I could talk to executives and two, I could understand their businesses really quickly. And so I, I just was like, this is fun, this is interesting. And I put that in my back pocket. And I actually took a year off to go do a year of volunteering with Habitat for humanity through the AmeriCorps program. And that took me to the rural south, which was so far from anywhere I'd ever been before. And fate of all fates, that's how I got into venture, which makes no sense. I left California, moved to a small town, was building houses and there were some regular volunteers who were retired bankers and angel investors from New York. And they got to know me and I got to know them. And at the time I'd been thinking I'd go get my mba, start a business, but you know, I didn't have a hundred thousand dollars to throw in an MBA when I also knew I didn't want to go into corporate America. Right. Like I knew that wasn't my thing. So they told me about this thing called an accelerator program. And they described it as saying, you know, we find people that want to start businesses and we give them money to help them get off the ground and help make connections for them. And, and I thought that was the most insane thing I'd ever heard because I was looking down the barrel of $100,000 of debt. And here are these people saying there's this whole other way where you're empowering entrepreneurs with capital. And so I knew very little about it, but I knew that I was magnetically drawn to it. And so they brought me on to run, build up and run this first accelerator program in the Southeast that was focused around kind of post Affordable Care act investing. And I really got to jump into the deep end of the pool. I had never negotiated with legal documents before, but it was just blocking and tackling, doing it all myself. And made my first 10 investments there. And one of them was a hardware biotech company based in San Francisco. Now, I don't know if any of you were in San Francisco around 2012, 2013, but it was an extremely special time in the city. And they brought me out to visit them. They all lived in a communal warehouse in Soma. I slept on the floor that was like their dance floor for their parties for this weekend. And I just could feel the effervescent energy of this place. And it was so obvious to me that this is where I needed to be. Um, so I sold everything, got a U haul, drove across the country and moved into this warehouse and got on my feet. Actually, that founder falsified my first apartment employment letter so I could qualify for my first apartment in the city because I didn't have a job yet. So anyhow, I, I, I, I started meeting people and I was very fortunate to talk to a lot of different VCs because I, I knew that's kind of what I wanted to do. But I also knew that I was someone that was a builder and I was someone that was a starter. And so I elected to join a very new firm that had just run one accelerator program. So we'd kind of been in these parallel tracks and they were going out to raise their first pre seed focused fund. It was a $32 million fund, a 2015 vintage. And I joined them in late 2014 as their first investing higher in San Francisco. That firm was called Bolt. I was there for eight years, went from associate to partner, and then not long ago, spun out to start something new called Baukunst, which you alluded to our exotic name. So it means the art of building in German. So bao means building, kunst means art of. And it felt like the perfect name to encapsulate our philosophy and the art of building companies and teams and products and, and honestly the craft of this very unique kind of pre seed phase of business building that I have come to devote my career and my life to. So it's a little bit of my, my story truly.

To have it. So it's cool. Makes sense. I should shout out a couple things. In about 2013, I launched the San Franc Group for our accelerator program associated with the EO organization. And I've been involved with that accelerator program globally since then. And the scaling up platform that we work with is the educational foundation for the EO accelerator program globally. So if you want to know more about that for our listeners viewers. Eoaccelerator.org.com actually I should know that off the top of my head after all these years, but I don't. And we, so we provide the content for that. We do some of the training of those trainers who lead that program. They have programs on like every continent helping companies get in that one. Accelerators come in lots of different shapes and sizes, but that one helps people get over their first million in sales. So a big focus on that. But they usually have something built before they get into that accelerator so they got to have some revenue and, and start to track on something. So. So that's cool. And that got you started in investing and then you, you got the balcony. So we're going to share some stories and some ideas and along the way we'll talk about what makes good candidate for VC when it's the right time, what are the different stages we can get into all that kind of thing. It also does seem like it's something that sort of ebbs and flows. I had, I had some companies in the late 90s and early 2000s that had some backing and, and then that money dried up and forced the shutdown of one of those companies because actually two of those companies because of that kind of thing. So things come and go. Right. There's a time for place for all kinds of funding in particular on the equity but also the debt side really. So why don't you talk to us about some of the companies that we talked about in preparation. How about Bobby, what's happening there and what are the lessons to be learned about that business?

