EP 84: David Connors Used The Swarm to Raise Millions | Deal Flow, M&A, and Warm Intros

Don't burn your one chance with an investor because you write some sloppy email that gets sent out to a hundred people at once. Don't be lazy with it. You're going to have 5 to 10x higher conversion if you just try and get a war mature.

Because what's a human element that founders can implement that you've seen work for yourself?

Being a founder is often a very lonely, isolating journey. So having others to lean on and is really important for your resilience. I highly suggest all early stage founders to have that foreign.

Welcome back to Fundraising Demystified. Today I have David Connors with us, founder and CEO of the Swarm.com probably one of the easiest ways to figure out if you know someone that you need to get an intro to. I'm a customer and I'm excited to have you on the show. David, you raised about 8 million for the company. You also previously sold the company to Sequoia. So I think you're just gonna have a really fun conversation today. But welcome to the show.

Thanks, Jason.

Yeah, great to be here. So for the audience that isn't familiar with your product, just kind of give the quick elevator pitch on what the Swarm is.

Yeah. So we've built a platform that helps companies to map and leverage their network and we also have a couple of products that power other platforms with people and relationship data.

Yeah. You just recently announced your partnership with Clay for people to leverage their existing tool that they're using Clay to kind of map form intros and shameless unsponsored plug here. I'm a user of the Swarm and we use it for mapping warm intros to investors. So we find like with Thunder, for those that don't know about Thunder, you can generate AI generated list of relevant investors for your startup. You can then take that list, export it to, you know, something like the Swarm, and then you find out, okay, who do you actually know that can get you introduced to those investors? So pretty, pretty cool, convenient tool for, for fundraising. So I kind of want to ask like, did you guys use your own product to raise your own round?

Yeah, yeah, 100%. So maybe I can give you just a bit of like a background and where the Swarm came from and then how we then use it. So sort of kicked off in 21. I was previously at Sequoia, as you mentioned. I had built them almost like a proof of concept for the Swarm where working with their internal product and data teams, we had mapped Sequoia's network and were then leveraging those relationships for the Portfolio, right? So founders were intros to Wells Fargo to try and close an account or to this rockstar VP of engineering, right? Who does Sequoia know? How can we help? So when I left Sequoia, I was then looking at the market and I was like, you know, we have LinkedIn as individuals. Where's the LinkedIn for companies? There's no platform helps you to look at the collective network of an organization. So that's why I was really interested and excited about, like, how can we really leverage these relationships that exist and all this trust that you can tap into as a company. But often it's, you know, either trapped in spreadsheets or in people's heads or, you know, on LinkedIn, but it's buried in amongst all this noise because everyone's connected to thousands of people on LinkedIn. So it's like, all right, how can we combine everyone's relationships into one platform? So when I first started, I didn't have this form, obviously. So I was like hacking this together, which is what all the other founders I talked to, probably some founders listening to this now have tried before, right? Downloading LinkedIn as a CSV, asking a few of my close friends and other founders to do that, pushing that into this like centralized database, you know, which is basically a big airtable, and then searching through it for people who are investors and then asking those people who had relationships for interest. And that's kind of how I kicked off, was like I built this first database of potential investors and then started to expand that out by talking to primarily other founders, but basically saying, hey, raising the first round pre seed, who do you know that invests at that stage and trying to then generate more and more of these lists of folks who were really focused at that very early stage, had a few conversations with folks who were a little bit later and always found that just to be very distracting. And there was just a big mismatch. So I think one of the key learnings I had early on was filtering it down to only those people who write the very first checks, because it's such a different game than someone who comes in at the seed stage when there's traction where there's revenue versus just like an idea or a napkin. So, so yeah, from my own network, from some of my friends and close friends networks, was able to then put together that initial precede round in. In 21.

So that kind of. You had to do it the hard way. And then you realize there's gotta be a bet. You basically raise the money to make that job of raising money easier for other people. No, I think that's a noble effort just because I think any founder that's listening to this podcast, let's raise money. It's, you know, everyone knows war managers of the holy Grail, but it can be just like exhausting to kind of map spreadsheets together and, and try to bring all that stuff together. Now that was how you raise your pre seed. You've said ra, how much is raising your pre seed?

So it was a 2 mil pre.

