How to Raise a $13M Series A, with Liza Rodewald, CEO of Instant Teams

All right, hello everyone and welcome to the Founder Institute event on how to raise a $13 million Series A featuring my good friend Liza Rodewald, CEO of Instant Teams. For those of you who don't know, my name is Ryan Micheletti. I'm head of global operations for the Founder Institute. And some of you know that Founder Institute is the world's largest pre-seed startup accelerator. I've had the honor of leading our operations team for the last 8 years, helping scale the organization to over 6,000 startups spanning 200 cities and building a, a mentor network of over 25,000 mentors. And so if you're a founder here in the audience, if you're a military veteran or spouse, or just a, a founder building a startup and you are looking to be backed by one of the largest and most successful startup accelerators in the world, uh, we have applications open in every major city around the world, ranging from New York and LA to Rwanda, Singapore, Kazakhstan. And so you can view the list of cities where we have open programs and enrollment by going to fi.co/enrolling. Additionally, in addition to my role of being a head of operations for Founder Institute, I'm also the co-founder and a VC at The Veteran Fund. The Veteran Fund is a VC firm that invests in military veterans, spouses, and dual-use startups, and you can learn more about us and join our deal pipeline by going to our website, www.veteran.fund. So it's an honor to host today's incredible event featuring what I would consider one of the greatest founders of the military community, Liza Rodewald. Liza, this has been a long time coming, and I'm so happy that you've taken the time to join us today. How are you doing?

I'm doing great, Ryan. It's great to see you again and great to be here.

Awesome. Well, before we get started, let me just kind of go over a quick agenda for the audience today. So first and foremost, this is a live international event. And we wanna make this as interactive as possible. So for those of you in the audience, please say hi in the chat, tell us where you're dialing in from. And if at any point you have a question for me or Liza, please put it in the chat and our production team will send it to us here on the backend. We had over 700 people, almost 800 people register for this event today. And we'll be sending out a recording of this within the next 48 hours. So please keep a lookout for that. And then also at the end of this event, we always do a networking session on Airmeet. Airmeet is a way for you to meet other founders, mentors, investors, and partners. And so as the world kind of continues this like hybrid virtual environment, we think it's really important to create meaningful relationships and connections between the people that join our events. So stick around, we'll share the link to join Airmeet at the very end of this, and we look forward to seeing you there. And then finally, last announcement here is we are hosting a Founder Institute Silicon Valley graduation event next week. Uh, where you're going to see some of our debut pitches of the companies coming out of that accelerator program. We're also going to have a keynote from another awesome FI alumni, Taj Ahdhav, who is the CEO of LeaseCake, and they also just recently closed a $12 million Series A. So, uh, exciting times at Founder Institute, exciting times at Instant Teams. We'll go ahead and send that information in the chat here. Um, Liza, I guess just to kick us off, do you want to start off with like a brief introduction on yourself and maybe an overview of Instant Teams.

Sure. So, hi everyone. Happy to be here today. My name is Liza Rodewald. I'm the CEO and co-founder here at Instant Teams. Went through the Washington, D.C. cohort of FI, so that's where my Founder Institute roots come from. I currently live in the North Carolina area. I'm also still a military spouse, so you'll hear that throughout my story, and that's my connection to the, to the military community and that side of what we're doing here at Instant Teams.

Awesome. Well, you know, I remember, I think it was like 2014 or 2015. Um, I had known Erica from a previous startup she was working on and I hadn't met you yet. Um, but we set up a call and you guys had this, this idea of Instant Teams or what was called like Mad Skills in the very beginning of leveraging and using the globally distributed talent network of military spouses to basically be a talent pipeline for, for corporations. And I remember I was on the freeway when we had that call, and I would love to just maybe share with the audience and hear from you, like, what was the genesis story? Like, how did it all begin? Where did the idea of this concept come from?

Sure. So I have a background in software engineering. I ran my own software company actually prior to starting Instant Teams. And so I had seen the need for companies to be able to scale and manage remote teams just from my own perspective and background. Then I became a military spouse myself. Right after my husband and I got married, he wanted to go back active duty. He was actually active duty, reserves, and then back in. And I said, you know, sure. My company was already remote at the time. And we moved into our first military neighborhood and every single military spouse I would meet would just ask me the same questions. Liza, how are you working from home? How have you maintained your career? How can you help me? And my natural tendency is to solve problems. I love solving problems. Right. And so this idea that I'd had kind of in the back of my head for this technology and then meeting the military community and saying, okay, here's a completely untapped workforce that could plug straight into this idea that I have. I think there's something here and something we can work with. And so it wasn't an instant when we started. I met Erica, my co-founder, probably 2 years later when we were both in Virginia, kind of at the same time, about 6 months, we met online in a fitness group. And her and I got together and just started talking about, she was actually working, Ryan, like you mentioned, in Silicon Valley for some of those startups at the time that I met her. And I was telling her about my software background and we just connected kind of on a mutual, you know, military spouses doing career work, seeing the community struggle. And just at a, at a surface. And then now a couple of years later even went by in between that. And she reached out to me and she said, hey, I have this idea. I'd like to kind of think about it. Would you be interested? And I said, hey, I've had a very similar idea, but on the technology side, and let's see if we can put these things together. I was actually about to start another company when she came to me. And so I put that on hold because I really wanted to build something with a co-founder. Everything I had done to date before had been myself as a solo entrepreneur. And so when she came to me, I thought, okay, I can, I think we can really make something of this and turn it into something big. And her and I working together, you know, would make a great team to do that.