Well, I think that there are a couple of things that make a company special, but the number one is the people. So. So I was very fortunate to have the opportunity to lead the precede round in Bobby, actually.

Hold, pause.

Sure.

I want to just underscore what you said there. The people make it special. A lot of times we think our solution, our mouse trap, our groovy idea is the thing that makes it special. And I think with time Those are common, right? Ideas are a dime a dozen, but teams and special people really bring something to life.

I think special people often have special ideas and exceptional people can execute them. So I don't agree that ideas are a dime a dozen. I think sometimes we say that when it's a shortcut for, but it's really, you got to get it done right. And I think, you know, I think the truth is that it actually does take someone extraordinary to, to have the insight into how a market that has the capacity to be a billion dollar business can truly transform and then can make all the little and big decisions and hard decisions and enduring decisions along the way to get it there. And no one exemplifies that journey more to me than Laura Modi and Sarah Hardy, who are the co founders of Bobby Baby. So for context, when Laura walked through my door, she was, I think, eight months pregnant with her second child. She was a solo founder and she had a pitch deck, right? So when I say I invest pre seed and I invest early, I really mean it, right? And so when I'm trying to decide, you know, what's, what's here, what's good, right, There's a couple things I'm looking for. So I'm looking for someone who has a unique perspective into why this business needs to exist and why everything in their life has led up to this moment. Why they're the only one that can build it. Right? So I'm asking you, why you, why now? And for Laura, actually a very personal story, right? So she and Sarah had been, she calls them work wives. You know, at Airbnb, they were early employees there and, you know, they had the operational chops to grow that business to be one of the most successful tech companies of all time. Businesses of all time, really. So they had this background in technology. They knew how to grow teams, they knew how to scale. You don't, you don't get to stand still if you're at an Airbnb. Anything that's growing that fast, you've really got to be an expert learner, which is what it takes to continue to be on the cutting edge and grow these businesses in the venture path. And so I knew from that background she had, you know, this experience, I thought, to potentially be a CEO and grow a high growth business. But interestingly, it was her personal story that took her to this product. So Bobby Baby is an infant formula company. And what's interesting about infant formula is it's a little bit like a consumer packaged good and it's a Little bit like a drug. Right. So, you know, you have to have.

A regular, highly regulated thing that people care a lot about. It's not just another energy drink.

Absolutely. And so it's, it's very difficult and it's much more difficult as it should be to bring a product like that to market.

Right.

But for Laura, what she saw was just a real gap between what was being offered on shelf and what she wanted to feed herself, let alone her baby. So the majority of formulas in the US have corn syrup and soy in them. And she is from Europe, she's Irish. And if you look at formula in the eu, you don't have any of those ingredients. Right. The sugar is coming from lactose. And so there was this interesting consumer behavior that she brought up to me. And I didn't have kids at this time. Right. So I didn't really know anything about this. And there were people buying European formula by the trunk load and like picking it up and, you know, in the dark parking lots and like, you know, contraband websites. It was like drug trafficking for infant formula because customers wanted this cleaner product so badly. So what she was describing to me was a multi billion dollar market with incumbent players. Right. It was really like a couple of pharmaceutical companies owned the majority of the market and a customer base that was doing unnatural acts to get the product that they wanted and that they deserved. Right. And she had this vision that she could build a cleaner formula company to serve this customer and that along the way she could really shake the stigma around formula feeding your baby, which I also didn't really know about. But the Breast is Best movement, which was fabulously championing breastfeeding, which is a wonderful thing for many kids. You know, breast milk is the best thing you can feed your child. But that, that movement had created really a culture of shame. And she and Sarah had their kids at Airbnb and going back to work and trying to pump and be executive parents, it was like they were caught between a rock and a hard place. And so she had a vision for a better product and she had a vision for a brand that she felt like could really champion her experience and, you know, get shame out of the picture. And so I led that round very, very proudly. I still continue to serve on their board. The reception from the market has been absolutely gangbusters. It's the fastest growing company I've ever seen in enterprise consumer anything. And we fed, I can't remember the number of babies you fed now. My son was one of the first to drink the formula. Another Very proud moment for me. And, and the other piece that I think is really interesting is they had a business model innovation here too. So product innovation and business model innovation. Most formula is just sold at the supermarket, you know, or online. But there's no direct to consumer subscription option. And Bobby was the first company to come out and do a direct to consumer subscription offer. And what worked so well for that is that once you feed your baby one formula and it works for them, they want to stay on it, right? So in business speak, that's a great cac ltv situation. If you can acquire that customer and you know that they're going to be on it for the life of that baby drinking formula. That's a very high LTV product and a predictable repeat revenue product. So that's another thing that I'm looking for in the consumer side. So that those were, all of those pieces were there when she walked through the door in terms of the strategy. But we hadn't done anything yet. So I've spent the last great number of years getting to really work with Laura and learn from her in so many ways and hopefully share something. I have to, to really make that business the business that it is today, which is an incredibly fast growing, profitable, you know, big business on its way to being I think a really household brand, which I think is very exciting.