Seed, kind of like walk us through, like why, why 2 million? And was it like just a safe, capped, uncapped, like how did you guys structure it?

Yep. So it was a safe. We had a, we had a cap on it, spend a post money cap. And you know, this was to set the context as well. This was, you know, late 21, boom time in, you know, VC land. I had just left Sequoia and sort of had that experience under my belt. So the ability for me as a founder with a previous exit to raise money, like I could have raised much more than that but wanted to try and be a bit more disciplined and kind of keep it and to just what we needed. The thinking of that amount was what do we need to be able to get to our seed round, to be able to build a product that's in market, that's a revenue. What sort of size of the team do we need? What sort of Runway do we need? And that's always backed into with a little bit of a buffer, you know, a 2 millimeter and yeah, that's, you know, we closed that three, four months. But it was just me at the time. That was just me. And then actually from that point then I went to go build the team after that. So I said I had the idea, you know, in a Google Doc, sort of wrote out my own investment memo that I would then give to investors. And if I was an investor trying to write a memo internally for how I would convince the, the IC investment committee, he's going to rub a stamp for this. Here's how I put it. He's like the market size, here's the opportunity. I even did a little Sequoia like pre parade, pre mortem at the end, which we always did, which is like, if this was wildly successful, what would it look like? If this was going to fail, what would it look like? And so did some of those and you know, very loose financial, you know, milestones, which is always very hand wavy. Yeah, you know that point.

Yeah.

But you know, as you Know, at the very earliest stage, it's more like, is this team credible? Is this a market size big enough that can be outsized returns for vc? And you know, does this sort of make sense in the kind of macro environment? I'm competitive.

So other than being probably wildly useful for you to go through that exercise and you having the background working at a, you know, tier 1 VC to kind of know what that process is, it's kind of getting out into the ethos with founders that that's something to try to do and it's even something that at Thunder we have a button that generates kind of a template for, for founders that uses their data to kind of generate a, an investment mode that can kind of tweak and then send out to investors once they kind of secure that first meeting or send second meeting. What are you kind of seeing? Like how useful was that in your discussions? Did you see that kind of get across the finish line or did people just be like, oh, okay, thanks. But didn't actually, you know, use it?

You never really know. Like every was kind of like, all right, thanks. You know, from my subsequent rounds of, of fundraising, I found that once you have a really strong investor come on board who even if they're not leaving the round, but just a very well respected, if you can ask to get their memo and then circulate that with other investors, that works really well. So it's like I've sort of often provided some material that goes into that memo, but then it's wrapped up. Typically this is like, especially for folks who have an angel list syndicate, this works really well where they have to provide this memo that's then publicly shared with all their hundreds of Thousands of know LPs. And then you say, all right, here's the memo that this investor just circulated for this round. And it's, you know, they're kind of line by line that obviously works better than if you just write it yourself. But either way, with this, you know, with anything to do with fundraising, making the investors life easier and providing them with as much collateral to persuade the other internal folks is always a good, good idea. The same with, you know, running an enterprise sales process, right? The more you can be arming your internal champion with what they need and making their life easier, then it's just going to be a lot easier for you as the founder to raise.

I completely agree. I think it's whether it's like copied and pasted by an associate to go to ic, probably unlikely, but it does reduce a lot of the back and forth in dd. So it's like, okay, they got a lot of the. So the deck is nice. That's more of like you know, what the appetite get me interested. And then like the investment memo, showing your homework and showing all the work that I got to the deck and being able to provide that I think is valuable to streamline the DD process so that you know, if you got the opportunity to go to ic, but like IC might be a week or two weeks or a month, you know, you don't know exactly what it is. So you know if it's going to be a month long wait and it's next week, you at least have everything that needs to be ready and doesn't have to take a lot of back course you can move a little bit quicker and not lose momentum. I think it's worth as a founder to go through the exercise, have it ready despite it maybe not being as meaningful as say the elite investor doing it.

There's a benefit to that long form approach as well. So for each round of I've always done a long form memo, you haven't necessarily shared it, which is sort of your distilled thinking at that point in time of what's going on in the market, why do we have this opportunity? And then, you know, here's our strategy for interesting to kind of reflect back on that. And we've wildly changed since that first memo of the product but the vision and the opportunity is, you know, remained largely the same.

