I Sold My Startup... In HIGH SCHOOL

2 weeks before I started at Tulane, we ended up closing the deal.

That's Zayd Ali. He sold his first company at 18 years old.

Feeling right when it happens and you open up the bank account, you see some zeros for the first time. It's a great deal. Then there was this deep feeling of what next?

Within months, he founded Valy, an AI SDR that's raised $3 million from Jason Kalkanis and Antler.

Once the first domino falls, the rest of them fall.

But those dominoes didn't start falling right away.

Within a couple months of getting the funding from Antler, I could see logically that we were running into serious headwinds.

So he went back to the idea for his first business and realized that AI had changed everything.

There was this technological unlock where everything I was doing with humans, all of that could now be done with GenAI.

So he told his investors he was pivoting, and thankfully they were on board.

Wow. This is more progress than you've made in 6 months since we invested.

Zayd told me the pros and surprising cons of fundraising during an AI gold rush, along with how to get a junior VC to convince a GP to meet with you and how and why to sell a product before you actually build it, along with a lot more. This is Zayd Ali's founding journey. So Zayd, welcome to the podcast.

Thanks, Alex. It's, it's good being here. Thanks for having me.

Yeah, man, I love starting these conversations off by sort of going back and thinking about where you got started as a founder, as an entrepreneur, and you actually sold a company in high school.

Is that right? Yeah. So I started it, started my senior year of high school and then ultimately took a, took a gap year to grow it. And then 2 weeks before I started at Tulane, we ended up closing the deal to, to sell it. So it's a curious journey to, to, to getting to that point, but a lot of fun. And that's how I got started off.

How do you even learn to sort of identify a market, grow a business, navigate gate and acquisition process when you're, you know, what, 18, 19 years old? How's that work?

Yeah. Okay. It's a, it, it was an interesting story. So I guess to kick things off, I was, this was my summer going into my senior year. Everybody was looking for, for internships sort of around the DC, Maryland, Virginia area. I grew up back in Washington, DC, and I decided that I wanted to go and get an internship in, in Tanzania. My sister wanted to climb Kilimanjaro, so I was like, hey, can I come with you? I'll stay with you, whatever. So she begrudgingly was like, okay. So I went over to Dar es Salaam, got an internship at this, at this fintech company called Serapu. It was a super interesting time. But anyways, while there, I'm scrolling through Snapchat and I see this guy that I'd met 2 years prior on one of his stories. It was a black square and it said, hey, does anyone wanna start a company with me? And I had started a nonprofit in high school and that's where I fell in love with entrepreneurship. But I really wanted to start like my first true startup. So I swiped up, I was like, sure, no idea what it does. And got on the phone with him. We ended up talking, going back and forth, and he was telling me something about client acquisition for financial advisors.

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I didn't understand a single word that he was talking about, but anyways, decided to jump in and say, hey, this is great. And we ended up co-founding the company together, coming in again to my second semester. And in terms of identifying the market, this was sort of— he came to me with this idea around, hey, financial advisors are constantly looking for new clients, especially sort of these mid-market financial advisors where they don't have perpetual referral stream. You don't want to work with sort of your lower-tier FAs, do they don't have any money to spend. Your upper-tier FAs, they're going to have, again, that consistent stream of either a client base that they've had for generations, or that referral network is so strong they never need to look externally. But right in the mid-market, you had this group of people who were constantly being given sort of $2,000, $3,000 a month budgets by the firms that they worked with to go out and try to find new ways to go and acquire customers. So anyways, we decided to target them. We saw the majority of people that the majority of financial advisors were using very traditional methods to go and acquire customers or clients. They were going to conferences, going to the golf course, they were sending direct mail. And so we said, great, let's try to bring some digital marketing strategies into this super archaic industry. And things were kind of moving along. We got to about $5,000 in MRR pretty quickly, but then we couldn't break past that plateau. Where things changed as I stepped into growth sales and top of funnel and he stepped into sort of fulfilling the backend operations. Once we'd bring somebody in, we saw that next inflection point to about $10,000-$15,000 in MRR once we made that change. And then COVID hits and financial advisors, they can't go to conferences, they can't go to the golf course. Now they're sitting at home still needing ways to grow their business. And so digital marketing was immediately where they started looking. And then that's where we ramped up sort of all of our outbound efforts, redid our website. We said, now is the time. And then that's when we started scaling 20, 30, 40, 50, 60, 70. And then we hit another plateau around that $70, $80K MRR mark. And at that point, we were pretty tired. I was about to start school and we said, all right, do we think we can go and, and get this thing acquired? And so I think I looked up like how to sell your startup and there was a, like a, a website brokerage company that had a Google ad and I just clicked on the first link and it's called Website Brokers and they sell companies, sort of e-commerce companies and service companies between sort of half a million in ARR up to $5 million ARR. Called them, got on the phone with a guy named Paul, said, send me financials. I said, great. He gave us evaluation in 2 hours and then we were like, awesome. Signed an agreement with him. He started fielding buyers for us. We took buyer calls, we had a 4 or 5 really interested parties, did a, a really quick bidding war. It took about 2 months and after 60 days we had an LOI in place and, and the company was bought right again, 2 weeks before I started school. So yeah, that was the, that was the journey of, of the first company.

The 2-hour valuation. I love it. Were you happy with the 2-hour valuation?

To be honest, like I didn't know, it seemed in the ballpark, right? Well, we got sort of 3, 3 to 4x on, on EBITDA, which for a service company is like right where you want to be. So I said, great.

What did it feel like after you sold it? You know, this is the first thing you've sort of taken through to liquidity. How does it feel to kind of give up a baby like that?

It's a mixed feeling. It's a good question because there were sort of, there was two back-to-back feelings. The feeling right when it happens and you open up the bank account, you see some zeros for the first time is a great feeling. It was very unexpected because I didn't go into it thinking I was ever going to sell this company. I really went into it seeing, okay, like what can I learn about building a startup? So there was never this like, I don't know, pot at the end of the rainbow that I was looking for. I didn't expect it. So when it finally hit, like that was great. And then there was this deep feeling of what next? And what really hit me sort of 24 hours later was I felt like I had built up a lot of expectation. There was, okay, 17-year-old kid started this company, it was acquired, and I immediately felt like I stepped onto this hamster wheel. I was like, shoot, this is great. I can maybe take some time off, but I need to now somehow figure out how to get to the next level. And is this something that I'm going to do for— so am I on this entrepreneurship flywheel and is it something that I really want to do? So there's a lot of reflection. I then went to Tulane. I had a semester there and over the course of that 6, 7 months, it became really clear, like I needed to start that next thing. It wasn't a function of expectations. It wasn't a function of Hey, I need to go and do something 2x bigger, 3x bigger. It just became really clear to me that there wasn't another path for me. Like I'd fallen in love with this. This was the bug. And then started my next company with the same guy just a couple months later.