That, that's amazing. And I think that goes back to like this, this insight of really finding like values-aligned people to start your company. Right. And finding co-founders really hard. A lot of people here who are starting, you know, early stage startups are struggling with that exact thing. But sometimes it just kind of happens and the opportunity presents itself like that. So, so I didn't know you were looking to start another company at the time. That's, that's really interesting. And, you know, I'm going to ask the same question that these military spouses were asking you, like, how do you do it? Right. So you've got now 500 employees around the world. You're trying to scale that to like 10x. Um, and now, you know, you're basically a couple of years ahead of this whole remote workforce revolution. Um, so I know COVID was a great kind of, you know, uh, amplifier of that, But how do you manage these distributed teams on a global scale? Like, you know, I'm sure that there's times where it can be really stressful, but are there any like insights that you might be able to share with the founders here on how to manage these distributed teams?

Sure. I think, you know, remote is just in our DNA. Erica and I would have loved to been in the same location as we built the company, but we never lived in the same state the entire time that we've built InstaTeams. We still don't live in the same state today. So I think that's unique from the founder perspective. A lot of founders might have distributed teams, but the founders themselves are in the same location. But we've even built this entire company with her and I being in different time zones the entire time. And so from that, just DNA of us figuring out how to make that work from a very founder level, and as you build and scale the team, I think one of the things that we learned was communication and how to do that in a way that enables people to be really productive. And to be mindful. So Erica calls it mindful communication. We have an entire policy written in the company about it, but when you're in a distributed remote environment and we have people working for us in every single time zone, um, all across, it's really important for people to understand when and how to respond, that you are very clear on and intentional in your communication. Because when you're communicating in Slack, email, like those things, a lot of people have different communication styles and you can read tone, intention a lot differently, and And that can cause a lot of problems in your distributed team. So getting people together, making sure communication is very tight is really important. And it has to be like an intentional process. You can't just hope that people understand and know how to do that. We actually have created ourselves like a mini course that actually walks people through how to do that and how to think about it.

It sounds like that within itself could be its own startup. In fact, I've seen actually some that are trying to manage like how you do the soft communication skills through a digital medium. That's really interesting to hear. And, you know, on the fundraising side, let's go to there for a moment. So you guys were separate geographically, you know, back, I think, when you raised your first round, the common knowledge was that you want founders together, you want not only the founders together, but they need to be within like 50 miles of the investor. And so, you know, COVID certainly like blew that up. And we're starting to see like, you know, now like geography doesn't matter as much from an investment perspective. It's still important, but it's not, it's not going to kill a deal. But you guys were before that, right? Like, what were you getting pushback from investors about? Like, one, being distributed co-founders, but then two, also like not necessarily being close to the investors because you moved around quite a bit. You were even in Hawaii for a while there.

I did. I graduated from the DC cohort and then my husband got orders to Hawaii. So right after the DC cohort was when we were going, okay, now we're gonna start raising money. And then we got orders to Hawaii and I was excited cause I was like, ooh, Hawaii sounds fun. Then I was like, how am I gonna raise money from Hawaii out of all places? So it was definitely a challenge, I would say. I just plugged into the Hawaii network and started networking there. And Founder Institute was a great asset in that process too, as we started. But I will say I raised my entire seed round completely remotely. I didn't meet a single investor in person, and this was pre-COVID, right? And the other part of that question, I think, you know, was there hesitancy because Erica and I weren't in the same location? Um, I think what they saw was, hey, what they're building is a testament to this. So if these two can do it, then what they can do for companies can also be done, right? So it was kind of a test of, can they eat their own dog food, right? Can they build a company distributedly, and can they build teams distributedly to scale this? And so if they really believed in the mission, which is the people we were looking for, they believed we could do this in this capacity. So it was definitely interesting pre-COVID to do that and was unique raising money completely virtually, which I did. The only in-person pitch I did was to the actual Hawaii Angels, which were there on the island. With me. Everything else was remote.

Yeah. You know, there's, there's so many gold nuggets of wisdom you're sharing here. Mindful communication, like the ability to like to take that like founder culture and dynamic and then scale that. And I think, you know, I could see why the, why the investors invested, because if you can get that model right within your own company and your own culture, and then start to scale that to other organizations and cultures, That's really, really interesting. Tell me a little bit about like when you first— the first idea around Instant Teams, you didn't necessarily have like a technology component built in. I think that was always like the vision of like, okay, if we're going to scale this, like how do we do it? But like, did you guys have some sort of eureka moment that was like, okay, we're, you know, we've got a couple clients including, you know, one of my companies, very low volume, but like, you know, consistent revenue to then saying, okay, how do we turn this into like a scalable tech startup? That's globally accessible. Tell me a little bit about like that aha moment.

Yeah. So I would say we were about 2 years in when we decided really to make the switch from Mad Skills to Instant Teams. I had actually bought the Instant Teams domain like 15 years before. I've had it for a very long time for the technology kind of side. And so once we saw what an amazing opportunity we had, even with just in the military community, and had a couple of customers and were testing that out, you know, her and I kind of sat down and had a, had a kind of heartfelt conversation that, hey, there's a lot of opportunity here. If we wanna take this where it needs to go, we both have to dedicate full-time to it. And we have to decide, yes, we wanna build like a scalable venture-backed startup and we're gonna turn Mad Skills into Instant Teams. And so we both sat down and did that. And that required some sacrifice on our side. I actually shut down my software business to do this full-time. And she stopped working at her full-time job in order to dedicate to it. Right. Which we had no money in the startup at that time. So we were working for free and putting all of our resources and money into it. So it's kind of a scary moment, but it was then that we decided, hey, we're going to go all in and we're going to build this at that global scale. Because we can do a lot of good, both on the community side, helping these military spouses get these types of jobs. But also solve a real problem that companies have that's now been even more amplified after COVID, the talent shortages, the ability to scale these teams. Like all of this kind of put us on a, I would say, faster timeline by about 8 years, right? Because pre-COVID, our number one objection was, well, we might want these people in the same state or in the same time zone or coming into our office. And then after the pandemic, everyone was on the remote work train, right? Because they had to be overnight, even traditional government and healthcare and things that were slower to move. And so that's been really interesting in this process because we were about 5 years ahead of that. And now, you know, the things that we're working on is now again, like 5 years ahead of where everybody else is at. But that objection that we used to face so much is now gone.