Can I put you on the spot and just, you know, you could say no, but would you be willing to share that precede memo that you drafted with the audience?

Yeah, it's very different but yeah, happy to.

Yeah, no, yeah, I guess I figured it's, you know, slightly, you know, inspirational but irrelevant to maybe what exactly the business is today or maybe you're not giving away any secrets. But I think for founders at a similar stage that precede angel around, it could be helpful for them to kind of understand what what a solo founder did at the time of creating that that document that went on to go and raise 8 million. So we'll include that in the show notes below. Don't miss out. So yeah, I think that is an interesting transition point to be like, okay, so you raised 2 million pre seed, you went through that process. You've since raised an additional six and a couple different tranches. I guess kind of walk us through the decision to go out and raise more money and kind of what your go to market strategy now was after you kind of Built the product and got some momentum.

Yeah, so we had the initial 2 mil so we started then building out a team. So I spent probably the next four to six months looking for the perfect technical co founder and wanting to bring on someone who was really experienced as of building out an engineering team underneath him. So CTO co founder found someone after a lot of searching through my network through warming troves from one of our investors who was fantastic and they now been with us the whole time, guy called Michal. And that was its own sort of journey. Was super interesting going from the solo founder to then bringing on the co founder over the next few months. As we're doing that, we're also doing a lot of discovery. So I was then talking to our customers, probably did about 100 discovery interviews. So gathering a lot of the initial user research and kind of understanding of the requirements and kind of what everything looked like, you know I had some of my own understanding about it. But once go deep. So then once we had the engineering resources internally started building out that team, got a designer on board, building out more of the product mock ups and started getting design partners to keep start giving us feedback. We then launched the first product that was focused on recruiting and that was the my previous experience building this recruiting automation startup. I was you know, at Sequoia my official title is the director of recruiting operations and I was pretty deep within the talent world. So I knew that space, I knew it was kind of low hanging fruit. We then launched it in 22 when the macro totally shifted, you know and all of our design partners turned around and said we're actually adding mass layoffs. We don't, we're not hiring anyone, we're definitely not spending anymore on recruiting HR tech. So that was a interesting moment where we then had to pivot to sales use case. So we had a lot of customers say we not recruiting but we're trying to land more customers, especially trying to get warm interest from our network. Can we use the product for that? Absolutely. A few things we do, adding company profiles and filters and things like that. So that was the first pivot where we definitely lost a little bit of capital and time instead of that transition but then launch it for sales. Very promising initial sort of feedback from customers and started to scale up within the startup community. And that's where we then raised the cbrand. So that was in 23 and that was the 4mil cbrand.

And I guess how did you decide who to go to? Why to raise for a million kind of walk us through that decision process.

Yeah, similar processes before looking at what we needed to do to get to the series aim and, and what Runway would be required for that. The process was a little bit different this time when we were looking at the full network obviously of all our existing investors and then also all of the sort of target seed investors we went to. So it's kind of, I'd say two approaches, both which I suggest firms do. One is casting the net, call it where you're going to all of your investors, close founder friends, very like core group of people who want to help you and asking them do you have a list just like on hand of investors at the seed stage you can intro us to. And oftentimes I will. I have like a list of 10, 50, 100 investors at the seed stage and say here's my list, you know, I can people, maybe not all them as strong relationships, but I can list forward an intro request along and then the other side is then all right, our more outbound spear phishing who's on our wish list that we want to include and then looking through that list then find warming trows and that's when we're then using this warm to say we've mapped all of our key stakeholders, you know, investors, advisors, team, other friends, networks, their LinkedIn email calendar, previous work colleagues, all combined into a single database. And then we search for Greylock, you know, who do we know Greylock. And then that sort of determines the engagement strategy to then who we should go to within show request and kind of go from there. So sort of both approaches I think yielded good results. I don't know the exact breakdown, how much capital came from from each, but it was definitely a significant amount from both sources. One hand, the casting the net I think is really great because you can, you know, sort of scale up your, your intro requests, but it's a very hit and miss. Like a lot of times people are coming back and maybe they're not that's not the strongest relationship. So maybe it wasn't the best path in, you know, or they say come back and say we, you know, boy to look for something like this for different rejection reasons but then for the, the outbound that's going to take a lot more time. You have a lot more research and sort of looking at the firm and individual at the firm. The previous investments I've done oftentimes I'd look at the founders that invested in and see if I can get intros through those founders. Those are often the best ones to get access to Investors, things like that. But it takes a lot of time. You know, that was a full time job for a good chunk of time. You know, I had my fundraising CRM just in a spreadsheet where I'm sort of looking at all the different things, you know, having data stuff longer. And I got about a thousand VCs that are in there that I've had some interaction with. Right. Either that I've like requested interest to or chatted to or have had. Yeah, some interaction with over the last handful of years. So each time would be at least not 100 firms I'd say for each round that I'd be that have on that short list, you know, and then the amount you actually talk to maybe is in the 70 to 80 and then kind of gets down to that 10 to 20 that will actually invest.