Well, you know, I hear a few interesting things in that. The first one is, and you mentioned at the outset, is like I've got an interesting team. So I have a couple of founders who have some experience who have a personal connection to the company that they want to create, have some passion and have some experience working in fast paced growth environments. So you've got that, that those core things in the team and then you have a really interesting problem, right? The problem is people want to get a different kind of formula for their kids and they're really passionate about it. They're willing to go to great lengths to get a different kind of formula that, to address different concerns that they have, right. So they want some different kind of formulation that might be available in Europe except we have different regulations here. So they're going around the regulations independently and here's somebody and then, then you get to their solution. So team problem. Now we've got solution and that is this particular European style product, but FDA approved, legal kosher to sell here in the US to address the needs of that particular consumer that's doing all these crazy expensive things. And then finally you've got an innovative business model and a brand. So they're doing something in a way that could create a lock on something. And, and I know I'm a new grandfather and my son is nearby here in Seattle and they got a granddaughter and they don't drive like a lot of their friends. They're just Uber everywhere. And he's AI developer for a tech company. And you know, just everything gets delivered to them all the time. Their, their wipes, their diapers, the formula. They're like whatever, anything like that they're going to get is just coming in like regular deliveries because they just don't get a lot to the market. Like they go, they walk down to the market for things like fresh berries. Right. But I could see immediately if they bought that product and they liked it, they'd be done. Right. You'd have it for the duration of their child. And then of needing a bottle, which could be a little while, and then if they had a second child, there's a really good chance that, that you'd have the business from the second child. And all of their friends would hear, oh, what are you using? Right. Of the parents group that they would go to. Yeah, it's really cool. Yeah. And, and then needing something like that because. Right. It takes something to set up the product, to set up the packaging. There's some investment required to get going with something like that.

Yeah. I mean, it took us many millions of dollars in three years to bring a product to market. And that's actually something that I really look for. Right. That can be a moat. You can start a baby food company overnight, you cannot start a baby formula company overnight. So there's lots of ways to create moats in your companies and there are categories that more naturally have them than others. But in this case, you know, it was very clear that the competitors were going to need to be venture funded if new businesses were going to come out. And so anyhow, I think I'm always looking for, especially in the consumer category, if you're going to do something in cpg, for example, what's the moat? What's the barrier to entry? Or if you can win it, what's the stickiness? It's unlikely for me to invest in a snack bar, for example, because it's too easy to make another snack bar.

A lot of people make snack bars. It's a regular.

You can make a good business making snack bars. Right. But I think for again, thinking about venture capital specifically, we're not looking for just a good business. Right. We want to make sure, at least for me, I think about it As I want to make sure that if this business hits, it's going to have the chance to return my whole fund. Right. So that takes a very particular type of business and outcome potential for anyone given business. And so we want to have really aligned expectations with the founders on that. And also making sure that, you know, all this work that we're going to put in is going to put us on a good planet to land on. Right. A planet where there's a lot of market.