We'll leave the secret 5-year roadmap as a secret for Instant Teams. Um, but you said something that's really interesting. And so when you quit your job or when you shut down your company and both of you decided to go full-time, that was before you raised money, right? Or did you already have money in the bank?

Oh, that was before we raised money. That was right when I dedicated to go through the Founder Institute, um, process. Uh, so that was kind of our first, like, baby step into, okay, we got to figure out how to lay a good foundation so that we can raise money because this is the path we want to go down. And I will tell you, Ryan, I did have several people people saying, are you sure you want to do that? Are you sure you don't want this to be a lifestyle business? I had investors say, are you sure this is the kind of path you want to go on? And, you know, I, I knew that we had something that could be so much bigger, um, even if everyone around me couldn't necessarily see it at the time.

That dedication and, and bravery and courage to do what you do is exactly what every single founder will need to at some point make make a decision around. And that's where, like, even in Funding Lab, which you went through— for those of you who don't know, Founder Institute's postgraduate program Funding Lab helps you raise capital— one of the requirements is that you're full-time on your business. And so, like, as we kind of go back to the topic here, how to raise a $13 million Series A, or really just, like, how to raise capital as a startup, one of the important lessons that you need to walk away with is that investors will not fund you, or it will be harder to find investors who will fund you, if you're not already full-time on your startup, boat's burned, you're moving forward to conquer the world. So that's criteria number 1. I do have some other questions around like fundraising that I can jump in here and ask. And again, just as a reminder for people in the audience, if you have specific questions you want to ask, go ahead and put it here in the chat, and then we'll get to your questions here momentarily. So as you know, because we invested in Instant Teams, the Veteran Fund is a fund that invests in military veterans and spouses. As we, as a fund, have gone out to raise that capital to invest in startups, we've had so many reminders of the importance of values-aligned people, finding the right team, building the right community of people that really understand the vision to surround you. And so you had the opportunity to sort of build all these different communities of supporters in every geography that you lived in. Maybe you could talk a little bit about like what you're finding on that community side of things. Like, is— how important is it to like be part of an ecosystem or be part of a community that will support you along the way?

It is absolutely critical. So that was our main goal going through FI and DC, was to start to build a network. Erica and I both came from backgrounds where we didn't have like friends and family kind of rounds, so we knew we were going to go straight to investors for the very first round of funding that we needed to take in. And neither her or I had ever done that before, nor did we have tons of investors just sitting around that we already knew, right? So we had to build it from scratch. And so plugging into ecosystems, I plugged into the Founder Institute, I plugged into the Blue Startups in Hawaii as soon as I got there to make sure that I was staying involved. We went through several Patriot Bootcamp, the IVMF's Be Wise program on the military side. Um, we went through several of those types of things just to start building a network, letting people know what we were doing, getting feedback on the product we were building, the target market we were going after. I mean, we learned so much, but, um, finding people that align with your values, I would say is so critically important because what I've learned throughout this stage is even the investors that I met very early on, still help me to this day. And it's because no, even after I got the money, I really did spend time cultivating relationships with those that wrote us the first checks that believed in us. I sent monthly updates and I had a lot of investors say, you know, most of our founders don't send us monthly updates. They just send us quarterly updates or, you know, or whenever I reach out to them and ask them, how's it going? You know, and I was very proactive with my communication. And I honestly believe that is the reason why I was successful. That, and, you know, the company traction for raising the Series A, because I spent time really digging into those relationships. And when it came time for me to raise a Series A, I had so many of my investors raise their hand and say, Liza, I'll give you an introduction. I know someone you need to talk to. And that was just the power of like building that over time and investing back into those relationships like they invested in me.

I love it because it ties back to your original point of mindful communication. And I see it a lot. You know, the founders that send out those monthly updates are almost like the squeaky wheel where it's top of mind. And there's been many times where I've gotten an update from a company and they haven't asked and I'm like, oh, like, you know, because I've seen this now, I can actually help them versus you just disappearing into the ether. And then, you know, us wondering like, oh, what? Oh yeah, I forgot about this company or what's going on with them. And so, you know, I think kind of lesson 2 here on raising capital is you want to send out those updates. And just from my personal experience, it's a really good exercise on personal accountability because it forces you to kind of forecast, it forces you to hold yourself accountable to achieving goals and milestones. And then, you know, by making that sort of public commitment to it, you're able to, you know, give yourself the motivation to achieve those goals. And so I think that's really, really critical. You know, you've raised a couple different rounds of financing, and I'd love to kind of get your insights as to what were some of the anecdotal differences between raising your seed versus Series A. Maybe you could talk a little bit about each of those rounds.