Yeah, that's the thing is like at, you know, starting with a thousand and then getting you know, responses from a few, maybe a hundred, a couple hundred and then actual meetings. And then those meetings actually, you know, cultivate to an investment, you know, just kind of going back to its numbers game. Whereas some deals, it's like we did a deal where you know, it was literally like 20 people and 5 invested and that was 3 million and off the races, you know. So it's just depends. But I think in kind of the, the software game, which, you know, B2B sales enablement or you know, kind of HR tech kind of thing and recruiting he's going to have on things, it's could be pretty competitive. So you got to really have a good deep network to tap into to kind of get as many shots on goal because you can be the flavor of the week and you know, maybe not depending on, you know, certain investment thesis and whatnot. And honestly, just, just for, for fun here, maybe we'll throw it into the recording or maybe a while. But I want to show how easy it is. I know this is like total shameless plug, but since we use it all the time, I figured I'd just, you know, show it. I'm gonna share my entire screen here and just show you how easy this is. So Thunder is, you know, the platform, our platform. You come in, you can actually generate your list based on, you know, you fill out your company profile, give us all your data, it populates your investor list. You, if you're a premium, you can just click download your matches, it populates all your matches that you match with all their contact information, all that kind of information. So you can, you know, throw them in your CRM right away. Or you can select the firm name, you can go into the swarm and go into companies, add a filter list of companies. Boom, you can add all those firm names in there, hit apply and you have to add people in your network. And there's other things like, you know, who it's connected to and strength of connection, but basically shows like, you know, how many people I'm connected to to open up doors to these different firms. Um, there's also the people list that gives you the specific people. Um, but they literally just took me a few minutes. That kind of ha. Not even a few minutes. How long is this recording? A couple seconds to, to go through and then you can click on the people that you know to map those, you know, make that intro request like hey, hey, David. You know, Bob, that a 16C, like can you make, you know, pass this deck on to them or you know, send a referral request, that kind of thing. So just like to show how quick and simple the process is, especially if you know who, who you need to be reaching out to. So kind of a double themless plug for both us. You're likely having trouble raising money or selling your company. Personally, I've had four exits and I've raised over $145 million. If you want a free coaching session with me, just like subscribe and leave a comment down below. Let me know me know what you think of today's video. For a chance to win a free coaching session with me, I'll select three winners every single month. You just have to like subscribe and leave a comment down below for a chance to win. Now onto the video.

And that's, you know, I think it's part, part of the, the battle is knowing out of the, you know, is it 3,000 VC firms? I mean, you probably have better numbers than this than I do these days. You know, there's so many different types of firms that you can just waste your time spend your wheels talking to when it's clearly not a fit, but definitely shouldn't even be reaching out to try and talk to them. So it's great that you can kind of help to again like reduce the noise of that. And then that's your target account list you should be then going after. And then hopefully what we can help with is then the channel of how you actually get in touch with them. Right. And getting access to those firms. Because again, from my experience, no one has invested that I approached cold. I know there's stories of it and people can do it, you know, every now and then. But you're just making it way harder on yourself. Like you're going to have 5 to 10x higher conversion if you just try and get a war mature. Because yeah, I'm sure you've talked about sponge before but as an investor you get inundated with lots of founders hitting you up, trying to get access to, to your inbox, your attention, trying to have a meeting with you as a forcing function. You just have to filter out a lot of that noise. You can't review every single one. So most people just blanket. I'm not even gonna respond if someone hits me up cold. And you just have to get an intro from someone that I know even if it's not particularly strong, at least you're in the door. And then obviously there's different levels of intros. You know, the best is a founder they've already invested that they like you know, the below co investors and other folks that they know and then their friends, you know, then there's other, other people generally in the ecosystem, service providers, folks that interact with you know, there's different levels of trust and obviously always shoot for the top. But just getting at least on that ladder of trust versus you just being in the pool of, you know, cold, undifferentiated, inbound they receive is going to rapidly improve your chances. So it's just worth putting the effort. It's unfortunate, it's just the reality you have to put in effort. It's going to take you time. Don't be lazy with it and don't like burn your one chance with an investor because you write some sloppy email that you know that gets sent out to a hundred people at once.

