Ask an Investor Anything with Ryan Adams

Hi everyone, how's it going? My name is Zeyhan Işık. I'm the head of global growth for the Founder Institute. Super glad that you all are here with us. It is afternoon for me, so I would say good afternoon for you. I know some people are joining in from Southeast Asia and Australia, so good evening for you. Thank you for joining us. And I see some folks joining in from Western Europe as well, so I guess good early afternoon to, or I guess, yeah, it's about— it should be 11 or 12 your time. But, uh, yeah, thanks for joining. We have a pretty interesting session planned today. If you've attended one of these before, we do an AMA with a venture capitalist. We bring them on. This is really your time to ask your burning and desired questions around, you know, startup funding. So today we have Mr. Ryan Adams from Roundhill Beach Ventures. So I'll give an introduction to him in just a bit. I just want to go over what the agenda is today. Honestly, we will do about 1 or 2 minutes of intro. We'll jump into Q&A straight away, and then we'll leave the last 10-15 minutes for open networking, which is the virtual tables you saw when you logged in. In terms of the format today, you'll see there there's a Q&A button, uh, it's right underneath the messaging tab. Please use the Q&A tab to feed us questions. That's the only way we'll be able to see it. We'll be able to, uh, everyone else can upload it, uh, and then we'll also be able to bring up the question as well. Um, with that being said, um, I forgot to mention, see what are the different locations people are coming in from. Okay, people are coming from Berlin, Pune, Serbia, Bali, Dubai, Prague, Adelaide, Warsaw. Okay, Brisbane, uh, different parts of India.

Cool.

Lagos, Tokyo. Awesome international crowd. We had about 333 people sign up, so I'm expecting about 150 people to show up, and we're already at about 107. Uh, okay, let's, uh, kind of kick things up. Uh, actually, do you want to bring up Ryan and While actually bringing up Ryan, uh, let me give an introduction to him. He's a super, super excited for him to join us today. So Ryan is a founder, investor, and senior technology executive who excels at defining technology vision, strategy, and execution roadmap to develop and bring innovative offerings to market and position companies for accelerated commercial success. He has a track record of building and scaling new businesses directing multi-million dollar projects and forging trust, trusted client relationships. Ryan is a hands-on technical leader with an extensive background in software engineering, cybersecurity, and big data analytics. He's also a passionate innovator directly responsible for creating valuable intellectual property and commercial software products achieving hundreds of millions in sales. He's currently the managing partner at Raha Beach Ventures based out of Abu Dhabi. Brian, are you listening? I think you're on mute.

Hi, can you hear me?

Awesome. Yeah, I can. Brian, how's it going? All good?

All great. Really appreciate the opportunity today. Thank you.

Yeah, I'm really, really happy you said yes. I think you're our third or fourth individual who've done this format. Again, all well received, so appreciate you taking the time and, uh, and really, uh, talking with the audience today. Uh, it may not seem so, but once we start doing the Q&A, you will see. Um, so yeah, everyone, just— can you just start feeding the questions? I see some questions coming into the, into the chat, but use the Q&A button. I guess I'll kick things off, um, right while people are bringing— are still queuing up the questions. Uh, maybe why don't you tell us a little bit about Roja Beach Ventures and a little bit about yourself and We'll go from there.

Sure. So Rahab Beach Ventures is a startup studio based here in Abu Dhabi. As a startup studio, our goal is to work with founders, with entrepreneurs, to help them take their idea from the idea stage to prototype to production to ultimately a profitable company. And in helping them, we provide not only financial capital, but also human capital. We provide the necessary engineers, marketing, sales, designers, testers, essentially whatever they need to build this company. We'll be working with founders day to day, helping with managing, helping with recruiting, helping them network and reach clients. As a startup studio, our goal again is to be more than just a check. And, uh, As a result, we're seeing some really interesting results. We're a little under a year old. I think our year anniversary is in the end of June, early July. And Abu Dhabi has been a great place for us so far in establishing and getting things kicked off the ground.

Awesome. Well, thank you for that intro. And then just for the audience, do you just want to tell them a little bit about Rahab Beach Ventures? What type of companies you invest in?