Sure. So my— we raised like a seed, a Series C, and a Series A. So those are like the three paths. I would say in each stage, the storytelling was obviously really important. But when you get to the Series A, it's a lot more about the metrics and the sophistication of the story and how it aligns with the actual facts of what's happening versus the big picture pitch where you're saying, this is what we can make if we meet all these targets. So the Series A, which, which much more in detail of, okay, how, based on your current metrics, how are you getting to here? Versus, you know, just the pitch of the dream and the vision, which is more on the seed and the series seed side of things. So I would say that dynamic was a little different. It always takes longer to do than you think. And everyone says that to you and you're like, yeah, yeah, yeah. But then when you go through it, you're like, yes, it is, right? It's a process, right? And you have to be ready. You have to have the time to dedicate to it. And you have to, you know, be willing to listen to a lot of nos as you start to go and you'll really refine the pitch and your presentation kind of through that process. So I think when I got to the Series A, I already knew I'd done it twice. So I kind of knew that mechanism, but I, so I thought it was going to be easier. But then when I got to the Series A, it was like the same thing again. So I was like, I should have known it takes longer than you expect. It's always going to be a little bit challenging. You're always going to hear a lot of nos. So even though I'd done it before, it still was kind of at yet another level, which I think is the typical founder experience, right? Every stage, you know, you never have it all together. You're always learning, always evolving.

Yeah. To be fair though, you also tried raising during the holidays, which is pretty challenging. So I think you actually, you know, closed your Series A pretty quickly considering all of that. There's a really good question here from, from David. This has to do with like showing traction in your seed round and like sort of what are the metrics that you have to show investors to get them interested in the seed round. I've got some anecdotal evidence I can, I can share with David, but you know, maybe you could talk a little bit about like where the company was at when you raised your seed round.

Sure. So we did have some financial traction when we raised our seed round, purely because we did do kind of the staffing managed services side of our product. And it wasn't just pure SaaS. So we did have, you know, some traction on that side, but that was part of us testing the market, figuring out exactly what the spouses were looking for, what companies were looking for kind of in our process. So we did have revenue coming in. We did have people registered in our platform. I think we had about probably 4,000 at the time that we were raising the seed round of active users using the platform. A few companies, not a ton of revenue. I would say we were like probably in the $200K-ish range at the beginning, which, you know, takes a lot to get it. I remember when we hit, when we crossed the $100K threshold, 'cause that was a big deal. Like we finally made it, you know, past passed that milestone. But so we did have revenue coming in. We, we weren't a pure SaaS product at the time, which was good and bad because then I'd have to pitch like how we're going to become a SaaS platform, even though we have this kind of revenue. So it was sort of, it was helpful and hurtful kind of at the same time. So I had to get really good at pitching, you know, where we're going, what we're trying to do and why we're doing what we're doing at this stage to get to the next stage.

So it sounds like you were still like, um, trying to get to product market fit with the seed round. Would you say that when you went and raised your Series A, that now it was like, okay, we have product market fit, we've got this validation from the market. Now let's go and like 10x the size of our customer pipeline.

Yeah. So by the time we got to Series A, we, we definitely have product market fit on one side, but we are still kind of catching up on the technology side. Of what we're doing. So I still have to kind of pitch where we're going with that. And part of this big Series A raise was to start to flip the focus more on the platform revenue and let managed service be more of a complementary than a driver in the business, but growing them still kind of at the same pace and making that, you know, 4-year, 5-year plan out where that transition starts to really occur. So that was part of you know, the Series A pitch, even though we had a lot of really great product market fit on the managed services side. And then we had some really big customers that were using the platform, which helps validate that this is a need in the market.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And, and David, just to share with you some other metrics that we see at like the seed or Series A round, if it's B2B SaaS, um, generally to raise a seed round, which we would define as like $2 to $5 million, you'll need somewhere around $10,000 to $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue. If it's deep tech, you can technically raise a seed round where you just have really, really strong leadership and IP. So if you're doing quantum computing, if you have a top quantum expert on your team or you've got a team of quantum experts, they could probably go out and raise multiple millions of dollars with just the idea and the concept. 'Cause it's such a capital-intensive project. And then like consumer transactionals, so this could be like, you know, direct-to-consumer, you'd probably want somewhere around like $250K to $1 million in annual revenue, or at least as a run rate. So those are all just metrics for like the seed round. That increases as you get to Series A. And Liza, I'd be curious to kind of get your thoughts here, but I mean, we've seen, you know, anything from like, if you're a direct-to-consumer or a consumer transactional, it could be $5 to $10 million in run rate. Series A, the size of a Series A round has gone up a lot. There's two alumni that recently closed a $12 million Series A. A decade ago, a Series A would've been what the current seed round is now, which is a couple million dollars. And so, Liza, I don't know if you have any other direct traction metrics that you think were accurate for your company when you raised, But it sounds like David's looking for like some other types of metrics and benchmarks.

Yeah, for us, I mean, we had a lot of revenue compared to a Series A company because of our model, right? Because of our managed service model, because of our, you know, 600-some-odd employees, you know, we were like at the $17 million ARR kind of rate whenever we raised. But so I would say that's probably high for somebody you know, starting out in a pure SaaS model. So it depends kind of like what your underlying business model is and how that's being viewed for valuation purposes. And part of that is just kind of sitting down, I think, and making sure that your metrics are on track for the type of industry that you're in. So we're a labor marketplace, so we're in the labor marketplace category. And so how those revenue multiples, you know, go is a little bit different. And our Series A was bigger. We did a $1.5 million Series C round that was the precursor to the Series A. But by the time we were raising our Series A, we have a lot of traction, a lot of really great things going for us, and a really big vision of where we're trying to go from the community side and from the technology side of the labor marketplace industry.