So well and the trick bears, a lot of investors don't like shop deals. They want to know that they got the, that their, their network is the how they got access to a deal. That's why LPs invest in VCs is know access. And if they feel everyone has access then well what makes the deal special to them? And it's kind of dumb, you know, when you think about it like is it a good deal or is it not a good deal? It's not always what matters. It's about being able to go back to their LPs and say like well I'm awesome and I have this exclusive network that I get access to these deals. And that's kind of like the big pitch that a lot of these VCs have. And so like a mass marketed deal or like a deal that's like Published like for the whole world to see could often deter the interest in a particular deal as much as founders might. Oh, it creates competitions. That's not usually how they think because everyone else thinks like they do. That's why getting like a new feature which I didn't show here but of like whatever you match. With a hundred investors we have this thing where we'll show you the. But they have like each of them have a hundred Portco founders or whatever. We'll actually give you that whole list of Portco founders that you can then import into something like the Swarm and say, okay, you might not know the vc, but do you know one of the Portco founders? Yeah.

Perfect.

Yeah, it's a lot easier to start a conversation with another founder and build a relationship with another founder that you know, you build a trust. Then they can be like, oh yeah, you know, like David's a cool guy, I'll introduce you to my, my investor. And it's like social cloud, it's social cred for you know, they'll be appreciative if they end up doing the deal. So that's another way to kind of think about your warm intros. You might, you know, you might not know that founder but you might be able to get an intro to that founder that can then get you the intro to the PC. Not going to happen in a week.

But knowing how the founders is such a superpower and such a, and it compounds over time as well. You've got to remember it's like every time you go to raise funding, you can leverage that found network again and again. And it's a two way street. Right? They can, they can leverage your network and. Exactly.

Yeah. Can't be like introduce me to your investors. It's like what, like who? Why? So don't be lazy, be, be kind with the ass that you have and make sure to make it as easy as possible. Give them everything they need to feel comfortable opening up their network for you. So I guess from here like you guys, you closed that seed round in 2023 and you have kind of in this extension round that's maybe it'll be announced by the time this comes out. Kind of walk us through why you did this extension round and kind of how did this come about? Where is that kind of strategy?

Yeah, so we raised that seed round, we started to onboard bigger and bigger companies. We reached this, this inflection point where we saw that the size of a company was about that 100 employees where the friction involved with the onboarding to the product was too high basically that they wouldn't complete it. So you kind of think about this kind of makes sense. Naturally, if you try and get a thousand people to accept an invite to a new platform that then asks them to download a Chrome extension, to import their LinkedIn connections or to hook up their email and calendar, thousand people aren't going to do it right. So instead we sort of had to really like hit pause and take a step back and think about what we're doing and was like we're trying to leverage the company's network. What we were doing was effectively aggregating the private individual's network and there's actually a lot of the company level network that's accessible and available without necessarily needing to tap into those private individuals networks. Right. You don't need to start with email and calendar and LinkedIn data, you can actually start with other sort of affiliations and associations. So that's where we then started to invest more and more time and focus. What I mean by that is without asking anyone to do anything, we can pull all the employees of this company and then we can find their investors using Crunchbase kitchbook type data. And then as you're saying, we can find the portcos of those investors and all of the execs at those porkos and that's sort of this core group of connectors that are at the heart of this company. All the employees, the investors and the other folks in the portfolio. And then from there we can then map all of their former colleagues for example, so we can say who have they worked with at the past companies together and then starting to score and rank these people say the, you know, the VP of engineering at this company, where have they previously worked and what was the size of those companies and were they at a 10 person startup or were they at a Google together and were they in the same location, were they in the same function? Did they overlap for a month or was it for three years? All these different weights and inputs can go in to then start to assess the strength of that connection. So we started to go deeper and deeper into this fully passive network mapper and we've now launched that on CLAY for all the CLAY users to use. We'll be rolling it out to other platforms as well. And it's an API that is a fully passive network mapping of the company. And then if you want as a user I can layer my LinkedIn connections on top of it and then I can connect my email calendar, I can invite other people in and then we can build out the private networks on top of what the publicly matched networks that the Swarm has already provided. So that was sort of the shift and that took us some time. That took us some capital. That's them. When we made that shift about 6 months after we then 10x our revenue and from that momentum we then decided to raise this additional seed plus round. I'm happy to share as well that HubSpot Ventures has invested in that and we've got some other great fantastic investors and saw the inflection point and the pull from the market for us to be this data Data Products company versus just a pure SaaS software company. And now we now make 95% of our revenue on the data products versus the SaaS products.