Yeah, great question. So we focus primarily on B2B SaaS companies or software as a service companies that are able to help the local environment, the local community, something that's solving a problem that's important to this environment in the UAE, but is also able to scale throughout the region, throughout MENA, and also throughout the world through innovative technology injection. So when we receive ideas, the ideas that resonate the most with us are the ones that impact this local community. In terms of sector-specific, we're actually sector agnostic. And, you know, we're working on ideas in the future of work, in sustainability, in even health and fitness. These are some of the ideas that we're considering and creating prototypes for.

Awesome. Well, thank you. Let's kind of see some questions trickling in. So Let's bring them up. So this is from Buzz from South Africa. They're asking, you know, when determining how much funding is needed, is it okay to include the founder's salaries? This is an important question. Just wondering if this is acceptable. Let me add one spin to this, Ryan. So obviously you're from the States and you're doing VC now in the region. I think this question will change on the location. So obviously if you're here, you need to legally disclose a salary for every single employee, including the founder, regardless of the amount. But I guess like, what are your thoughts on founder salaries?

Is it— this is a fantastic question. Uh, to me, the way that I look at it is the money that comes in the company should be spent on the company. And in some cases, when you spend the company, that means you have to pay the payroll of the people who work there. I feel like there is a concept that exists that's been shared by other, you know, speakers in this area where they say you should take just enough salary as a founder to keep the lights on but not be able to save a penny, right? So the bare minimum to survive is what you should be living on until your revenue at your company enables you to justify a higher salary. We primarily deal with pre-seed startups. So we're talking about even, you know, pre-revenue, pre-prototype companies. If you need a salary to be able to work on this company, then, then you need that salary. Um, but it shouldn't be, uh, you know, the level of comfort that you may be accustomed to if you're at a Big Four somewhere or something else. This actually provides a unique challenge here, uh, in the UAE. Most of the people who live here are actually expatriates. I think it's 86% of the population. And as a result, they don't have the support system to be able to perhaps live with their parents or, you know, build their company out of garage. So the required amount of revenue, or rather, rather, the required amount of money that goes to salaries at a UAE-based company may actually be higher than your home country where you could live with your parents while you're getting something kicked off the ground. Something that we've seen a challenge here especially.

Yeah, that's very interesting. And I think the founder salary topic is like never ending. Every VC will— some will have different perspectives, but I think it's everybody where no VC is going to say no, but it's all within reason. If you raise like $100K and you've taken a $90K salary, that's questionable. But if you raise like $150K, you're taking like $10K out just to kind of live. And again, that's just— yeah. All right, let's keep it going. So we'll just keep, uh, bringing these up. Uh, everyone, like, please add your questions, but also look at the previous questions that are there and help build the ones that, um, uh, that you think are relevant or be interested for Ryan to to talk about. Um, so I like this one from Jordan, um, from Bali, saying that, you know, what's the chance of starting funded by VC if the startup has a great product, great opportunity, built by founders who have the previous experience in the same industry, but the product is still under beta and with little or no traction? I guess another way of looking at this question is like, how important is traction when raising, uh, Yeah, it's a fantastic question.

And I think it depends. It's a case by case, if I'm being honest. What we look at personally, as we are pre-seed, pre-prototype, you know, traction's not even a consideration. You know, you don't have a product yet when we're looking to invest. What we're looking at is the founding team. We're looking at their unique ability to solve this problem. What experience do you have with this problem? Is this something that you've lived through in your day-to-day life? Is this something that you've lived through in the place that you work? Why are you uniquely qualified, again, to be the people who provide this solution? First and foremost. Second of which, we look at customer interaction. Let's say there's no traction. That's fine. But let's say you're talking to potential early adopters, innovative early adopters. And you're having these conversations and you're getting good feedback. And even though you haven't sold anything yet, you're getting a lot of support, a lot of interest. You know, people are willing to have that, not only that first conversation, but that second or third conversation. To me as an investor, that's what's really important. And the idea itself, I think, comes almost after that. You know, we're not going to be experts in every domain of, you know, every sector. But if you are that expert and your clients think that your approach is novel, they think that your solution is, is really tackling this problem head on. And this is something that we were definitely interested in.