Yeah, those are all really good points. David, you kind of have this comment in the chat like, wow, these are eye-opening numbers. And, you know, frankly, it is, you know, when I did my first startup and this was back in 2011, I was like, all right, we're going to go and raise like a couple million dollars, then we're going to build the product and then we're going to figure out how to sell it. And like, there's this whole like learning curve that has to happen for the founders to really kind of root you in reality, which is, you know, now it's really hard to raise money if you need to use it for product development. You have to have a full-time team. You have to have traction. You have to have a product that your team built or that someone on your team can actually build and manage. You can't just outsource it to someone. And so to give you an idea, it's pretty hard to go from zero to that point, right? Because you need this team essentially around you that can achieve all those milestones. And so what we do at the Veteran Fund is we've kind of found that there was this big pre-seed gap, So what do you do if you, even if you have achieved those numbers, but you don't have $10,000 a month in recurring revenue or even $50,000 a month, where do you go to get the capital you need? And so that was sort of the genesis of the Veteran Fund, which was we look for companies where the team is full-time, they have a product that, and it could be an MVP. It doesn't have to be a final product, but they can prove that they've built something on their own. They have to have a little bit of customer validation and traction, and obviously they have to be a scalable tech startup. Those are sort of the table stakes just to make it worth your while to go out and start fundraising. And if you don't have that, that's okay, but you need to recruit the team and build the product and do all those things to get to that point. That's really where Founder Institute comes in to help you get to that traction and funding. And then once you're ready to raise capital, then we go in and put you through the Funding Lab program to help you do that. So, Liza, I don't know if you have any other comments on that, or we could kind of move on to the next part here?

Yeah, I mean, I think it's different for every company, and I think as founders you hear the stories of people going out and raising $5 million on just an idea, and that's really the rare things, you know. All the founders I've met have, you know, you have to put in the work and the time, um, to, to prove the traction, and then it makes the pitch that much easier for sure.

So, um, at these different funding rounds, your seed and your Series A, Did you have a different ask or like, where, where would you think, like, you know, when you were looking at the different investors and you were talking to them, like, what were the asks? What were the things that they could help you outside of money at the seed round? And then what were you looking for in investors kind of at that Series A round?

Yeah, I would say at the seed round, I was just more concerned with the right types of people and not as much the help, because at that point we really needed money just to kind scale out and keep proving what we were doing so that it wasn't just me and Erica and the 2 people we paid out of our pocket to help us build along the way. We knew we needed to kind of build a team. And so from the seed round perspective, I was looking more for just value adds and the right kinds of people to bring in. And then, you know, when you're raising it first, you know, I think the tendency is to take money from anybody because you're just kind of like, yes, somebody's willing to give me money, I'll take it. But really aligning yourself with those people personally and making sure you're spending some time to get to know them as an investor, what their ultimate goals are, asking, you know, what is the success for this investment look like to you? So you make sure that you guys are aligned on the outcomes for it at the seed round. And then when we got to the Series Seed round, by then we had some good traction. We were ready to start scaling even bigger, and we wanted to make sure we had a partner that could help us in very key areas. And so Squadra Ventures is who led our Series C round, and Guy Filippelli is the managing partner there, and he was actually a West Point graduate and very in— involved in the military aspect of the community. And so we knew that kind of investor would be a good fit for us to help us in the military and some of the corporate partnerships we were looking for, having that connection. So not only does the money coming in be very helpful, but it's also strategic to us in relationship building and building our network on that side as well.

Yeah. Again, a lot of really good points there. You really want people that are going to help pull at the oars and do more than just give you capital. And so, you know, like here's, here's the catch-22. When you have a really good company and you can easily go out and raise money, you can be picky with your investors. When you don't have a really good company and you try to go out and raise money, you're not going to get the traction you need in the market. So instead of like wasting time to try and go and raise money, you should spend that time trying to build a better company. And so like there's this like inflection point that happens where like once you've gotten to a certain point, now all of a sudden it's a lot easier to go out and you'll spend much less time raising capital than if you're just starting off with like an idea and you're trying to like go and raise money from angels when you don't necessarily have that traction. You know, there's a couple of questions here in the chat. There's one specifically around like the DNA of Instant Teams. You know, does Instant Teams primarily cater to the military remote workforce candidates? And did you determine the specific workforce makeup beyond their military background? So this is sort of like, you know, is Instant Teams military community only? And then if so, what are sort of the expertises or verticals that you focus on in terms of supporting with remote teams?

So predominantly our workforce is made up of military spouses, veterans, caregivers, those types of military groups. We do have what we call civilians. So that's a very military community term, but people that are not affiliated with the military also in our pipelines of talent, although our mission is really to empower and help out the military spouse community who move very frequently and often have a hard time maintaining and climbing the career ladder. So Within what makes our technology and our system very unique is that we are all skills-based hiring, which is a unique proposition now in the talent world as a whole, but was an absolute necessity for the military community. As a military spouse that moves around a lot, they have multiple job titles. If that goes into a traditional ATS system at a company, it automatically gets kicked out as a job hopper, inconsistent. That kind of thing. So we built our technology to tell stories, to tell stories of the people that are building their profiles within Instant Teams, but also a skills accelerator component where they can reskill, upskill, and gain those skills so that the employers that come on and build these curated pipelines with Instant Teams are actually choosing the path of the types of skills that they want to see. And it basically democratizes the hiring process. So that you don't have to have gone to a specific university, or you don't get preference for having a job title to job title. It's all about the skills and what you can do. And I think at the workforce as a whole, that's where we're moving to a more skill-based hiring system. And it was just a need, a necessity for that to happen for the military spouse community. And so as we grow, when we move, you know, our mission will always be there, but we do have, you know, openness to other untapped talent resources that we can bring in to help, you know, get rid of that bias in the hiring process and help these large corporations. We mostly work with enterprise and small to medium enterprise, be able to really connect to diverse talent and untapped talent pools that they wouldn't normally have access to. Because a lot of the bias that currently exists in their systems, even if that's not what their desire is, It's there inherently by how all of that technology was built.