Yeah. So you're motivated to just go out and do it again right away, basically.

That's what it was. I didn't know if that was the case and it, I'm glad that I realized sort of what my motivations were, what those inputs were for me to be able to work the way you need to work to build a company and to find opportunities to scale a team. Like they're, you need to understand what well you're pulling from. And that's what I think I realized after that first experience. So yeah, it was, I needed that type of building momentum in my life to be able to fuel my well. And I'm glad that I was able to figure that out pretty early on.

Okay. So let's fast forward. Now you're building Valley. The beginning of this journey though, you went and did Antler's residency program and you were also a member of Launch House and you were a great member of Launch House. When we were running it. Are those types of like community accelerator programs valuable for a founder? Like, what's your perspective on that?

Yeah, I think they're incredibly valuable, especially if you're not a quote, like, in-network founder. So for me, like, I had never, never started a venture-backed company before. Yes, I had this bootstrap services company, which at that time nobody in the Valley really, really valued. I think that's now starting to change. But, but yeah, I didn't have a fancy degree. I wasn't technical. And so I would have network founded. I needed a way to jumpstart the network of Silicon Valley investors, founders, get into that bubble. So the first place that, that obviously offered that to me and was Launch House, that was an incredible experience. And I think the biggest benefit there is you, there are very few places where you will have more focus and be surrounded by more energetic and purpose-driven individuals and intellect, right? I think just being able to surround yourself with incredibly intelligent people who have that same gene, that same bug of wanting to go and create is something you don't get when you're not in a Launch House or an Antler or Y Combinator. And so Launch House was a great experience and then happy to talk about the Antler experience 'cause that was incredibly transformative as well for me. And I think there's tremendous value in being around those types of people and seeing what you can accomplish in a 4-week program, in a 6-week program. What I find is that a lot of, I say founders, but people in general, I don't think they know what that next gear looks like. Like when you really push yourself to 100% capacity, What can you get done in 6 weeks when it's a binary? You're getting funded and you have a ticket to building a true startup versus you get rejected. When your back's against the wall, what can you do in 6 weeks? And once you see what's possible in that timeframe, it reframes your mind. So you're moving at a more consistent pace because you, you understand what your potential looks like. And that's something I think an accelerator does really, really well.

Yeah. And you actually took funding from both. You, like, we invested in you. And also you got the investment from Antler, which not everyone does. I guess in both cases, like how did you manage to make either yourself or the opportunity stand out?

Yeah, I remember the first day at Antler, it was be so good they can't ignore you, right? That was the saying that they said over and over and over again. The essence of that, at least the way I interpreted it, was just compound that time, right? I wanted to prove that what I was doing week on week on week built on top of each other so I could draw this direct line of, hey, this is what you initially brought me in for and this is where we are now, right? It's very easy as a founder when you have a million different things that you need to do to create sort of this scatterplot of progress. It's very difficult to draw a direct sort of A to B line going up and to the right. And so for me, I sort of work backwards from where do I want to be at the end of this 6-week program? And for me, it was I needed to have at least 100 people on both sides of our marketplace, because we were building up a social network for founders and investors that we could talk about that company later on. But, uh, but anyways, so, so that's where I needed to be. I needed a product in users' hands, and then I needed to somehow get past this chicken and the egg problem and show that I can grow both sides of this marketplace. And so backwards from there, there's a pretty simple line that I needed to draw. Number one, I needed to go build an MVP. So as a non-technical founder, figured out how to use some no-code tools with my then co-founder, Will. For any founders, FlutterFlow, amazing. Take a look at it. It's a brilliant product if you're non-technical to go build web apps and mobile apps. So yeah, we built an MVP in a week. We then stress tested it, brought on a couple beta testers in week 2. Week 3, we got all the entire Antler cohort on our product and we convinced Antler to say, hey, screw your startup day reports where we go around the room and talk about what we're doing. All of that is now going to happen on FISH. So we got them to adopt it internally. Week 3 is when we brought on a bunch of investors. Our pitch there was, you invest in lines, not dots. You have a group of incredibly high signal founders here who are in batch, in residency. Come get some asymmetric information. This is where the alpha's going to be. Look at the companies that are breaking through the noise on FISH. We got some incredible investors on. J. Cow joined some other high, high signal angels, and then From there, week 4, we started to make some introductions. This was totally manual, right? So connecting founders and investors on the platform wasn't happening in our app yet, but do things that don't scale. So we were just trying to make any mutual connections that we could. Week 5 was just pitch preparation, talking with the partners, trying to figure out sort of what scalability and the billion-dollar outcome with Fish looked like. And then at the end, it was, it was IC. And so I could draw this very direct line of this is what you brought me in to do. This is what I did. I told you that I would achieve this by the end of the, uh, of the program. And this is what we have. Now, ultimately we ended up getting the investment and, and Jeff, who's the, the general partner there, he was like saying, I told you this when you joined, I'm gonna tell you this again. I hate your business. It sucks. However, you did make a promise and you lived up to it. And that's the type of founder that we're looking at back. And, and the pace, the speed, and the execution quality are, are the things that we really care about. 'Cause if it's not gonna be this idea, it's gonna be something else. Like those traits permeate around markets, around industries, whatever you end up doing. So we're gonna write you the check and Lo and behold, 6 months later, we ended up pivoting from Fish to what we're building now, which is Fally.

Yeah. I mean, I think at one point Jeff called you a maniac, right? And that's the, it's like the same vibe that I got when we first met and sort of also the reason that we backed you. You're a solo founder, you're young, but we definitely saw that in you and it was like, well, okay, this guy is going to make it happen, whether it's this idea or after a pivot or whatever. This is the guy. Yeah. Talk to me about the pivot then. Like when you reached that point, what did that feel like? How do you know it was the right time? Yeah, walk me through that.