So we, we've recently done a couple shows talking about debt side funding and I just want to underscore that as well. So when you know what you're doing, when you have a business established, when you have customers and a product and things like that, debt bank lending of different kinds and SBA funding even can be fantastic ways to grow and cheaper and easier in many regards than venture money at any stage. But if you don't have a product or anything yet, it's a really dangerous.

Move to take and difficult. Right.

You don't have customer against.

Right.

You're not going to get it in the same way.

Yeah. So for us, when we talk about pre seed, I'll do everything from a couple hundred thousand dollars, someone that's an expert looking to leave their job, wants to do an exploration around an idea, you know, up to two and a half million and kind of taking the full pre seed. And the way that we think about it is like, well, what do you need? Right, okay, we're going to start from zero. What do we need in order to really get going and who do we need? What do we have to build? What do we have to have to accomplish? And typically venture backed businesses require some money to get going and it allows people to pay themselves. Right. Inventory revenue is the best money you can ever have. Right. And for us too, like we have a firm belief that our goal is to get people into a position where they can grow, you know, cash flow positive so that you have a choice to raise money.

Yeah.

But that you don't have to raise money. And that's a position of power to be in a position of strength. And so we have a proclivity for businesses that we feel like we can get in that position and operators who want to grow that way so that you have a lot of options as opposed to only having one option, which is to sell more equity.

Yeah. So it's a range of funding for all different stages. And some of the companies in our accelerator program around the world have some kind of venture seed. Friends, family, different Stages. A lot of the companies that we coach in scaling up are usually around series B that we will tend to see them more. But you know, but you gotta, you've got a big range, you've got to go through a variety of things. So it's useful to think about with that stages. Let's talk about some other examples. You mentioned Fido. Is that a pet company around dogs?

It's not. Although we did invest in a pet company called fi. So the smart dog collar. Fi no, but Fido is a really interesting, inspiring company. F I F Y T O oh Fido Phyto. But yes, based up in Petaluma. So we met Dr. Jason Prapas many years ago. He was in the kind of MIT Tata center universe and deeply obsessed with agriculture and aquatic plants. And deeply obsessed. I mean like growing weird ponds of things in, you know, off the balcony of his apartment.

Yeah.

And Jason really opened my eyes to how broken the animal feed industry is, particularly organic animal feed and global supply chain that's involved and the carbon footprint involved in getting animal feed to farmers who are feeding their livestock organic animal feed in order to get you organic milk, cheese, yogurt, et cetera. And so he found this aquatic plant that could produce the significantly more preferable kind of protein and nutrient mix in an organic way to feed to mostly right now cows, but also chickens and other livestock and stuff. And what's so interesting about it is he, he realized that he's a mechanical engineering background that he could build a system to actually automate the growing and production of this aquatic plant and that the only input that they needed was cow manure. So if you think about that, a lot of that it's a really. And cow manure is a huge problem with climate change. Right. So we invested in Jason. It was just an idea and a deck similarly it was just. I think actually he had a co founder at the time, but I idea in a doc now did he have.

Besides the idea, did he. Had he done a proof of concept or a demo or something like that?

So he had actually built a little.

Grow tank of this stuff.

Yeah. So he had been exper. As I, as I referenced, he'd been experimenting with this for many years.

Yeah.

And he'd actually gone to India and was there and was feeding cows with the plants in India and seeing that they were doing well, was doing in a kind of controlled way. He has a PhD scientist so his using, you know, fairly rigorous methodology around that. But there was no automation in the growing strategy at the time. He Was him with essentially like a pool cleaner, you know, kind of because you have to agitate the. Agitate the crop. And so it was very labor intensive.

I've accidentally grown some things in the back of my refrigerator, but I think that's a different.