So earlier you mentioned that, you know, raising capital takes a little bit longer than you anticipate. There's a question here in the chat around like, what were like maybe 2 or 3 key activities that helped you successfully raise your rounds?

I think one, being consistent. Two, Keeping your existing relationships very warm and building your investor network. So I continued to take calls and meet other investors this entire time. Like I'm even doing it now again, right? Even though I'm not currently raising. So always having that process built in and not just thinking about it when it's time to raise, because then it's a little too late. You should be building your network the entire time, keeping those conversations warm. Taking introductions. Um, it's nice once you start moving along, because then people want to talk to you versus you just trying to talk to people and get people to take calls with you. So it's fun to kind of go through that transition and see that, but it's important, I think, to keep those conversations warm and to keep your eye on that. I also organized all my things, um, in Foundersuite. I love that tool. I thought it was really great, a way for me to keep track of the conversations that I've had. And then a way for me to move everybody to the next stage. So I have like my seed, series seed, and series A all in that. So I can kind of see who I've talked to, who I've connected to, who gave me the intro and manage my time and make sure that I'm visiting that frequently. And then always going back and saying thanks to the people that give you introductions. It's very important, you know, to make sure you're keeping people in the loop on the other side.

You know, there's a question here too, that's around like, is there a good doc or URL that gives a breakdown of Fundraising, typical formulas, how much equity to give away. This is coming from Moses. We go over all of that in Founder Institute, but also in Funding Lab. And Liza mentioned Founder Suite. One of the things that I found really helpful when raising capital is this kind of notion of measure twice and cut once and really be like organized at the onset. This, like, the key to fundraising is not like have one investor meeting a week and kind of build it a little bit at a time. You want to get everything ready to go, like from your leads list to your deck, to your financials, to your deal room, like get super organized at first. And then at some point you go out and do like an investor blitz where you're doing like 5 meetings a day, not 5 meetings a week. And you're just stacking them like back to back to back, because that's going to give you momentum in the round to create a little bit of that FOMO that will help navigate and push investors to commit. And so there's a lot of like little tricks and tips like that that we go over at Founder Institute that will make it much easier for you. Is there anything else, Liza, that you would want to share to a company that's looking to raise capital?

I was thinking they need to join one of your whiteboarding sessions. I think you gave Erica and I probably our first, like, here's the venture capital landscape whiteboard session when we first started the company and doing things. But I think you cannot hear read and listen to that enough, right? Because even now that I've been through it, you see the math and you see everything play out in real time. You know, the more you can dig into it and the more you can read everything you can get your hands on it and see different scenarios, the more you'll understand. And then the better equipped you'll be to answer the questions and to make sure you're really creating the kind of path you want to be on. Because, you know, I had a background in software engineering, so a lot of that was new to me. Right. So I had to learn it from scratch. And so at first it sounds like you're speaking another language and then it sounds a little bit more familiar. And then now by the time you're a Series A, you're like, oh, that everybody doesn't know that stuff. I've already forgotten that, you know, I had no idea what that was, you know, just a few years ago. So constantly learning and reading and doing, going back and doing it again and again is really important to like exercise that muscle so that you really start to retain that information.

What's that saying, Liza? It's like, you know, when you first have a kid, it's like you're in this like crazy process and then you kind of forget about it 2 years later. So you have another kid and then you're like, oh my God, I remember all these things. I totally forgot. Yeah. It's so funny. Well, so there's a lot of resources and things. We'll put some here in the chat. Let's talk a little bit about founder mindset. And so this is something that, you know, it's a framework that we've been developing at Founder Institute. You know, just quickly, like how I define it is founder mindset is like the set of attitudes and beliefs that enables a founder to overcome the challenges that lay before them against all odds as they set out to use their vision to change the world. Right. And so it's like, takes a very particular person with a very particular set of beliefs that will sort of unlock that ability, that superpower to literally take that idea that they have and transmute it and turn it into something that positively affects the world. And so with that in mind, like, I mean, you've accomplished a lot. You've built a really great company against all odds and against a lot of the norms that were set out in the venture community. For you personally, like, what are some important components of your founder mindset?

Sure. So I think one, you have to be in a spot personally where you are as mentally stable as possible, right? So you have to be feeding yourself, you know, positive affirmations. You have to be exercising. You have to be eating, eating just in general, because you can forget to do that as a founder, like really taking care of yourself to be in that kind of mindset. I was kind of reflecting on that a little bit. I've always been very, a very I don't know, go-getter kind of personality even as a child. And I'm sure, you know, gave my mother lots of sleepless nights because I knew it all, you know, even as a teenager. So that's always been sort of in my DNA. And, you know, just personal experiences I've had throughout my journey, which people, you know, probably don't know a lot about some of the hardships I've gone through personally, that's kind of, I think, built that muscle of, you know, I am going to I'm just going to go out and do what I know how to do. And, you know, it's going to be a success either way. So I don't treat things as failures along the path. I actually started a company and shut it down before I even started Instant Teams a few years before I did my software company. Right. So I've had different experiences, but I just count them all as, okay, this is getting me to the next step and to the next stage. And then being really confident in the things that I know and the things that I can control. And then understanding, you know, there's always going to be things happening outside of my control. And then how do I face that in the most positive, stable way? Because as an entrepreneur, it's like, woo, woo, woo, woo. And like, all this happens like in 5 minutes, right? You can have the most amazing thing, but there's something also bad that happens. And so you have to just get yourself in that steady, stable mindset that like, no, no matter what's happening around me, This is my focus. This is what I'm doing. This is my goal. I'm going after this and setting those things down. Another thing that I do that may be unique just to me is I have physical objects that I usually either purchase or get that represent the next level of goals that I have in my life and in my business. And so I buy that and then I have something that I'm going to buy at the end and I tie those things together. So to me, like just having a physical representation of where I'm heading and a physical daily reminder of that. And I put them in my office or I put them different places, really helps me also maintain my mindset of what I'm trying to get to and what I've accomplished and kind of memorializing it in those kinds of things.