Great response. All right, let's keep going for this. Ian from Warsaw is asking, you know, what are the current benchmarks when it comes to raising your seed or pre-seed round? Like, is there certain things that a founder should be looking at whether it's their MRR valuation. So this is a larger question to unpack, but I guess, um, as an investor, what are like your— what resources or where are you going to understand your benchmarks? And we'll plug it into the chat. FY has fi.co/benchmarks for pre-seed based on our portfolio companies and like what people have raised at and what traction they've received. But Ryan would love to get your two cents on this.

Yeah, absolutely. So we are, I think, in a changing environment, especially lately in VC, in the world as it exists in its current, you know, in the current climate, you know, things are always evolving. For us, I think our first stance is only ask for money if you need it. And I think if you need it is the driving question here. I think there needs to be a trigger, an event, like you're expanding to a new region or you have an opportunity to capitalize on a new business opportunity. And that's the reason that you need to raise funds. And I think once you have that true justification, not raising for the sake of raising because it seems cool or, you know, things are easier with more money, um, that there, there be that that, that need. And once that need has been defined, I think that's when you begin to determine when you raise. I, I love that.

Don't, don't raise for the sake of raising, right? Like, um, we had one individual yesterday talking about like the rocket ship analogies. Like, investors don't want to help you build a rocket ship, they want to help you be on the rocket ship with you and as it goes. So like, you really need to understand what type of investors to leverage and also to engage with, right? I like this question Austin's here is asking. Um, I think it's a good old-fashioned question. It's like, what are the key parameters an investor addresses before deciding to invest in a startup idea? I guess, like, what should a founder do before, or else before addressing an investor as well?

Are the key parameters an investor addresses? So when we're looking to invest into a startup, you know, we typically receive through our website, you know, a submission of an idea. If the idea aligns, the next thing we do is we look at the pitch deck. We look to see how well thought through the pitch deck is, how well it's organized, the overall design of the pitch deck, because it It tells us about the attention to detail. It tells us the level of care and effort has been put into this. That's really the first impression. Once we're beyond all of that, we begin to look at the founding team first and foremost. Who are they? What have they done previously? What's their track record look like? What kind of social proof do they have? What's the likelihood of them being able to repeat what they've done before? What kind of references do they have in terms of, you know, these networks that are publicly visible? And then we look into the idea. Is the idea something that fits our thesis personally? You know, is it something that's impacting the UAE in a positive way, impacting the region in a positive way? Is it something that is novel? Is it something that hasn't been done or it's been going to be done in a new, a new way, a better way, you know, improving on user experience, you know, as an example. We look to see whether or not it is investible in terms of scaling. So, you know, we've received ideas related to cafes. It's a cool idea. It's a great, you know, concept, but we don't see it scaling the way that aligns with our thesis. So it's not something that we would invest in. Technology, the defensibility. Really, the list goes on and on and on. I think, I think that, that kind of gets us across the surface.

That's right. I think also another way of looking at it is your investment— is your company scalable? And does it require venture capital, right? Right? Like, it's not just— I think it's not that 1 to 10x return, it's like that 100x return, right? Like, can your business even sustain something like that, right? Uh, cool. Uh, folks, if you're enjoying what Ryan is saying, there's some emojis at the bottom. You know, you can press 1 for a clap, 2 for heart, 3 for thumbs up. Yeah, okay. So please, that's a good way of giving us feedback, especially if Ryan drops a lot of, uh, knowledge here. That's what I appreciate about these sessions is like everyone has a unique perspective, um, and I'm sure you'll share a lot of golden nuggets. All right, let's move on. Amelia from Berlin's asking on how to do investor outreach, um, you know, what's the best way. I think again this might change region by region, but what's your general experience of a founder? Obviously you're on this webinar now, so founders can reach out and make reference to this, but like How should founders do investor outreach?