It's an interesting question because founders often hear this conflicting advice, which is just don't die. You have to be a cockroach. Just keep surviving. Don't take no for an answer. Just persist, persist, persist. And then you also hear sort of the glorified idea of the pivot, right? Like these incredible companies were all born out of, out of pivots. You had, uh, Burbank raised some funding. 18 months later, they launched Instagram. 18 months later, they're acquired by Facebook. And so There is, there's no one that can give you that answer. And I've had a few founders ask me this question. I think it comes down to a couple of things. One, it, it's sort of the, the logos and the pathos. And so there's the logic behind it, which is, okay, in the case of Fish, there was really no business model that was sustainable. We had a consumer social product which had a TAM that was too small to monetize with ads. You couldn't monetize with subscriptions because nobody would want to talk to the founders that needed to pay $30 a month to go and talk to investors. So there's the logical reasons behind why this product wouldn't work. But even so, like that, that is not enough to convince me that, that it's something that I was willing to commit my life to is not worth committing to anymore. And so the second piece is, look, as a founder, you need to have intuition. You need to make decisions with 60% of the information that a normal person would have to make that decision with conviction. And I could feel that there, I would, could pivot myself into circles, but that you needed to take a step back, have some intellectual honesty, take a week away from the business and look at it objectively again, remove yourself. From the situations that are telling you to keep grabbing onto this thing. If you feel like your tank is running on empty, a week away from the company will tell you if that's something that you want to jump back into or if that separation was, was worthwhile, 'cause you got the clarity that you needed. So for me, that was the process that I ran through. Like within a couple months of getting the funding from Antler, I could see logically that we were running into serious headwinds and we kept building different types of products and different variations of this we tried to move into investor updates, sort of like short-form investor updates instead of, instead of sending emails. But it turns out of the million problems a founder cares about, trying to find a better way to send investor updates is at the bottom of their list. And so there wasn't anything that I was really grabbing onto, and it took a week away from the company to say, yeah, I, I don't think that there's a business to be built here. It looks like the investor founder ecosystem is a lot bigger from the outside in once you're operating in it, it's a very insular, it's a small world and it's a difficult problem to solve. And so at the end of the day, intellectual honesty and logic, you know, if you're going to be a successful founder, you know.

Yeah. I remember we had a couple of jam sessions at one point about the investor update idea. I remember pacing around my kitchen talking about that with you. What would you say to somebody who's maybe seeing these signals that maybe deep down in their gut, they know should pivot. There's not this big venture scale outcome with what they're doing, but they're choosing to ignore them. Like, what would you say to that person?

It's an interesting question. The only person who can make this decision is, is the founder. I was in a really interesting situation where the only thing convincing me to keep building Fish was that other incredibly smart people invested in the company. And so I was thinking, okay, hold on. Launch House has invested in this business. Jason Calacanis has invested in this business. Antler has invested in this business. These are intelligent investors. So there must be something that they see that I didn't see myself. I don't think that if Jeff came in and said to me, Zayd, I think you should pivot, I would've done it. I would have, right? I don't think if you came to me and said, Zayd, you should probably pivot, even though maybe in the back of your mind when we were talking about this investor update thing, you're like, this isn't gonna work. I wouldn't have done anything differently, right? I needed to come to that conclusion myself. So I would be a sounding board, right? I would help them try to find an avenue that may work, right? And we came to a couple conclusions after that conversation, but I wouldn't convince them to depart from the business because it's ultimately up to the founder and they know the market much better than I do. The founder has to figure it out themselves.

Okay. We made the right choice. Bali is a venture scale opportunity. We're ready to go on it. Like, what was that like?

It was almost by the time I communicated it to investors, it was, I had a lot of conviction there. I think one of the reasons, and I didn't mention this earlier, but when I was thinking about my fit with Bish, there was really not a clear why me or why now. And I used to think that that was sort of a, a nice to have to like give to investors of like, they'll ask, what's your why me? What's your why now? And I was like, who cares? Like I can build a cool company without it. But it became very clear that it was, oh, the only two questions you really need to, to answer when it comes to founder market fit. And so with Fish, there was no reason why me, an out-of-network founder, should go and build the social network for Silicon Valley. And there's no clear why now. It's like all of the social networks have kind of been done and we've probably done too many already. Why didn't someone do it before? And so With Valley, the first two criteria were very clear, right? So I'd previously had appointment setting experience, hadn't done a venture-backed company before, but I knew intimately well what was required to go and set appointments for different types of customers and what the SDR motion looks like. And why now? There was this technological unlock where everything I was doing with humans around finding prospect lists, right? Copywriting personalized messages, handling responses for our customers. All of that could now be done with Gen AI. And so I said, okay, there's a, those two things clearly line up. I have a really clear picture around what the first version of the product looks like. And I also have a group of people in my phone that I can call who'll be my first users. So I called them up and I said, hey, this is what we're thinking of building. Is it interesting? And we walked through a couple different ideas, a couple different approaches, a prob— ways that we could solve this problem for them. By the end of those brainstorming conversations, they were saying, hey, when is this gonna be ready? When can I test it? How much will it cost? So for me, in 30 days of having those conversations, I said, I've got the why me, I have the why now, I have the customers, I have a clear idea of what the prototype or the MVP will look like. And I know how long it'll take me to go build it because we scoped it out with our future users. So when I went to investors at the end of January or February of 2023 and said, hey, we're pivoting. Here's why. Here's all the data and proof on how this is going to be the right decision. Here's how big the market is. Here's our, here's our early customer list.

Wow.

Like this is more progress than you've made in 6 months since we invested in Fish. I mean, in 30 days. So for me, it was really clear because all those things lined up. I think I was lucky in the sense that the, the technological shift, the idea of pivoting, having the early customers all aligned, but I think it's what's required to have an idea worth jumping into. You need to see those clear signals.

Do you think that's true for both venture-backed companies and bootstrap companies? You've obviously done both, had success with both. What are the differences and similarities between the two?

So the differences is for a venture-scale business, you need to have either a 10x productivity boost that you're offering the market or a 10x cost reduction that you're offering the market to ultimately break through the types of customers that you're looking to acquire to build a long-term scalable business, to build a solid foundation. Having both of those is great. And in the case of Fish, I've got conviction. We have both of those recipes here to change the paradigm of the way things are being conducted right now with appointment setting. With bootstrap businesses, they're just as hard to build, but the ideas are easier to come by in the sense of you don't need to have a 10x differentiator. You can have a 1.5x differentiator. You can sell into a derivative of a, of a larger market. So for me and Advisor Appointments, what I, what we were doing was, it wasn't unique in any way, right? Booking appointments on LinkedIn had been done in the B2B SaaS world for, for years. All we did was find a market that hadn't fully adopted these types of solutions, and we started just building a specific service for that vertical. We had the same exact solution, but we just called it Advisor Appointments, and we, we focused on reaching out to financial advisors. And so I think there are more adjacent markets that you can target with service businesses where you don't need to have a 5x or a 10x improvement. It can be that 20% better or 20% more focused. And you can build an incredible cash-flowing business. However, I will emphasize the point that I think both are equally as hard to build because they're, it's a lot of work and it takes a lot out of you for sure.

Yeah. Different challenges, but both very, very hard for sure. You mentioned J-Cow, Jessica Canis. He came in, I think pretty early, $25K angel check. I know from experience that when you get sort of a brand name, high-profile investor like that, it can have a big impact on how people view the company and how they view you as a founder and how they view the potential of what you're doing. Is that something you saw as well?