I love that. In fact, that's the first time I've heard that. I've got plenty of little like, you know, cool trinkets. My daughter like made me this. So I always like have that as a reminder, but I love the concept of like getting something that like memorializes that goal, and then you just stare at it and you see it every single day and it just like imbues in your subconscious. I think that is, that is really, really cool. Um, you know, as a founder, you talked a lot about like really like good positive habits, affirmations, healthy eating, exercise. Do you have a mindfulness practice? Like, do you meditate? Do you take some time during the day to do that? What does that look like?

I do. I do that usually in the mornings. Um, my which is much better now. So when I lived in Hawaii, my schedule was a little bit terrible. So I was probably not the best representation of all of these great things I just said. So also know that I haven't done that perfectly throughout this journey. Um, but since moving to the East Coast, my mornings are a lot quieter. In Hawaii, you know, I was already behind 6 hours in the Eastern time zone, even at 5:00 AM, right? So it was a little more difficult. So keeping in mind your schedule and what you're able to do, makes a difference. But at this point in my journey, my mornings are set aside. I have a very specific routine that I get up and I do my, what I call quiet time. I do that in the mornings, right before I wake up my kids to get on the school bus. And then I do put them on the bus and then I do my exercise kind of routines. And then I try to keep my schedule blocked for the first few hours in the morning because my most productive time from a strategy and just creativity standpoint is in the morning. I'm a morning person. And so I try not to jump straight into a bunch of meetings and things first thing. I try to use that time right after my quiet time and my exercise to really do the things that I can do the best right then and guard that time and then let the rest of the day be, you know, the meetings and the different things that I need to catch up on. So that's kind of the rhythm I've established for myself. Erica is the opposite. She's a night person. So her stuff happens at night. Right. So she, her creativity is, you know, in the evening hours and things like that. So you just got to find, I think, what your natural rhythm is and then guard it and try to cater to that as much as possible.

Yeah, that's, that's really cool. Um, you know, there's a lot of evidence that show that, you know, the morning when you first get up is like kind of your, your key time. You know, I, I don't think I shared this story with you, but when my family was evacuated from our house due to the fires, We went to Hawaii because we have some family that lives out there. So I also had that 3-hour time zone to the Pacific Coast, right? I can only imagine the East Coast. But it was so magical getting up at 4:00 AM, going out on the grass, looking at the stars, getting some meditation in first thing, and then jumping in. And by the time 5:00 PM Pacific hit, because I think it was like 2:00, so we'd take the family to the beach. So that's always, even though it was a very stressful time, It's a really fond memory. And I think there's something that Jaime says here. Jaime's from Spain. His question is sort of around when things got chaotic and you were close to saying, "Enough is enough. We're not going to make it. I'm going to throw in the towel." What were some of the things that kept you going? And to expand on the question is, are there other tools that you use to stay zen and be be very like composed in the face of chaos and uncertainty?

So as far as other tools, I'm a music person. So I see your guitars in the background. I've got one here. That is, I use a lot of music to kind of stay in that mindset. So I have different songs that I'll listen to. I have different things that I play to kind of get that creative energy. Flowing around me and to keep myself kind of grounded on that side of things. And then the first part of that question was what I got into my— I think you think about my guitar and I got lost focus.

Yeah, it was just kind of around like, you know, at some point, and this happens with like every single founder, it's probably happened to every person on this call, you're going to be staring into a tunnel of darkness and you're going to be like, okay, this is a pretty challenging situation, um, what are some of the things that like keep you going? Like when you've, when you've had to kind of be the light to shine in that tunnel of darkness, like what are some of the things that you have found that, that were able to help you move forward, uh, courageously into that?

Yeah, so I think from, for myself personally, um, I, I believe so strongly in what we're doing that I never let myself get into the mindset that this is the wrong thing, right? I know it's the right thing. I may have to switch what I'm doing and how I'm going about it, but it is the path I'm supposed to be on and never wavering in that. Right. But I think it's also important to recognize sometimes as a founder, you can also start something and then realize maybe this isn't the right path and that's okay. Right. So there's a, there's a time to push through and then there's a time to maybe reevaluate. And those are the things that are hard and only you can kind of know that and figure that out. But I, I had one of those journeys where I was like pushing and then I was like, wait, this isn't actually what I want to do. And so I knew it was time to pull back. Whereas with Instant Teams, I've always known that this is going to be successful. This is, I'm, it may be hard and it's been hard, you know, I don't want to make it sound like, oh, it was just easy. We just raised money and we did all that. There has been a lot of extremely hard things. That we've had to walk through, but I've always been so determined because I know, one, we're having such a good impact on the military community and that's a mission and in my heart to do. But two, I know we're really solving a real problem here and I may have to switch how I'm going about doing it. Um, but I'm not, I'm stopping was never like even a doubt or thing I ever let enter my mind. Right. It's just, how are we going to get done? You know, and there was a point where we struggled to make payroll, right? Those happened several times during our journey. And those are hard, right? When you're faced with those kinds of situations, but no matter what, we always found a way. So I think that's the unique thing about founders. Like we're trying to solve problems. Like, as long as you don't give up, like there's usually a way. We're also, I can recognize we were in the right industry at the time. Right. So there's been a lot of Founders that, you know, just wrong, wrong timing. Right. So it's nothing that you're doing or nothing that, you know, but with COVID like, you know, you were in the travel space that was really tough, you know, for those 2 years if you were starting anew. So we would just happen to be also kind of in a good industry during that time as well. So again, just that mature emotional maturity to step back and be able to look at where you're going, what you're trying to do and what, and listening to feedback, but then ultimately knowing yourself which direction you need to go.