Yeah, no, I, I love this question, and this is something that I was hoping we would be able to talk about today. Um, you know, if you ever feel lonely, uh, put investor in your title on LinkedIn, uh, because you'll receive, you know, dozens of messages each day. Um, how do you stand out when that happens, right? Uh, I think the idea is to do your research and tailor your approach. There's an example that I like to give, you know, in, in real estate, right? When you're buying a house, you know, especially in the States and here as well, the most successful houses are the ones that are staged, right? These are houses that you go into and you see the furniture, the living room set up nice, the bed set up nice, and because people typically have a hard time imagining themselves in a blank box. They have a hard time imagining how this creation, your creation, would fit their needs. So if you help paint the picture, in this case staging, you're gonna increase the likelihood of a sale. So as it relates to investment, right, the idea is don't just tell me your side of the story, tell me my side of your story. What does it look like for me If I'm involved in your startup, what does that mean? How does that look? What kind of interactions can we expect? What can I benefit, or how can I benefit, or how does this make my life better in some way? In order to do that, you must do research, right? Read about the investment firm. Read about what their goals are. Read about what their thesis is. Are they only investing in pre-seed pre-prototype B2B SaaS companies? If so, we may not invest into your Series C company, right? But the amount of pitch decks we receive for later stage investments is substantial. You know, if we're focusing on B2B SaaS, we're probably not going to invest in your restaurant, right? To me, The best thing you can do is know your audience. Take the time, read their site, read their profile, and write a tailored cover letter or a tailored message that talks about Rawhat Beach Ventures. And in this example, it talks about how your company will help the UAE, will help the local population. The likelihood of us not only responding, but responding in a positive way— let's sit down, let's chat, let's go about this more— increases dramatically because that tells me that not only do you have the attention to detail, but you're willing to adapt. And in startups, you know, you either adapt or you die, right?

Yeah, I love that. Um, that's great. I just threw into the chat, uh, we, we created, uh, I'll pin it to the top, uh, it's a great guide on how to secure investor introductions. We took it from one of our mentors and we put it together last week and is being well received. So there's a link there, you guys can go read up more about it. But it echoes everything Ryan just said on doing your research and really, um, trying to figure out your way into— and really just communicating properly with the investor. Cool. Right, let's go check in with you. How are you? Are you enjoying the questions so far?

Love it, this is great. Okay, awesome.

Yeah, these are more fun because you get to just All right, I like this next one that's coming up, um, from Paula, uh, from Portugal. Uh, should I raise funds for the next 24 months rather than 12? The idea is to have sufficient runway to either to generate enough capital to be sustainable or to raise another round. Um, so Ryan, could you answer this if you're a seed company and then re-answer this if you're a Series A company? Because I'd love to hear your response for both.

Yeah, this is tough. I think it depends on the market. I think it depends on the type of business. I think it depends on how the money's going to be used. I think it's so, so case by case. You know, how challenging is it for you to raise funds? You know, does it take you 9 months to raise funds? If so, then you may wanna prepare for a longer, longer type raise. Our, our goal is to really, raise as little money as possible. And in doing so, we typically focus on, you know, shorter investment cycles. So for us, we're looking at, you know, a 12-month runway for whatever we're doing, with the idea being, because we're B2B SaaS and we're a little bit privileged in this, in this area, that we're able to produce a product that is revenue generating in a much quicker way. And the quicker that we, and perhaps you as well, can be less reliant on investor funds, you know, the better.

Yeah, I think that's great. One thing I'll tell the audience to note is like, look what's happening in the economy and look what's happening with startups now. We have a video on our YouTube page, fi.co/YouTube, where our CEO John talks about the market outlook. It's all the Series A and Series B companies that are being impacted right now because they raised at very high valuations, and now they have to— when they're raising, they have to raise all the down rounds. And the Series A companies are really the ones that are in a crunch because, um, they have money in the bank. It's not like they don't have money, it's just that they don't know when the next time they can raise at their current valuation, because if they go and raise another round, they're gonna have to do a down round, right? So that's kind of the dynamics, uh, where play and then finding step stuff. Super interesting. But if you're at the pre-seed or seed level, you should be okay as long as you navigate your term sheets effectively. Um, all right, let's, uh, keep going. So Tife from Lagos is asking, when is the right point, um, to set up an ESOP? Is that to do while you're raising around or after you raise around?

I don't think I'm the best to answer this question. I actually haven't personally done this.