100%. It was a weird feeling realizing the difference, the different lens that people viewed our business with. It happened both with J-Cal and with Antler coming on the cap table. It was, for some reason, people give you a bit longer to speak before they interrupt you. They're much more willing to get on the phone after you send them a cold email. Your response rate goes from 5% to 50% when you add those investors in, in your subject line. I'd always heard about sort of this idea of momentum fundraising and sort of once the first domino falls, the rest of them fall. I didn't realize how viscerally true that was. And it's, maybe it was a sign of the times, but yeah, it, it made a massive difference. We did J-Cal's sort of Founder University accelerator, and then like we talked about earlier, we did, we did Antler's residency, but it does make a big difference. And for us, like the thing that I changed was the subject line in our cold emails when we went out. Fundraising. It was pre-seed, 25% month-on-month growth, dash Antler, backed by Antler and Jason Calacanis, dash round 50% filled. That's all I needed to say. It was like 100% open rate when we'd email a partner and then response rates went through the roof when we made that, that small change to the subject line of our cold emails. And on the back of that, it made fundraising a lot easier. Still not easy, but we could at least get our foot in the door in a way that we couldn't before.

Let's talk about fundraising. So I think you have a lot of pretty interesting opinions. You've also did some pretty interesting stuff during the raise. First thing I guess is Jeff talked about this. I've talked about this. When you come into a pitch, when you're talking to an investor and you sort of bring this electricity, this charisma, this high energy to the meeting, it really does make a difference. I think people underestimate the amount of, not even necessarily being prepared versus not prepared, but just the way that you approach the meeting makes it, makes a difference. Was that like a conscious thing that you did?

Well, it wasn't a conscious thing. I don't know. I feel like if, if you have to make it a con— you need to be energetic in every aspect of running your business, right? Like you are gonna work 16-hour days. The rest of your team are gonna work 16-hour days. There's gotta be somebody that's there in the trenches that can bring energy to the room and get people amped up. So no, I don't think it was— it definitely wasn't a conscious thing. And I think, I don't think it should be a conscious thing. 'Cause if you feel like you have to turn that on, it's depleting for you. And so No, I think it was, I was amped up to be in the rooms that I was in and to go in and have the opportunity to go and build a business that we were building. So naturally that brought a lot of energy. I also think I reframed, I've been trying to reframe my mind in whenever I feel anxiety and I feel like the butterflies in my stomach, just telling myself that's excitement, that's excitement, that's excitement. That's not anxiety. I can't remember what podcast I heard this on. It must be like a Modern Wisdom, Chris Williamson, uh, Chris Williamson podcast. But that reframing, so I think also in the early days it could have just been nerves and anxiety that would force like the smile on my face and bunch of amped up energy to come into a room. But yeah, and I also think that's a great hack. Like I'll run that playbook in my head before I go to like a public speaking event. I'll need to tell myself, this is excitement, this is excitement, this is excitement. And eventually you start to reframe that feeling into excitement versus anxiety. And that sort of brings you out of your shell versus trying to, uh, to, to cover up.

So that's what you were doing before we turned record on. Now I understand.

Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Okay.

If you had to pick, you're, you're going into a pitch meeting with a big investor. You had to pick coming in with that high energy, that charisma versus maybe having the business more polished than otherwise would be. Which one's more important?

Yeah, that's a good question. You know, I want to say it's a mix of both, but I'm not going to cop out like that. It depends on the type of founder you are. I think for a non-technical founder, people are looking for the charisma, for the leadership, or the excitement. And your job is to get the investor excited about the business. And you can do that in a number of ways. You can do that by bringing energy. You can do that by bringing, by amping them up with the, they might have a mundane day, they're on their 9th call and you come in with a, with sort of a shock to the system. That's a great way to kick off a call. At the end of the day, an investor is gonna invest in a business that they think has legs, but in the early days, they're investing in a person and a leader and a team that they think has legs. And so it'll be different when we go do our Series A and Series B, but I think for that first funding round, a lot relied on, as a non-technical sales-focused founder, do the, does the investor think that I have the character to be a person to go and sell a $100K contract when we are selling against billion-dollar incumbents, right? And those soft skills of charisma, leadership, electricity, what, whatever they wanted to say, those are important when it comes to building sort of the fundamental investment case for the company. So I think one actually flows really nicely into the other, meaning sort of the soft skills of the founder flowing into, is this an investment opportunity and can they penetrate a market against large incumbents with some sort of output there? But for technical founders, it may be different, right? Because it's, you're indexing on the strengths of the founder versus lack of weakness. And so how strong are those strengths, if that makes any sense?

Yeah, no, it makes sense. Another thing that I think a lot of founders get tripped up on is trying to create urgency. As part of the fundraise. You talked about how sort of the process all came together really quickly once you got those first couple checks in. Founders see that happening and they try to sort of recreate it. And I think that investors can usually see through that these days. You know, maybe that wasn't true as much, maybe they didn't care as much in the ZIRP era when there was so much money around, everyone was pouring money into funds and they had a lot to deploy and things like that. But it's definitely changed now. Do you think that founders should sort of try to create that urgency anyway, or how should they think about that?

Yes, I doesn't work to the degree it used to, but I definitely think it still works and it's just a good way to create a, to run a process. It doesn't matter what the funding environment is. You can still run a very structured process and create sort of your own FOMO circle, even if the sort of the macro environment isn't bleeding FOMO, right? Everyone's trying to run, trying to find bets to place to put money. It's like for us, right? When we started to figure out the way to raise this round, I said, our process is going to start on X day. I booked probably 15 calls back to back to back to back to back in a 2-week period. All of these were intro calls. I had my narrative ready. I'd practiced this in the mirror 100 times. I'd give it to my parents, to my sister, and it was a well-oiled machine. So come day 1, 14 days back to back to back, we ran these calls. From there, you can very quickly weed out who's interested, who's not. And then you start to take these second calls, talk with partners, you start to feel out terms. And you can now, you want to avoid the backchanneling, so you don't want to mention any names, but you can start to play each fund off of each other. Hey, we're floating these terms. It's looking like things are moving along well. We're going to have another conversation with them on Thursday. Why don't we talk on Wednesday? Right? So something as small as that can drive urgency for a fund to push the conversation that much further, right? You're pushing other companies that they're looking at down the pile because they need to prioritize yours. That in the back of somebody's mind may not be Hey, they've got a term sheet we need to move right now, but it's showing that they're prioritizing your company and they need to move quickly on you. Otherwise you're having additional conversations. They're not the only fund that they get. So that's number one. I think that running a structured process is a good way to vet the investors who are actually interested and start to play other investors against each other to get someone to a decision quickly. Two is the FOMO element is not so much a I don't know, try to raise the price as much as you can. But for me, like I would talk about when we were raising our pre-seed, the first couple investors we talked to to try to set up those first conversations, I would mention things like, hey, we're not raising right now, but we are growing revenue X% month on month. If somebody wants to pull us into market, we'll have those conversations. And so small framing there, it's like, okay, somebody wants to pull us into market versus I need to go and raise funding. Then the last piece is the best way if you wanted to actually drive FOMO is, is go jack up revenue. When we could send a pre-read deck that said in March revenue was X, next slide, April revenue was Y, next slide, May revenue was Z. Something as simple as that is the best way to drive urgency and FOMO. So people can give you all the tips in the world of running the structured process, back-to-back meetings, small sort of phrases that you can use to reframe your business in the minds of investors. The best way for you to go and actually drive urgency is revenue. Show that you have a business that people are pulling out of your hands and you have real customers that are giving you real money to go in and use the, the solution to a problem they're having. And that's ultimately like, if I think about one thing that changed the fundraising game for us, revenue, revenue, revenue.