Yeah, I— you've said so many really great things just now. I, I think, you know, vision, purpose, really like making sure that the thing that you're doing is directly tied to your purpose in life. And there's so many people that don't know what their purpose is, and I would encourage everyone, if you don't know what that is, like, you should spend some time to try and figure it out. Because, you know, and Instant Teams is a great example, like You know, you've done a lot of things before Instant Teams, but it was almost like the universe was conspiring to lead you to a point in time where it's literally the personification of you and Erica and the experiences you've had as entrepreneurs, as, you know, remote workers, as military spouses. And so like, you kind of know, like very, very deep down, this is the right path. We're doing the right thing. And so I'm just going to follow that thread. And like be able to navigate through the ups and downs to do it. So that's really great. And you know what, just a reminder, I know we're getting to the top of the hour. We are going to do some networking after this. We'll share that link here in the chat, so stick around. I do have one question here which kind of goes full circle. And you know, originally you and Erica were talking about like this mindful communication, really establishing that culture. You have this like even like course that you put people through, which I'm super interested in and learning more about. How do you and Erica take these personal values and mindsets and really imbue it into the Instant Teams culture? Because the culture starts with the co-founders. And so how have you been able to successfully grow that within Instant Teams?

Well, I would say Erica is fabulous at that. My co-founder is amazing and I can't say enough great things about her and our relationship. A lot of people thought we were really good friends before we started Instant Teams, which we weren't, like we just knew each other in passing, but we've really been able to develop obviously a very close relationship now over time working together. But I think her and I building through the process, we came up with our core values for the company probably in year 3, right after we raised the Series C round. And we used those from very specific things that her and I had been embedding in our teams. Consistently. And so with those core values, like for example, one of them is take ownership. So that is like one of my big personal core values of taking ownership of something always leads to a solution, even if you aren't the cause of it, or, you know, weren't influential in the process, but taking ownership and making solutions around that. So that's one of our core values. And then we take that and we give every quarter core value awards, and we award, and we have our Slack channels to where people can say, hey, I saw, you know, Jane demonstrating ownership today, and this is how. And so we always tie back things that our people are doing within our organizations back to our core values, which is our back— were birthed from intrinsic values that Erica and I kind of built together in the company. And so we make sure we keep those front and center throughout. So everyone knows our core values. They're not just talking points. They're not just something on a slide somewhere. Like we ingrain them into our company. We talk about them, we give awards, and we recognize behavior that reinforces that. And I think that's important to kind of keep it, you know, a thread throughout your organization, especially as you grow.

Totally. And, and, you know, those sort of institutionalized values really like stand the test of time in the organization as it grows. And, you know, as you get to 10,000 employees, your influence is going to be much less. And so you really want to make sure you set those up to grow with the group. Well, Liza, I mean, this was, this was a great talk. I know we said this was a long time coming. I super appreciate you joining us today. Um, we're going to go ahead and wrap up. I've got one last question for you, which is, you know, for the military spouses and the military veterans that are here, they're thinking about entrepreneurship and even the non-military community folks that are here. What do you have, like one piece of advice that you would want to, uh, give them as we wrap up the event?

Sure. I think mostly just going for it. If you have an idea, you have a vision. I think there's so much support in this community if you're just looking in the right places for it, that just starting and doing it, I think, you know, thankfully we've been proof that two active duty military spouses can build a company that can get Series A funding. So that's very exciting. So I'm, you know, really encouraged that other people will follow in the path if that's the kind of company they're wanting to build, a global scalable company and solving those types of problems, like just getting started and not waiting and starting to iterate on it. Because, you know, obviously Eric and I thought things would happen a lot faster too. And although they've happened quickly, it still takes time, right? So going ahead and getting started and just just putting your idea out there and starting to get feedback on it.

Yeah, I love it. And Liza, I wanted to surprise you with something today, but we, in your honor, you and Erica and Instant Teams, we've officially launched the Instant Teams Fellowship to Founder Institute, which will allow any military spouse to, who applies for and gets accepted, to join one of our programs for free. We think it's time to start building out the military spouse entrepreneurship community. And, uh, and you know, you guys are a really great example. So thank you for, for paving the path forward for the founders. Um, and I look forward to working with you guys for years to come.

I love that. That's amazing, Brian. Thank you so much. That's super cool. We'll definitely make sure we share with all of our, um, connections and military entrepreneurs in the military spouse space too. That's really cool.

Amazing. Well, thanks again for joining us today. We're going to go ahead and wrap up. So, uh, our producer Scout is going to put a link to Airmeet in the chat here. We're going to leave this line open for a couple minutes just so people can successfully transition over to Airmeet. But let's continue the conversation. I'd love for people in the audience to meet each other, learn more. Maybe you can find a co-founder, mentor, or investor in this space. So once again, Liza, thank you so much. We'll make sure to give you the recording and the links.

Thank you for having me. Thanks, everyone.

All right, take care.

See ya.