Okay, we can move on. So I think you talked about this before, but like maybe it's always good. Ben from Telugu is asking like, what are the main things that, you know, you're looking for when you meet a founder for the first time, essentially? What can be the X factor and what is a big no we should avoid? So like a founder meets a VC, what should they do and what shouldn't they do? You know, whether it's in person or online, I think those are two different dynamics, but yeah, I would love to get your thoughts on this.

Yeah. We'll typically do a call the first round of introductions, but I have a huge preference for doing it face-to-face. I feel like you learn much more about a person in person, especially when you're looking to invest and you work very closely with them. When we are in person, I think the biggest thing that I'm looking for is passion. You know, no one should care more about your idea, about your company than you. And if I feel like you're blasé or feel like I'm having to pull things out of you, I'm not as interested because I think that interest could be contagious. You should be almost bursting at the seams with all of the cool things, all the cool insights, all the data, all of the approaches, all the ideas that you have to make your company work, to make your company a success. When someone's passionate, that's exciting to me. That's the first thing. The, the second thing I believe is the attention to detail. Identifying what they bring to the table, their company brings to the table, but doing the research, the competitor research. This is something that actually we see missing quite often. You know, we have this great company, this great pitch, but they leave out all competitors. They leave out, you know, the landscape. When you have attention to detail and realizing that you don't exist in a vacuum and that, other people, other companies may have had the same idea. What have you done to identify their approaches, identify, you know, how they're achieving things, how they've reached success? But more importantly, how can you learn from their mistakes or learn from what they're doing? So if you, if you come into a meeting with us with, with those things, not only passion but, uh, you know, attention to detail, you know, you're going to be coming off on the right foot.

I 100% agree with the passion thing. Like, a founder should have it like on their t-shirt that like they really need to drum themselves up. Uh, at our FI cohort, this happens all the time with our founders when they're pitching. I tell them all of them like, hey, if you are not excited about your idea and if you are not excited about your business, I don't care what your business is, I can 100% tell you that your audience won't be. And that's including investors. So, um, I love the passion statement there. Uh, all right, let's do a few more of these. So a lot from, uh, Palestine, um, is asking, what are the current trends you're seeing in early-stage investments? How can startups align their strategies with these trends to attract investor interest? I guess, do you agree with the second part of that question? I don't know if startups should align their strategies for investor interest, but I don't know. What do you call this?

Kind of cart before the horse, right? Um, current trends and early-stage investments, I think it's, it's kind of hard for us to answer. There's great resources out there talking about what the global economy is investing into. I mean, you hear a lot of buzz, uh, with generative AI at this point. What I can speak from our own personal experience is that we are very interested in generative AI adjacent. So what marketplaces, what jobs, what industries are going to be impacted by generative AI and how can you help them not only survive but thrive in leveraging these technologies while not necessarily investing into generative AI itself. Getting into LLMs at a pre-seed level is challenging because it requires, you know, significant investment in many cases. You look at the amount of money that was spent on OpenAI as an example is tremendous, you know, well into the 9 figures. You don't necessarily need that amount of funding to create something impactful. That will be, I think, quite necessary in the near term.

Awesome, thanks for that. Let's see, everyone, can you just— I'm seeing some stuff in the chat. Please use the Q&A, don't use actual chat. Uh, jump into the Q&A, we have a lot that's there. I don't think we need any more questions, just go through the existing ones and just start uploading. So I'm really just going to through the top unanswered and just bring those on stage, right? Um, This is interesting. This is more on the personal side. Uh, this month is asking, uh, you know, how does the life of an entrepreneur change from investor, um, after receiving investment in terms of running a company control? How do you ensure winning in relationship dynamics? Let me take it one step further. Like, how do you evaluate the— or how do you— what's the advice you give to founders on maintaining a good relationship with their funder or investor? Sure.

Um, in, in our environment as a startup studio, when we invest into your idea, into your company, we actually become co-workers. Um, in this case, we are working alongside you, even in our own offices. You know, you get office space with us, and we're able to work with you on the daily if necessary to help you build your company. I think it's case by case depending on where your strengths are as a founder. For example, if you are a strong technical founder, you may not need to talk to us about the inner workings of, you know, scaling your cloud-based product, right? But if your weaknesses are in marketing and sales, perhaps that's where you're tapping into our experience to figure out how can we, you know, create or develop a roadmap to launch your product in a viable way. So I think it depends on what your strengths are. It depends on the strengths of who's investing in you. Our recommendation, kind of why we exist, is that we believe that the investors that you should leverage are smart money, or the investors that provide more than just capital and provide some sort of networking or some sort of other benefit in addition to just capital. And really, I think, identify investors that complement you, your company, what you need.