Want to get more insights like that? Each week I actually interview multiple founders. For the ones who don't join the podcast, I write up a case study and share it with all Founding Journey members. I also write weekly tactical deep dives, share startup opportunities communities and analyze trends that I'm noticing. We've also got a community of founders, an investor and pitch deck database, and more fun stuff like over $60,000 in perks and discounts to help you build, grow, and raise capital for your startup. Go to join.foundingjourney.com to get access. That's the honest truth. If you're struggling to get revenue, you can do all the hacks, you can do all the positioning, you can do everything else, and maybe you will get someone to buy into you and your, your story, you as a founder. but at the end of the day, if you have the revenue, they're going to come to you. Process is going to be a lot easier. All that stuff sort of solves itself.

100%. I'll talk a little bit about the playbook that we ran because I think it's really useful for B2B companies that are looking to acquire their first customers. When we were setting up those first investor meetings, at the same time I was going on LinkedIn and reaching out to people who would need appointment setting services. A lot of these were B2B SaaS founders, some financial advisors, because I knew I could sell to them. And it was a $30 LinkedIn sequencing tool. I didn't need use any AI in this case. It was a basic template. Hey, not looking to sell you anything. Here's what we do. We're backed by the early investors in Robinhood and Calm, and there you go. Name brands actually that do help. Yeah, we're looking to solve this problem. Let me know if you can give me 15 minutes of your time. Again, not looking to sell you anything. So we're setting up first calls. We're also setting up calls with these, these like customer feedback interviews, right? I'd walk through the problem that we were solving. I'd walk through a Figma mockup of the product. And I would say, hey, this is what we're doing. It's going to help you set appointments. It's 1/10 the cost of hiring an SDR. It's going to be 10x more productive. Productive. It's going to be 10x cheaper. Tell me about your current appointment setting process. What are you doing? Are you using offshore individuals? Are you hiring SDRs? What does the ramp up time look like? What does retention look like? They'd start to give, tell me their problems. From there, I'd show them how Valley could solve 50%, 60%, 80% of their problems today. And they would end those calls. Those calls, number one, would be blocked for 15 minutes. They would end up lasting for 30, 45 minutes. By the end of those, they'd say, hey, can I buy this thing? In the early days, we had them sign LOIs. Later on in the fundraise, we'd actually— we had an MVP so we could have them purchase the product. And so while I was taking these investor calls day by day by day, we were converting these customer feedback calls into customers and they could see that revenue graph go up and to the right. Anytime I would send an update email and say, hey, do you have any update on the decision? Uh, who are we talking to next? What's going on? By the way, I wanted to give you some up-to-date information. When we spoke, revenue was X, revenue is now Y. What a great way to create urgency, just to show that your business is actually growing while they're sitting on the sidelines having lunch.

Yeah, I mean, it's, it's the best way. And that was really smart strategy coming in sort of from the, from a psychology perspective. You're not trying to sell them anything. You're just trying to get a little bit of their time to solve their problem. So smart. Shows you really care about them and their problems. Customers are way more willing to give you their time as a result. I think a lot of founders get scared about selling before the product is built, right? Even taking LOIs, but definitely taking money. You guys sold before you had the MVP and then just when you had the MVP is when you started taking on revenue. What are sort of the reasons you think people do that and how can they sort of get past it and start being more aggressive?

Your product is never going to be good enough. And so I think that there's a really big fear of rejection or a fear of embarrassment, whether it comes from people in your network saying like, hey, you decided to quit your job and go start company, this is what you're putting out, or it comes from family, it comes from the customers that you're giving your product to, right? Your product is never going to be good enough, especially in saturated markets. Like for us, I still think our product is, is quite there to compete with the Outreach Sales Ops of the world. They've had 10-year head starts. So I think that's number one, the big hurdle that people need to get over. But if you're not giving your product, putting your product in the hands of customers, if you're not launching it on socials, if you're not getting feedback from the market, there's no way that you'll graduate from level 1 to go to level 2. Level 2, you'll have a whole other host of challenges that still won't be good enough. Customers will be upset because they're getting value from your product, but it's super buggy, and so they're gonna be constantly blowing up your Slack channel. You're still not gonna feel great. You have to graduate from there to get to level 3. I think number 1, people are just, uh, uh, are afraid of the initial reaction. Number 2, it's people may be afraid on the inability to follow through. They're saying, hey, like, a customer is signing an LOI for this thing, right? I need to be able to ship by this deadline. There's so many other factors that are going on in this business. What if I miss it? Right? What if I lose that trust? And for us, the best way that we solved it was putting ourselves on the same side of the table of the person that we were speaking to. So the way I would frame it is we've had this conversation, we've talked about your problems, talked about how me and our team wants to go and solve this problem. And I would say, hey, think of us as your outsourced development shop, right? We've talked about your problems. I want to go build the best solution in the world for you. Think of me as your devs that you're hiring, but you don't have to pay me a dime. Only thing that we need to go do to go and build this product is I need to go raise from some of the investors that we're talking to. Here's who we're talking to. Signing this non-binding LOI will really help me show that there is pull for, for this product, that people like you care about what we're building. Would you be game to, to sign this? And if an investor wants to talk to you, would you be able to take 30 minutes of your time to tell them why this is interesting to you? What problems it will solve? So the reframe that, happens in their mind is we are now tackling this problem together. I've told him my problems, he wants to go and solve them. He's gonna build this thing for me for free, and all I have to do is spend 30 minutes potentially talking to an investor and signing a non-committal agreement. That sounds like a sweet deal. And so I was able to bring the, the potential customer up to speed on what the process looks like for me to be able to follow through on the commitments that I was making. And so even if we weren't able to hit a deadline, even if the product wasn't able to live up to that first spec that we talked about, they felt like they were part of the process and they felt bought in. And so a lot of those customers that we brought on in March of 2023, they're still with us today because they've been building next to us day by day by day by day. And it started with that first framework.

How did the investors respond to the LOIs? Because I know sometimes people will think LOIs, does it really matter to investors? They really don't care about revenue. What, what, what do you see?