Is it 95% of revenue is now coming from the data.

Yeah, data products and partnerships with Clay and these other platforms like soon be HubSpot net 240,000 customers.

That's a much bigger concentration of revenue than I thought it was. It's impressive. The data front, I guess, you know, kind of speaking to that because everyone talks about SaaS. SaaS, SaaS, SaaS,. SaaS. Gotta have SaaS. Gotta have SaaS. But you know, at this point, you guys kind of recognize this problem and pivoted the business and you know, it seems to be paying off to this point. Like what would be your advice to other founders that are like maybe kind of looking at a similar situation, especially in the world of AI now are, you know, kind of business models are changing expectations. Is it a token based system? Is it a SaaS based system? Cuddle up. What's kind of your advice to the founders out there dealing with that?

I think if you have any proprietary data that you can make accessible by our own API for others to build on top of and to integrate into their own products, then it makes a ton of sense to do that. I think the demand and the appetite now for other tools, agents in particular who are looking for these data sets and especially if you can make it easy via an API for them to, to tap into. Again to your point, making it usage based and credits based make it really easy for folks to get started and then they could scale up usage is is a great idea. And I think especially seeing the general trajectory of the industry where you have more and more agents who are tapping into these underlying databases and creating their own interfaces, I think the number of interfaces can scale up rapidly. The ease of building products is getting easier and easier. You know, with replit and Cursor and these and these other Fantastic tools that you can spin up these, you know, new products that suggest, you know, overnight, but they still require this underlying data to tap into. So if you can position yourself as one of those data sources that folks can tapped into them, you can see a lot of, a lot of growth, success and then also start putting out that defensible moat because it's really hard to imitate that underlying data, especially if it's proprietary data that has some network effects and some flywheels from your users using it.

And with you guys, the proprietary data is basically just I guess the contacts and the map then mapping of those.

Contacts in terms of the network mapping engine is a proprietary bar. And then we also have the underlying database that we license to other platforms and that gets better the more users we have as we're crowdsourcing a lot of that fresh data from all of our users.

Okay, no, that's interesting and I guess, yeah, for fun, like are you using any, you know, vibe coding or you know, AI coding tools for your, for your tech team or is that a question for your cto?

Yeah, I mean we're definitely using all of the classic, you know, on the engineering side like co pilot and stuff. I think one more interesting one is our chief growth officer Olivier, who is non technical over the weekend was using Replit and I think it took him 10 hours to spin up this new app that was very similar to another, I won't say who it is, but an AI first network management tool that is very, very cool and sexy that you can search like semantic search of say like show me founders that have had an exit before, different things, you know, and it was all powered by our Data and our API. Right. But he spun up that interface in 10 hours over a weekend. Just happened together, sort of vibe coding. So I think that's really cool and you kind of see how powerful it is especially for non technical folks to be able to start building out these full end to end apps overnight. And we're actually then running this experience to start monetizing that and sort of saying is this interesting for different people for different other use cases and yeah, lots of different other experiments, things like that happening behind the scenes.

No, that's fascinating. I think I know exactly what you're talking about because I spoke to earlier about that.

One of us people you actually know, Olivier. Olivier and LinkedIn is all. He shares a lot of that stuff, his journey with it.