So he knew a lot about the plant and a lot about the potential nutrient profiles. He had fed some cows in a totally non scalable way and he had a real thesis around what the go to market could look like and the way to build the system in a way that could automate this production, that wouldn't require a lot of labor, that would make it economical and scalable. Right. Because it doesn't do you do any good if you can't scale up production and feed lots and lots of cows. So we led that precede round, had been working with Jason ever since. He's now up in Petaluma and feeding a lot of very high end cows that make very high end cheese, but also chickens and other things. And I think this series A was led by Google Ventures and we're kind of off to the races with that. But what I think is so beautiful about that story is again it's taking this very broken system that is having big societal impacts, environmental impacts, and completely reimagining how we architect that. So the system right now is centralized near the farms and they actually just sell the feed. So the business is just selling the feed, which is great because that's what farmers want to do, is buy the feed. Right. So he's really working with the farmers within how they think about farming and helping them control their costs. Because inputs are one of the key things. The cost of inputs is a huge issue for a farmer. Right. So he's not working against the farmers, he's working with the farmers and along the way really solving for a system that is really hurting the planet and just bringing that creative insight to the problem at a systems level and then leveraging technology to make it scalable. So that's a pattern that I love to see. And again, in the person piece it's like Jason's just obsessed with this, he's obsessed with this plant, obsessed with this problem. And he is personally so motivated by the climate impact that you can just tell he's going to run through walls to make this happen as fast as he can. And that level of ambition is what, what we're looking for when we invest.

So you got a PhD who's passionate about something, you've got a category that there's a lot of smart and passionate money. Available for. Right. Climate change, food production, warming, gas, chemical reduction. Right. You're addressing all of those things. So you've got big problems that need addressing. It's funny, as you said it. And I'm writing down notes as we're getting ready. I write. I hear fido, and I write down fido instead of a Greek word for plant. Right, Right. But. And then. And then you got the right. Like a right place, too. So California, Northern California is known for technology, but also just up the way a little bit. Huge amount of food production, very innovative kinds of agriculture and related stuff is going on in Napa, Sonoma. And our whole Central Valley is just filled with all kinds of farming, more production than, like, lots of the country. So diverse and innovative.

Yeah, yeah. And Jason was originally based in Boston, and one of the other things that we see with founders is they really think about where is the absolute best place for me to be for my business. And he realized it wasn't Boston, it was Petaluma. And so he moved his family to Petaluma. I remember going out to see their first system, which was so cool. Going out of the city, driving up to the first Fido farm, it felt like I was going on a Jurassic park tour. It was so cool to see this system. And they had a couple of open engineering wrecks at the time. And I looked around and I said, what mechanical engineer wouldn't want to move to Petaluma and solve climate change? I was like, this is. This is going to be great. And sure enough, they built an incredible team up there, you know, living in a beautiful place and. And making change.

So it's a lovely place if you can live up there. It's like the. And it's so much easier than being in the Bay Area with the traffic and stuff like that to be, you know, some of those winding back roads. Beautiful. The food, the wine is fantastic. The pace is a little bit nicer than some of us endure.

Definitely different.

Definitely different. Well, so we talked about a few others, but, you know, it would be kind of interesting because it's been in the news a lot lately. But you said there's some interesting work going around, EV charging. And I know that the need for EV charging, electric vehicle charging now is enormous. And the complaints in the press about inoperative chargers, hard to find chargers. There's a guy shot the other day, which is maybe more a commentary about guns and prevalence of gun violence in the country, but arguing over a Tesla charging spot.

I had not heard that. Wow.

Yeah. Just a few days ago. So, like, crazy stuff, a big problem. And I know lots of folks who are like, yeah, I'd love to get that. I love my friends, Tesla or whatever. Oh, my buddy just bought a Rivian. And that's cool. And they are cool, by the way. They're really cool.

Yeah, they're really cool.

One of my buddies bought a Rivian, there's one on my block. And they are, they are super cool. They're not cheap. But then you start to think about, well, wait, where can I charge this thing and where do I drive on a regular basis and is it conducive to that? Am I going to have problems with that? Is this a good first secondary vehicle? Like, so there's a world of issue there. Talk about what you're seeing there.