The LOIs meant nothing. What they cared about was that I showed them the LOIs and they'd say, okay, this doesn't mean anything. Can I talk to this customer? And so it was a way for me to get my foot in the door for them to make the ask and then I can make the intro. So the first 2 LOIs that I showed to our investors are now our investors, but at that point, potential investors, they said, okay, great. Who cares? Like LOIs are letter of nothings. And so I then went back to those people and said, hey, I know that you're committed to this process. I know that you want to see this, this product in your hands. Would you be game to speak to these investors? Takes 30 minutes. And then in future conversations, I made that ask after each customer interview.

Super smart. I actually remember that pre-seed or the pre-read deck that you sent around.

Yeah. Yeah.

It was super abnormal to me because you had nothing in it except for just like text. I think everyone tells you, oh, you gotta have charts, you gotta make sure your deck is designed. Obviously this is a pitch deck, so it's a little different, but it was just text. Well, why, Why no design?

We tried a bunch of different decks and I feel like I wasted a ton of time trying to work on like the, the most beautiful graphics and positioning things and looking at a bunch of different templates on like problem solution, TAM, competition, whatever. What I really, and we kept trying to optimize our deck throughout the fundraising process and I realized like if you design your pitch deck in order to get an investor to a decision, the decision is always gonna be no, right? An investor isn't investing in a deck, they're investing in a person. And so what I wanted to do was fully focus on the story, right? I wanted a deck that could somehow communicate the story, but also add some drama to the story. So I don't know, we have some slides in there that was our customer's prior cost of appointment setting was blank with Valley. We brought it down to, and then there's like 3 blank slides. They have to click, click, click, try to get to the number, $71, and it ends up being 10x cheaper. So anyways, we had some fun with it. But I realized that like the goal of this deck is just to get me to a meeting, do something different. Everybody is seeing the same templates when it comes to pitch decks. Probably look online, there's gonna be slight derivatives of the same 10-slide deck, which is great, right? And I think it still works in many cases. For me, it just wasn't clicking cuz we were in a hyper-competitive market. We were raising in the midst of the whole OpenAI rapper debate. Which is any company that's building on top of this API is gonna be dissolved in the next 4 months. And so I was, there were a lot of headwinds that I was facing. I needed a way for people to have a reason to probably stand out from the noise of OpenAI wrapper simultaneously with the sort of downturn in pre-CVC funding. So I decided, let's try a pre-deck. I think it was ultimately 25 slides. Again, like you said, just text. There's no charts, there's no competition, there's nothing. From there, we were able to get that first meeting just because we stood out. And then on the call, I still wouldn't use a deck. I would talk through, here's the founding story, here's the problem we want to solve, here's why it's going to be a billion-dollar company. And then one of the other, one of the pieces of advice that I give to founders and something that helped me a lot was keeping an FAQ bank. So every time I had a question, making sure that I wrote down the corresponding answer or how I objection handled that point so I can refer back to it in future meetings. And I can also send it prior. To my call with the next investor, right? Because I know that these are questions they're going to ask. How can I preemptively address those concerns and show that I'm thoughtfully approaching these conversations and thinking about things in ways that most of their founders may not be thinking about? So that was really, really helpful. And I did see an inflection point when we started tracking what those questions were and refining those answers because you get the same ones every, every call pretty much.

That's one of my favorite things that you did. And I think a lot more founders should do this where when you're talking to a VC fund, you're talking to— your first meeting is probably not with the decision maker, right? Especially if they're a bigger fund. If they're a small fund, sure, maybe it is, but bigger fund, definitely not. And so you sort of play this game of telephone with that person trying to communicate the opportunity to somebody else, but you just had one meeting with them. Maybe you sent them a deck. They don't have the full story. They're not you. A lot gets lost in translation. And so you sort of equip them to get through those conversations.

100%. So the— what I realized that our biggest bottleneck sort of in phase 2 of our fundraise was we could get the person on the phone really excited about the business. We could talk through sort of why we stand out to a bunch of the other outbound appointment setting solutions that were popping up, sort of like our class of startups. The issue was the translation piece, right? Where that person, analyst, associate, principal, or potentially a partner needed to go and communicate that to the rest of the partnership when they went to IC. Let's say that we took a meeting on a Wednesday, they say, great, we have our partnership meetings on a Monday. Um, I'll review my notes and we'll get back to you on Tuesday. By the time they have that IC, a lot of the nuance around why Valley is an interesting opportunity, it's very easy to get lost. And so the core tenets of our business, which is outbound tool using AI, automating parts of the SDR and BDR workflow, they'd heard like another 100 companies that were offering the same exact thing. And so for me, I needed to make it incredibly simple for our core, uh, for the, the, the investors that we spoke to, to be able to translate the the nuance of our pitch to people in the partnership. So created the FAQ bank. I created about 8 different decks, 5 slides each, and then recorded Looms of me going through those decks. Those videos would be 2, 3 minutes long. The longest one I think was 9 minutes going through what our defensibility looks like. How do we build a moat? Why Valid becomes $100 billion company? How we stack up against Outreach, right? All of the main objections that I, that I knew the associate analyst principal would hear in those, in those boardrooms. From there, we were able to, to get to the second meeting. And then from there we were able to close up the fundraise. So like that was the final insight in addressing the bottlenecks sort of across the process. It started with just getting people to respond to the email, open the email and get the first call. From there it was how do we get from first call to second call? And then once we got the second call and had, we were in those rooms, it was a lot easier to get things done.

How did you know what those objections were? Was it just, hey, I got this question from them. I know they're gonna get the same question from their boss or how do you anticipate them?

It comes from the questions that the associate or analyst, again, principal, whoever you're speaking to is asking. And so I didn't get this right off the bat, but it's in that first crop of investor calls that we would take, like let's say our first 15, right? What were the questions they asked? There's clearly these 4 that rhyme. And you can also use their follow-ups because usually if somebody is somewhat interested, they're going to send a crop of follow-up questions to try to understand the opportunity more before their next conversation. So just pattern matching, right? Your first 15 calls, you're getting your feet wet. Um, you're warming up the pitch muscles. Try to see in those first 15s what's rhyming between the questions you're receiving on calls, between your follow-up emails, and say, okay, this is clearly like, these are the parts of the picture that aren't colored in for investors right now. How can I preemptively address those? And in the next 15, send those Looms proactively, send those decks proactively, or have really refined, precise answers when I get on the phone.

We actually had a chat a few weeks ago too, where Uh, we went super deep on sort of your fundraising journey specifically for Valley. I actually wrote up a case study about that. People can go to foundingjourney.com to check that out. One of the things you said is that founders shouldn't let an investor who hasn't written a check intro them to someone else. I think that's so true. Why does that hurt instead of help?

