The Fundraising Journey For AirGarage Raising From Top Investors Like Founders Fund & a16z

Of course, you've raised some from some really awesome investors like Floodgate, Founders Fund, and then a16z. So could you maybe share a little bit more about, you know, what the fundraising journey has been like?

Yeah, so we raised our Series A in Q4 of 2021. That was from Andreessen Horowitz. Raised our seed round in May of 2019 from Floodgate and Founders Fund, like you said. Yeah, I mean, it was a very interesting experience, especially raising the seed round. And then the Series A was unique just because of the timing of 2021 was kind of crazy fundraising environment. But You know, when we started the company, we didn't have any connections, right? We didn't know anybody. And the advice that I always give to founders is obviously, first of all, focus on running your business. And usually, whenever people come to me asking for advice about, you know, how to fundraise, the first thing I'm asking them is, why are you fundraising instead of just focusing on the business? So those are the first things I'll just point out. But for us, you know, we had already gotten the marketplace off the ground. We had our first, you know, handful, maybe 5, 10 locations that we were managing. We were probably processing in the range of like $35,000, $40,000 a month in gross parking payments at the time. And, you know, we moved to San Francisco in August of 2018 after we started really getting into the full stack marketplace that we do now. Then we started fundraising in sort of February-ish timeframe of 2019. And the way that we did this was, I think worked really well where we framed it as, hey, we want to raise an angel round. And we went out to a bunch of angel investors and again, we didn't really know anybody. And so it was a lot of cold outreach and just me following people on Twitter, me finding people's emails and reaching out to them cold. And I think that the perfect example of this is this investor of ours, Ryan Delk, who has invested in every single round that Air Garage has raised and is always one of our biggest supporters. I found him on Twitter, I'm sure, and then emailed him, cold emailed him at 10:30 PM on a Tuesday or something like that. And within 7 minutes he responded and immediately fired off some questions. And then we went back and forth really quickly via email. And he was, you know, basically like, okay, this sounds interesting. Come to my office at 7:00 AM tomorrow for coffee. And it's like, that's what I always tell founders. That is the benefit of being in San Francisco is if you're in the city and you have that density of people around you, you can just show up for a 7:00 AM coffee after a 10:30 PM cold email and then pitch somebody. And really at that point, right, they're believing in you as a person and the way that they're understanding if they believe in you is by interrogating you about the business and seeing if you have thought through every single possible edge case and really truly explore the idea maze. So, you know, that was interesting in that like we started out with just cold averaging all these angel investors in the spring of 2019 and then eventually basically coalesced all of them and saved all their intros for the same point. And then basically had them introduce us to seed stage venture firms, you know, basically in the first or second week of April, all at the same time and then raised our seed round, quote unquote, in a week from those venture firms, right? So It was a lot of preparation and work and practice and, you know, finding, fine-tuning the pitch with those angel investors to then raise that seed round. But then that's how you, you know, quote unquote, raise a round in a week.