Perfect, yeah, we'll table that for once we're off the record. But yeah, so I think from what you Shared in terms of adopting your own technology to go out and raise your own money, demonstrate the power of it. These fascinating for founders when it comes to what you're seeing in the market today, where you know, I was just talking about like AI is everything, like you guys are tapping into that. You're, you're a layer into that piece. Especially in today's mark where data matters so proprietary data matters so much, you know, kind of what would be, you know, generally some advice for founders that we maybe haven't covered around being able to build the network. So it's not just about accessing more metros, but like what, what's kind of the human element that founders can implement that you've seen work for yourself?

Yeah, I think there's a few like timeless pieces of advice that are times for a reason. I think one is meeting in person, you know, in that kind of irl. Like there's no replacement for the in person face to face relationship building. Whether that's at a small event or meetup or larger conference, whatever it is, it's good investing the time to do that again. I think it's really easy to sit behind a desk and not get out there. But meeting with founders, meeting with your customers, especially if you have, you know, even early stage design partners meeting face to face, you'd be so surprised at how much patience and leeway some of those early design partners give you. Thank you. To all our design partners who've been with us on this journey. That's definitely one big one is just being face to face. Even if it's no, you don't have any particular agenda in mind. Especially meeting other founders, I think is just always a good idea. Meeting up face to face. As you said before, look, meeting other founders who are at a similar stage to you. One thing I found helpful was having like a monthly session with other founders throughout a similar stage. I'm not sure if you host that through Thunder or like having recommendations for that, but I highly suggest all early stage founders to have that cohort of peers that they can lean on and to not just been networked but obviously for all the points of company building. And you know, being a founder is often a very lonely, isolating journey. So having others to lean on is really important for your resilience, you know. And yeah, just in terms of getting the, the message out there, I think what I found really helpful is posting more on, on LinkedIn and if you use Twitter, then do that. But sort of building in public, so to speak, kind of making the awareness of what you're doing more. Not just like yeah, again like hiding behind your desk and kind of building away so quietly. I think being out there is just going to increase your, the sort of iteration cycles and kind of getting that feedback vibe from the market and then you know, there's no way for people to find you if they can't learn about what you're doing. So you'll just have people organically reach out and be like I love this mission, this idea. I think it's really serendipitous but you have to kind of put yourself out there. So it's a bit uncomfortable often but just kind of getting out there, putting yourself out there and you'll find I think pretty quickly that there's a lot of like minded people who want to support you.

Yeah, I could brutally agree with that sentiment. Like building a personal brand is so powerful for founders in today's I think personal brands in general, whether you're an influencer or you know someone that is building a company, whatever it is just having a personal brand to differentiate in the world of fake AI, you know, kind of like avatars where you know there's so much noise and it's so easy to just create generic content and spam, spam it all the hell. I think having a personable brand or personal identity associated to your company is kind of what, it's what separates you know, companies like you know, look at Facebook, Tesla and SpaceX with Elon. Like these just super prominent founders that everyone is knows the name of. Obviously that's top.001% scale but you can still be a master of your own niche and your own community and both for sales efforts or fundraising efforts. But David, it's been a, it's been a pleasure having you on the show. What's the best way for people to to learn more about you or the swarm?

Yeah, I think on, on LinkedIn. Try and post there pretty regularly and feel free to follow. Connect with me on there and then otherwise our website theswarm.com beautiful.

Thanks for coming on the show David.

Thanks again Jason. Enjoyed it.

Thank you for watching today's episode. As a reminder, I'm your host Jason Kirby. I have built and sold multiple companies with over 135 million in transactions as either a founder, operator, investor, cross across multiple industries. I'm currently the managing director and founder of Thunder BC where we help companies and founders at all stages navigate what capital to raise and who to raise it from and help improve companies odds of raising capital if you need help, reach out to us at Elk under bc. If you like today's show, please share with your friends, give us a like or comment down below. And as a reminder, this show is published weekly. To get notified of new episodes and our newsletter, be sure to go to our website at. Join Thunder VC and if you sign up today, I'll send you a few freebies on how to negotiate a term sheet, how to get a free list of relevant VCs, and much more. That's it. No more shameless plugs. Thank you and see you next week.