It seems like a great offer, right? The investor has just rejected you. They want to be helpful instead of just stand on the sidelines. They're like, I can I've introduced 5 other funds. Investors, number one, talk. Two, they like to follow other investors. And so when an investor invests, they want to follow that investor. Investor doesn't invest, they want to follow that investor. I don't think that there is a worse signal than getting an intro from an investor who passed. All it's going to do is like before you get on that conversation, they are going to already have a sort of predisposition in their mind that you're not an interesting opportunity because their best friend who they probably respect and love their decision-making. They probably co-invested with them a number of times in the past. They said, this is a great opportunity. It's no sort of discredit to the investor that they're, they're introducing. But again, there's a reason why they're friends. There's a reason why they share deal flow. It's because they like to invest together. And by the same token, they're going to like to not invest together. That's reason number 1. Reason number 2 is you want to go into whatever meeting you're going to get with a clean slate. The more people that are referring you to other investors when they have invested, it's just the more people who know that you've received a no, and that compounds, right? So I made the mistake early on and very quickly realized that those calls were a waste of time, and I appreciated the offer, but don't accept, don't accept.

Are there any circumstances where you would consider taking an intro in that context? Like maybe the company's in dire straits, or, or is this just always gonna be a no?

I'm sure that there's probably edge cases where it's worth it. I just have never talked to a founder who received a check from a, from an intro from an investor who said no. I've never heard a story where that's worked out. I've only heard the call lasted 5 minutes. They weren't interested. There may be situations where, look, if you're running out of avenues, take that meeting and see if you can turn a no into a yes. And if you can, like, those are often your biggest supporters, right? You see that in sales all the time. You see that in startups all the time, right? Where you've got a product in market that no one thinks will last, no one thinks is valuable. And when you the changed perception from, hey, it's also really cool, they stick with you forever. If you're really struggling, then it might be worth it, but I haven't heard about a successful story there.

Yeah, not too many, if any, come to mind for me as well. Uh, you mentioned AI, right? Obviously, Valy is an AI company. You guys are doing exciting things there. Everyone sort of mistakenly is assuming right now that if you plaster AI on your pitch deck, if you get the AI domain, you're doing something vaguely in AI, that you're 100% going to get funded. Anything can get funded in AI, right? Now, or at least last year. What was the raising process like for you? Like, is that true? Is it straightforward?

Yeah.

Tell me your thoughts on that.

No, it was not. It was not easy. It was not straightforward. There's a reason why we had to go and figure out all these weird strategies to try to go and raise because it wasn't easy.

The—

and so I mentioned this earlier, but we were like in the depths of the AI wrapper debates. OpenAI is going to go do this in 2 months. OpenAI is going to go do this in 8 months and your business is going to die. Obviously that proved not to be the case, and I just need to find really clear ways to objection handle that concern. And the answer that we used was really simple. It's like I would ask an investor, why is OpenAI here? Right? What is OpenAI's goal? If they responded anything other than their goal is to build the best outbound sales tool in the world, I would say there's your answer. They're here to go and build AGI. They're not here to go and build incredible sales technology. They're not here to go really deep with sales leaders at Front, Miro, Datadog, Zoom, Rippling, Deal, you name it. They're here to go do something entirely different, which is beautiful and amazing. It's going to make people a lot of money. If you want to invest in that thing, go invest in that thing. I'm here to go and build the world's best outbound sales tool and build a better world for buyers and sellers where they can actually live in harmony and not get spammed with a bunch of BS that they're going to delete in their inbox. I'm like, that is the problem I'm here to go really deep on. If you think OpenAI wants to go solve that problem, then we're probably not going to be the best fit. And it was a very clear answer, but it took me a really long time to arrive at that point. It seems obvious now, but when I was consistently getting hit with, why doesn't OpenAI go and do this? Where's the defensibility? Initially there, there weren't clear answers there. 'Cause you look at it and you're saying, okay, the speed of development is going down. It's very quick. It didn't take us very long to go and build this MVP. Somebody else could go and build this MVP. And eventually sort of came to the conclusion that If the cost and time of creating software is going to zero, technical moats won't exist for long. There are only going to be a couple of ways that you can build defensibility in a startup. You can have distribution moats, right? So you have sort of long-term sales lockups. You're in an account for 3, 4 years, or you have some sort of distribution advantage through founder brand or community content. You have a brand moat, which is you're known for one thing and you sort of have mindshare in customers, in the brains of customers that you do this one thing incredibly well. And as soon as somebody pops up and say, hey, Really for an outbound tool, Valley's the first tool that comes to mind. And you have network effects and network effects aren't going anywhere and potentially data modes. And that was something that we talked about. So distribution, brand, and data modes were the 3 things that we would, that we would mention when it came to defensibility. And I'd also talk about, I was very conscientious about why outbound starting here allowed us to build the data modes, distribution modes, and brand modes that we needed to go and build the, the long-term vision around the product. Which is ultimately sort of a go-to-market brain at that point. It's shifted a bit, but yeah, that was the initial answer. And then there was a much more simplistic answer later on.

It always looks more simple in retrospect, for sure. Any other sort of disadvantages or advantages of sort of raising in that sort of crazy fundraising environment that it was last year?

Yeah, I'm sure that it was helpful to be an AI company and be one of the first sort of popping up in this AI for go-to-market. It was a consensus that AI was one of the first Go-to-market would've been sort of the lowest hanging fruit for sort of AI optimizations and AI efficiencies. So that was a helpful trend sort of to be, or wave to be riding, 'cause people were actively looking for bets to make there. And there was just a, a lot of sort of back and forth in the VC ecosystem around what are the first gen AI bets that you're gonna make? And sort of, are we gonna bet on the application layer? Are we gonna bet on the infrastructure layer? Like all of these pieces were just getting worked out. So I think there was a bit more concern when we were raising than there is today, even because investors were very worried about this being And so they're like, we're not going to go and chase this next wave. We're going to be much more conscientious. We're going to learn from our mistakes. And then people realize like, hold on, they're staying powered here. Like, this is real. This is transformative. This isn't— there are actual enterprise use cases for this tech where crypto saw a few, but not many in the early days. I think that there are benefits, obviously, of being able to be an AI company 100%. You're seeing significantly more capital going to AI seed stage companies than companies that don't have AI, but it isn't always smooth sailing. You need to have very clear ideas around what does your moat look like? What does long-term defensibility look like? Is there resiliency in this offering? And distribution is more important than ever when technical moats are pretty much going to zero. And if people see you getting traction, they can build a replica of your product pretty quickly. So how are you going to get 6 months, a year in, some sort of distribution advantage compared to other startups that could build similar tech?

Probably more to that too. The markets get so crazy when there's the hype bubble, the FOMO.

Yeah.