Yeah, so this is a space that we've been tracking for a long time. So we made an investment, early investment in a company called Evercharge, I want to say back in 2015. And we were very early to the market with that investment and their value proposition was focusing on multi tenant apartment buildings and doing the kind of load balancing so that multiple people could charge at the same time and having a software layer that allowed the different tenants to figure out who pays for what and making that work for the apartment building owners. That company recently exited. It was quite a good exit. And we still felt though that there was really a lot of room to go after that category. And so we actually made an investment in an ex Tesla engineer and really doing a very similar play called Orange Charger. And this happens sometimes where you make an early bet on a company, they do well. Right. And you've learned a lot about that space. And for us, we realized, you know, there's actually a different product architecture that we think could capture more of this market, grow more quickly. So we had learned a lot about that space and what the customer wanted. And when we spoke with Nicholas, he had exactly a shared vision around what he thought would win in that category. And, and what I think is very interesting about it is most people are focused on how fast can I charge? Right. How fast can I charge the car. But if you live in a multi unit apartment building and you're parking overnight, like the user experience isn't how fast can I charge? It's I just want to be able to park overnight. So what you want is a lot of outlets, you want a lot of places to plug in and you want to be able to plug charge overnight and you want to really reduce the friction on the sales cycle so you need to make it affordable to the apartment building owner. And so Nicholas's whole product was really architected around those insights, which are a little bit of a zag against most of the market. You know, we zig and we zag. It's a little bit of a zag against most of the market. And interestingly, an early Evercharge employee, that first company we invested joined Orange as their on their marketing team. And so there was a little bit of unfair knowledge advantage as we always want. So we've been in that space for some time and then Nicholas is incredibly smart, sharp, ex Tesla engineer. Two of the Tesla co founders invested in the company alongside us. And it's still very early, but we're very excited about the way that they're really thinking about bringing charges or chargers to people who live in apartment buildings which right now there just aren't great solutions for that in a way that makes it easy and reliable to know that I can buy a lower cost TV and it's wonderful that those are coming to market and I can reliably charge it in my parking spot overnight. Right. And so I think we've, we've got to get a big, a much bigger install base in order to open up the market, which I think is absolutely critical.

I think you see that now I've heard people say, oh yeah, we chose our building because they had EV charging in the garage and other people are like, well, it's kind of a cool place and there's a spot where we could run a cord out to charge our things. So people are grappling with I want to live in a particular place, how could I work out the charging? And if you live in an urban area, you're suburban or rural, it's, it's less of an issue. You might have more questions about where we're going to charge as I go around during the day. But that overnight charging in an urban area is a particular concern.

Well, and I think what I really love about that, that's applicable to a lot of companies is you have to think about, you know, what's the specific slice of the opportunity, who's the customer that I'm really trying to serve and what's the product architecture that's going to best serve them and their experience. Right. So it's not all of EV charging. It's like who's your customer? What are their friction points? Right. Like what's going to make them buy? And in this case you had to do it both on the business the building own, right. What's going to make them get the installs in and then how does that solve the end user experience? Because both of those things have to be true. But when you're going after big, huge, meaty problems with massive scale, like going from gas vehicles to EV vehicles, like there's a lot of different people you have to convince to get a new car. So you got to pick your lane, pick your customer and really focus on delivering the product for them. And that can allow you, if you really focus on what they really need to let go of some of the constraints that other people might be building around, such as speed. Right. You might realize that speed is actually not the leading thing that you need. What you need is omnipresence. So I think that that's just another pattern that we're looking for. Right. Are you being specific about who you're trying to serve and does the product architecture really serve them in unique ways?