Yeah, I think that's a great response. Um, um, I don't think I can say this on the webinar, but I remember one of my first ever FI sessions I did in Toronto, we had this, uh, guy, uh, a very large VC firm, and he was really explaining, like, um, giving the dating, the marriage, uh, I guess not really the dating but the casual dating analogy with investors. It's like, you know, um, it's like you don't want to sell me on casual dating, like casual dating. You want to sell the investor as if you're going to literally be married to them for the next 5 to 10 years. So it's a real wine and dine type of relationship within that for a few months. Um, because like, so you can't really sell them on like, oh, they're not just going out once. So it's— I think it's an important relationship to cultivate and develop over, uh, over time, time period. So you have to really like think about that. And I don't think enough, um, founders think about that because like, to your point, they won't do the research and they'll do the outreach to an investor without knowing anything about them, you know, like go stalk the investor on Twitter, LinkedIn, go look at their profiles, see if there's relevancy, see if they've advised previous companies, go talk to portfolio companies. It sounds like a lot of work, but it's not that much. Like you can probably do that over 2-3 weeks, like, and then shortlist like 5-6 good investors, in my opinion.

Yeah, um, I love that, I love that feedback, I love that kind of that take on the dating analogy. And even if it is a lot of work, even if it is a lot of work, continuing with the marriage analogy, don't you wanna put in a lot of work for someone that you're gonna be spending a lot of time with? That I think vetting is actually quite critical, right?

Oh, 100%. We advocate for that quite heavily at FII. All right, let's, we're at 30, 2. So let's do maybe, uh, like 3 or 4 more questions depending on something, and then we'll wrap up for networking. Uh, okay, so Stuart from Prague is asking, uh, so if the startup is not suitable for investments, do you usually give any referrals or pointers on when they should become ready for investment?

So It depends. We receive a tremendous amount of pitches to us and we don't provide feedback to everyone. You know, our default response is, you know, if it fits our thesis, we'll get back to you because of just the volume that we receive. When someone approaches us in a more tailored way, they actually, hey, write about Raha Beach. Hey, we're interested in investing or creating something here in Abu Dhabi. Would love to just pick your brain over coffee to talk about this pitch, this idea that we have. If it's a more tailored thing, I'm happy. And I actually have sat down with numerous, many startups and help them provide feedback on not only their pitch deck, but the overall idea where possible. Even if that then isn't necessarily within our thesis. But I think it really just depends on how you ask, how you, how you approach an investor. So generally, because of the sheer volume, we don't provide that level of feedback on everyone. We don't have that capacity. But if you approach us in a very polite way, then time allowing, we'd be happy to sit down and happy to provide some feedback.

Yeah, one thing I'll also mention to the audience is we have an event like this called Pitch Practice. We host it every 6 weeks. It's literally, um, there's about 10 mentors. Each mentor has a virtual table. You go, you pitch them your 1-minute pitch or your elevator pitch, they give you feedback, and then you go on to the next table and into the next, into the next. So like within like 30 minutes you can get feedback intended for people, right? I would encourage— it's a free event similar to this format, apply.co/events. Go sign up for them. We host them every 6 weeks. And obviously, if you think you need some investment advice or you're kind of at the early stage, go apply to the Founder Institute, apply.co/apply, to your closest chapter. And I'm sure one of the local directors can help you and maybe enroll in that program. So we didn't really talk about markets, but DJ is asking, you know, like, what does the investment market look like?

I don't know, as a whole, is it time to raise?

Maybe that's a good question to cover.