It's very chaotic. We saw that too. But okay, last kind of thing I want to hit on here is I don't think a lot of people would have guessed this if they've listened to the conversation up to this point, but you're super young, right? You're like super young for a venture-backed founder who's had a previous exit. How do you sort of evaluate in your position the risk of kind of going all in and spending essentially your 20s on a startup versus, you know, other priorities that can happen in life?

Okay, this is great. We were just talking about this. Um, I, so I think that there is, for me, I will get into these existential loops. What motivates me? Why am I doing what I'm doing? Is sort of the well that I'm pulling from a positive well? Is it a poisonous well? What's the chip on my shoulder? Like, I'll think about all these things because the way that you need to work to build a company is atypical. It is not for work-life balance. It is a very intense, extreme life. And so I'll ask myself these questions and I get to, and I'll, I'll think myself into loops, but I get to 3 core truths. Number 1, is there anything else that I'd rather be doing right now? And the answer is always no. 2, do I think I could be successful at any other profession? No. And 3, is it fulfilling? Do I feel like I have a purpose here? Do I feel like it energizes me? Do I feel like it fills my well versus drain it? And the answer is always yes. So if those three things are true, I can sort of pontificate around how I want to spend my 20s. I can think about— there's this saying that you, when you live your 20s, you're either going to be an underskilled 30-year-old or an underlived 30-year-old. You just have to choose which one you want. I think that's total bullshit, right? I think that there is— when you have those three things and you understand that those are sort of immutable truths and you have clarity on those three things, you can figure out a way to sort of structure your life around that. And there isn't a lot of open space in the life of an early-stage startup founder or late-stage startup founder, it's always going to be hard. But if you know that's what you want to do, you know that it's— there's nothing else you'd rather be doing, and you know that it motivates, fulfills, and sort of grabs onto this, whatever this idea of purpose is, you don't really need to think much harder. So I don't. And so those things are true for me, and that's why I decided to devote my 20s to doing this. And yeah, there'll be another decade of building in front of me.

I love it, man. Somebody's got to get those appointments scheduled and make sales an actually efficient process across support. So there we go. Very last thing we like to do, we do a little rapid-fire outro. I got 4 questions I'm going to ask you. Just give me quick-hit responses.

Yeah. Okay.

Name one investor who other founders should take capital from and why.

Jeff Becker, general partner at Antler. This, Antler has done more for me than I could possibly articulate in a quick-fire round. But from first, one of our first investors, first customer, friend, advisor. He's helped us build our entire advisor council. Like, this guy is relentless in building with you. That's the one thing I'll say about working with Jeff is it's not this traditional founder-investor dynamic. It doesn't feel like— for a lot of— I talk to a lot of my founder friends and like investors will sometimes feel either like bosses or people actually really resent their investors. With Jeff, you're on the same level. And it's the first thing he said to me when he invested in Valley was, I'm now your employee. Tell me what you need, put me to work. And yeah, I think that, that, that explained him to a tee.

I love that. Yeah, we need more investors like that. We do. Name one thing that you would change about the startup world.

That's a great question. One thing I'd change about the startup world is I, I talked about this way at the beginning of our conversation and it's starting to change, but we need to appreciate bootstrappers more. I felt like in my, or sort of early startup experiences with advisor appointments and then Fish, Uh, which eventually turned into an agency, by the way. I didn't talk about that earlier, but it didn't— people didn't qualify it as a startup. And it's a lot of work and it's difficult. And I've been on both sides and it should be more respected or more valued than it is. And I'm starting to see now that founders are in an era where they need to grow profitably. They need to go and find ways to not rely on venture capital. They're suddenly like, oh wait, this is actually pretty cool. So yeah, that's, that's one thing I would, I would, I would wanna change.

Yeah, I mean, I totally agree about bootstrappers. We raised a ton of money for my last company. This time I've chosen to sort of do it myself fully. Different challenges, as you mentioned earlier, but just as if not more rewarding for sure. Next one up, uh, what's the number one piece of advice you would give to a first-time founder?

Revenue. Start by building a good business before you go and build a great business. What I tried to do with Bish was I tried to build a great business out of the bat. I saw the glitz and glamour of a social network for Silicon Valley founders, investors connecting, meeting money, transacting. Like that is a, it is an exciting company to build. I didn't think about what the fundamentals were in the unsexy parts of that business to actually make it work. And so build a good business. A good business has revenue, it has sort of traditional growth models. You understand your unit economics, like there is, there's scalability there. Once you have that core kernel of something that works, the basic things about a business, money in, money out, then go and think about how can I make this incredible and conquer the world with it. That would be my biggest piece of advice if I think about what I'd want to say to myself 3 years ago.

And this last one, this is a Peter Thiel question. What's something you believe that most people disagree with you about?

I think culture should be exclusive, not inclusive in the sense of culture should be like a glove, right? I find that there are a number of of companies, sort of later stage companies that will have cultural tenets like innovation, respect, empathy. It's like, who doesn't want that, right? Your culture is your company identity. It should be an opt-in or an opt-out thing. It should actively exclude people from joining your company and bring people in to joining your company. It should be something that 10% of the candidates that you interview actually want to be a part of. And so, for us, like we have cultural tenets of Olympian work ethic, right? If you want to achieve what 0.1% of people achieve, you have to be willing to put in what 0.1% of people are willing to put in. We have a tenet of no sugarcoating, which is sugarcoating wastes your time and my time. It's the least empathetic thing that you can do for someone. You'd be direct in whether that is— in some cases, people would imagine that that is pretty dickish and it's sort of very, yeah, it's blunt and it's too frank for a workplace. For us, it's we don't waste time with that, right? The most empathetic thing I can do for you is give you the most direct feedback possible. So for a lot of people, that's not a workplace that really excites them, but for a lot of people it is, right? And that is the environment they've been waiting for. I think that there is this sort of demonization of working incredibly hard and frontloading your time and, and sort of saying no to work-life balance. When people come to Valley, they're looking for a place where they can work harder than they ever have before. They can work longer than they've ever had before, but they're given more freedom and responsibility than they've ever had before, right? That is a conscious choice that people are making to opt into our culture. So when I say exclusivity versus inclusivity, it's, I want to be hyper-inclusive of the people that are looking for that work environment. And I should be able to say, hey, this may not be a fit, or people should be able to say, hey, this isn't fit for me. Culture-specific.

That's great. I completely agree. I've seen the pros and cons of that at different points throughout my career. It's definitely true.

Okay.

So thanks for coming on. This is a great conversation. Where can people go to find out more about you, to find out more about Valley?

Yeah.

Where should I go?

Yeah, so I'm posting a bunch of content on LinkedIn when it comes to the future of sales. And if you're looking to, to book appointments, head over to joinvalley.co. We can, we'll help you out.

Cool. Thanks, Zayd Ali.

All right. Thanks, man. This was fun.

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