Again, you've got somebody with some background, you've got some team in place, you've got an interesting problem, you've got a unique solution, a unique business model, all of these things. And I think it's useful to remind for our listeners and viewers, even if you're not seeking funding, but you've, you've just listened, watch the show regularly. What about your team is unique, special, appropriate to the space you're in? What, what, what is the specific aspect or specific problem that you're looking at? Not the broad category that you're in, but the specific aspect of it? What's unique about your solution? This is the thing that we talk about with companies at every stage. Let's focus on some unique differentiator, not just trying to be in the same business that everybody else is in, in some particular category. Really useful things at any stage to think about.

Yeah. I like to boil it down to two things. Why you? Why now? Yeah, you, why now? You know, and if you, if you can answer those things in a fulsome way that is true for you, that is real in your heart, you know, then there's something there. And if it's like, oh, why me? Right. Or why now? Right. Then I think it's good to take a look in the mirror and be like, is this really the right thing? Do I have it yet? Maybe I'm not quite there yet. Right. It doesn't mean you're not going to get there, but you might not be quite there yet.

That's a useful thing. We talk about a lot. I've been writing about it lately is what's Your connection to this thing. Some of the why you is your particular skills or strengths or background. But then there's the other thing of like, why do you actually care care about this? Do you have any thing. Because growing a business is really, really hard and you will encounter all kinds of difficult points and sleepless nights and things like that. You better care about this particular business. I've encountered a few people like, ah, it's just whatever, I could make some money at it. So I'm doing it. I'm like, yeah, that's not good enough for the kind of work that we're going to do when we want to 100x something, when we want to get to a billion. That kind of thing is a very different kind of a mandate.

Yeah. And the way I think about it too, not to interrupt you, but the way that I think about it too is really I want to create massive value in the world and hopefully a lot of money is a byproduct of that. But I found that the people that are really focused on that mission, you know that, that like money as a goal is not the same level of motivator as mission as a goal and money as a byproduct. So not to say that both people can't make money. There's a lot of ways to make money, but I like to work with the mission.

No, and, and there are, and there are people who really enjoy the game of making money. You could easily argue that a guy like Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger for that matter, love the game of making money. In the end, they also really care about the quality of the companies they do. They're not just looking at the, but they're looking at fundamental things behind it. But, but clearly they really care. They enjoy the game of making money by doing good things, solid, defensible, sustainable kinds of things in the world. And I think there are a few people that enjoy that. But a lot of us wouldn't put our times, our blood, sweat, tears into things that we aren't passionate about. Which is why the purpose for our company is helping leaders build a better world. And we know that everybody that we choose to work with that has some idea that makes the world a better place in some way. It's not. I mean they make some money at it where it's all capitalist. It's all where they're making a return on things. That's how we know it's efficient, competitive, relevant, but an innovative, but it does some good. Like they can tell their mom about what they do. For a living.

Yeah, the cocktail party test.

Right. So before we run out of time, a couple shout outs and reminders. Big thanks as always to my friend and mentor Verne Harnish, who who wrote the original Rockefeller Habits and then created the whole scaling up framework that we use in in our practice around the world and was on our show regularly without whom none of this would have been necessary. And then to Wanda Mitchell, our show producer gets our guests scheduled and prepared and out the ready. And then the folks at Potfly Productions who get our audio cleaned up and our show notes and the show distributed every week. So thanks to all those. If you want to know more, drop us a line, ask us for some help or give us some feedback. Tell us you loved you want to hear more of a particular kind of show or less of something info scalingcoach.com is a good email for us. There it is in the crawl right now on the video info scalingcoach.com and then our website where all the shows and programs and coaching offerings and that kind of thing are@scalingcoach.com so hopefully that's all useful for you. Why don't you hit us with what are the key things that that the category that you look for, just some basic facts and then we'll throw up the link while you're talking about that. Balconst.com is your. Yes, there it is.

Yeah. So we lead precede rounds at the frontiers of technology and design. So if you're a founder that's building something new, the frontiers of technology and design, I'd love to talk to you.

Oh, you're looking for that. Thank you Kate for joining us. Thank you everybody for watching, for tuning in. Hope it was useful for you. Like subscribe, share it with a friend that helps them especially. We'll talk to you again next time. Keep scaling up.