Surbhi Sarna, CEO of nVision, discusses how she raised her first $300,000 and hired senior experts as consultants before making them full-time employees. She shares strategies for finding mentors and building trust with early hires, including an anecdote about a mentor connection that led to an introduction with Tim Draper.
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I think almost everyone sitting on the ground right now, they all have this idea of starting a business after they graduate Draper U, and you're saying the first $300,000 that you raised was the hardest money that you had to raise.
Right.
How were you able to navigate all of those things, like the insurance companies, like the FDA, everything that is very nuanced in the industry that you're in, with maybe not as much experience as someone who comes with 25 years of experience in pharma?
Right. So I mean, the first thing is as much as you can get experience in it to do that, but then to work with people who are very experienced and have the necessary skills. And then hiring them on and trusting them. I think a lot of entrepreneurs, because we care so much about what we're doing, it's hard to bring on someone who's an expert and then sort of just give them ownership over what they're doing. So I definitely believe in doing that. So I hired a VP of R&D who has over 25 years of experience and we work very closely together, but for example, I won't interfere in who he wants to hire.
Right.
Something like that. But yeah, the fundraising part and that being the first $300,000 was definitely the most difficult.
How many people here think that they will or think about hire experts for their startup? Anybody? Okay, quite a number. Aside from the fact that you need to let these people kind of run their show once you bring them on, you're basically saying you have to have that trust bond. But how did you convince someone with that amount of experience to come onto your startup with you saying, yeah, I have I have a few hundred thousand dollars in the bank, and I have a few years of experience. Please join my startup that could crash and burn, statistically speaking, in the next 3 months.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. People who are that good with that level of experience and that sort of thing, their salaries will be about a quarter million, like around that. So I actually didn't hire him or anyone at that level. on full-time until the next round of funding. Instead, what I did is I had him join the company as a consultant.
Okay.
And that way he was available to come with me to pitch meetings. And it was understood that once the money was in the bank, that this person would join full-time. So a lot of entrepreneurs play it that way. And it just gives the investors reassurance that, you know, all the necessary pieces of the puzzle are there, you know. And my husband's an entrepreneur in tech, so he just closed his seed round of funding from Andreessen Horowitz for $3.5 million. And just the requirements in tech are a little bit different, right? You don't necessarily need someone with like vast amounts of experience to give, because there isn't the FDA and all this like other regulation.
So I do know that some people in the room are actually thinking about going and trying to poach Okay. To poach higher-level execs because maybe they have this kind of idea that they might not have all of the expertise and they're thinking about different structures for this. So aside from a consultant, do you think that they should go any other routes or a consultant is a pretty straightforward and standard—
I love the advisor thing. You should kind of get them in whatever— so I wouldn't think of it so much as they're joining the company as they're joining you, right? Like whoever has that much potential and promise in their career has a lot of different options. So what are they taking a bet on? They're taking a bet that you can execute on whatever you're saying. And of course, if they don't believe in the company at all or the idea at all, that's going to be an uphill battle. But I think really focusing on making them like you and believe in you is incredibly important. Any investor, or a high-level person, that's what they're looking for at the end of the day is— and the guy that I hired, honestly, the guy that I ended up hiring as my VP of R&D, he was my boss at the previous company.
Wow.
So he was that startup's VP of R&D, and 5 out of the last 7 companies he's worked for have successfully exited. So he knew me in the capacity of a subordinate, So it took a little bit of time. It took like a year of building the relationship and him doing consulting before he would come on full-time, which makes sense. So earlier when I said I got the call from the bank and I walked into my boss's office and I quit, that was him.
Gotcha.
And now he works for us.
That's great.
Before going out and fundraising, you need to find a mentor. So you need to find someone who really believes in you. And it's the same thing like I said before, Don't just pick someone out of convenience. I also made that mistake. Wait until you find someone that you know has all the right connections for you and who really believes in you and who you get along with. And that person should not be shy about opening doors with you. One way that you can tell right away if someone's going to be a fake mentor or a fake advisor, and this is a lot of entrepreneurs have gone through this, is they'll tell you casually they'll make a connection for you. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know Tim Draper. Totally gonna make that connection later tonight. No problem. You'll see an email from me. And then like 2 days later, nothing's happened. And like you call them and you ask again, and they're like, oh, yeah, yeah. So it's before even having a formal agreement with someone, sometimes it's kind of nice to see if they're really willing to pull up your sleeves for you. And then, In terms of how do you find this mentor? OK. When you're first starting out as an entrepreneur, and let's say you have no network yet, or you have a very limited network, every meeting you take will seem random and kind of connected, but not really connected. But you never know where that meeting's going to lead. And every meeting you take gets you a little bit closer. So for me, when I first started, wanted to start a company. I remember that one of my high school friends' dad had started and sold a company. I was like, oh, this seems like a really solid connection. I'm going to go to her house for dinner. So I went there, and her dad did not help me at all. But her mom was sitting there, and her mom does market research, completely outside of my field. But she had a friend that did clinical trials in India, completely not related to the stage of my company at all again. So, but I met that woman. She was really interested. And each time you meet someone, you should take the meeting so seriously. There's a little bit of this Silicon Valley thing where it's like, unless you can see the immediate return on your time, people don't want to take that conversation seriously or they want to rush through it. But if you do take the time and take people seriously, even though you can't see a clear connection, things often fall into place, right? So then I took that meeting with that person, who introduced me to somebody else, which was kind of not related, who met me to my current mentor, who introduced me to every single person who's put company money into my company, including Tim Draper. So you just kind of have to hang in there and be patient. And every person you meet should like you. You should be a good person and a nice person and courteous and grateful to every person you meet. And you should also stalk them before you meet them. And I mean that in a less creepy way than it just sounded, but you should definitely Google them and understand everything you can about them before meeting them, because people find that very flattering, and it also makes your conversation more educated. So just— you're in the Valley, right? So eventually you're going to meet the right person. You just have to kind of put yourself out there and take meetings and meetings.