Yeah, that's a fantastic question, and I think it depends on the climate of your particular country, of your region, and their risk tolerance for for early-stage investments. For us, this is kind of an ideal time. My partners and I, when we started this firm, it's kind of less than ideal. You see the massive drop-off in investment, massive drop-off in raising funds. But when you look at what happened during the 2008, 2007, 2009 area, in the States with the recession, with the housing market collapse. Look at the companies that came out of that particular area, right? You see the Ubers, you see the Airbnbs, you see these— there's a list of 20 companies that are absolutely fantastic. So for us, what kind of keeps us going and what keeps us getting out of bed and excited every morning is if we can thrive, not only survive, but thrive in a market that's challenging, then I think we're building something special. When it comes to raising, we're about to raise seed for one of our companies in a few months. It'll be interesting to see how in this area things have changed. You see a massive increase in seed valuations from like 2019 to 2021 or 2022. Where you're looking at, like, I think it was a, you know, $750,000 average to, you know, a $2 million average of deal size. Is it still at that? Current trends show it's going down a little bit, but we're only gonna know, I think, as we, we experience it firsthand. And I think as a result, as I said earlier, you're needing to adapt. So maybe the way that you would've raised funds in 2021, um, isn't the way that you do it today. And I think it's talking to your local investors, it's talking to your local investment community. And figuring out what's trending, what's working. Is it safe investments? Or perhaps you're reaching out to smaller ticket size with angel investors. It just depends. But I think being open to flexibility and being open to feedback from your local community is your first step.

I think that's great. Great piece of advice. All right, let's do one or two more and then we'll jump into networking. Mohamed's asking, um, when you're fundraising specifically for product development, what's the best way to communicate this to investors? It's unclear over here if there's traction or not, but assume there's like no traction. Um, do people fund, or would investors fund a startup purely on for product development and then go forward from there?

Sure. I think it comes back to adequately defining the need, you know, providing that justification. Is there a reason why you need to expedite? Is there a competitor that's coming up? Has someone announced that they're working on something similar? You want to be first to market, uh, or do you want to be a fast follower and as a result you need this extra injection of cash? I think when you better understand what your story is and why you believe that this is necessary, I think it can be very useful. As a technical founder myself, I'm going to look at how do you plan on utilizing these funds? Are you allocating towards, you know, in a smart way? You know, are you doing things that are relatively cheap upfront, you know, MVP creation, you know, wireframing in-house? Before you perhaps leverage external developers and external development firm. If you've done everything you can to save costs and you have a real burning justification as to why you need to launch 6 months earlier, and that's why you need this injection of cash or capital, then yeah, sure. I think it could be a very valid justification as to why you need to raise.

Perfect. I like this question. I think it's a good question to end in. It's one I'm surprised we didn't get it until now is like, how do you set the right valuation for your company after each round? And then he talks about like, as they concentrate on development, how does that affect valuation? But I guess, Ryan, do you want to talk to the audience today about like how to set a valuation, especially when talking to investors?

Sure. So there's a lot of different approaches here. The first of which can be doing competitor analysis. Are there other companies in your same domain that are of similar stage that have raised within the last few months? If so, how did they position themselves? How do they value themselves? What multiples were they using? If you're revenue generating and you exist within a certain domain, you can use that multiple to help create a valuation. Really, it, It, it depends. It depends.

Yeah, we just did an event yesterday where an individual went through like 3, 4 different methodologies on evaluation from a more technical standpoint. So if anybody goes to our YouTube page, they can watch that, uh, and that's pretty in-depth. All right, uh, Ryan, we're at the 45-minute mark. Uh, I want to make sure that there's time for networking. So folks, we're gonna kind of wrap up here and then we'll jump into the virtual tables. But Brian, any parting wisdom you'd like to give our audience today?

Sure. Again, thank you so much for attending today. Really appreciate, really appreciate your time and the great insightful questions. If you have a pre-seed, pre-prototype B2B SaaS idea that can impact the UAE and beyond, please come to Raha Beach Ventures, check out what we're doing, and and see if we can work together.

Perfect, folks. You know, I've done a lot of these. I think Brian's the first one that's actually invited you to come in and pitch a pitch or kind of like, uh, send a proposal across. So do take him up on his offer if you're within B2B SaaS. Um, all right, we'll wrap up things now. Uh, we'll see you in the networking portion and we'll chat shortly. All right, thanks everyone. Enjoy the rest of your day.

Bye.