How to raise money from VC funds

Niki Scevak:

The best predictor of success is often speed. And so you would be surprised the variates in even taking away hours worked, if people just work the same hours. You would be surprised at the variates between some teams and the speed of progress they make and other teams and the speed of progress they don’t make. So I think it’s paying attention, again, in the early days is like the speed and the rate of learning usually predicts the eventual success of the founder and the team as well.

Niki Scevak:

Hey, and thank you for having me.

Niki Scevak:

Yes. So it was literally a decade ago, I think it was. Last week was the exact 10 year anniversary. And back in 2012, I had, just prior to that, founded Startmate. So Startmate is an accelerator and many of the same concepts and is almost a precursor to Blackbird in that it’s based on this idea of the circle of life. People who build technology companies invest and help the next generation. And Startmate was, as I mentioned, almost an MVP version. We had 20 or so folks. We found a handful of startups and helped them build their first product, win their first customers, raise capital in Silicon Valley. And that journey in the first two cohorts of Startmate triggered within me that this is what I want to do with my life.

This is what I truly love. And I think, more than anything else, the people that I got to meet through that Startmate experience, you make a wave of friends at high school. You make a wave of friends at university and you don’t make any other waves. And Startmate was just this wave of friendships that I still count dearly today. And so I teamed up with Rick Baker and Bill Bartee, and we formed Blackbird. And the idea was to put this community of founders at the heart of what we do, and to really lead with this idea that Australia could create these world leading companies. I think entrepreneurship, particularly a decade ago, was very skewed to see some successful idea in the US and make some version of it in Australia. And Blackbird was for the opposite type of startup.

The startup that is trying to be the best in the world, not the best in Australia. Trying to do something that is original and ambitious and unlikely, and to support those companies and those founders right at the beginning. And so, back in 2012, I would say Venture capital was a dirty word in Australia. The last couple waves had largely failed. There’d been some exception to those rules but, essentially, hadn’t done very well. And then also the other embarrassing fact was that Australia had already produced these great, successful global technology businesses like Atlassian, Campaign Monitor, Redbubble, RetailMeNot, Halfbrick Studios. So the list goes on and not one Aussie VC was in those companies.

This time was like a paradox of this community of Australian founders had been rising up, but there was no real institutional venture capital focused on investing in them and focused on bringing them together. I think the other magic of Silicon Valley is this connectedness to the founders coming together, to helping the next generation where, even back then, you had successful founders, but they weren’t necessarily helping the next generation. They were very disparate and disconnected. And so the idea of Blackbird was to bring them together and see if we could create a lot more successful startups with some money and that community.

Niki Scevak:

It was so hard to get up and running. And so we had 522 meetings to get 97 people to say, yes. And that was our first fund of $29 million. So it was essentially this, if there’s founders in the audience, it’s essentially this mega angel round that we raised, and we didn’t even have the benefit of a vision. We were like, we’ll spot other people’s visions. And so it’s a tougher sell than a specific vision. And the people who did say yes, as I said, largely were technology founders who were investing their own personal capital. But their interest in helping that next generation, I think, is what brought everyone together.

So that was the hard part. The beautiful part was, once we had raised the fund, we were like a cup of water in the desert. There weren’t any other funds, and there weren’t any other people, even with this express interest to say, we love people who are ambitious enough to found a global company from day one, to who want to be the best in the world and who want to build these wonderful software companies from Australia. And so it was hard to get up and running. Once we were, it was obviously the best time to have a venture capital fund investing in global Australia, in software startups in 2012.

Niki Scevak:

Yes. It completely changed. I would say where the ecosystem was a decade ago, we could meet with 200 founders per year and still that would be the hundred percent of the universe of startups in Australia. We’d have plenty of free time on a calendar and you look back and it’s like, wow, that was a week in the calendar. Now I would say we need to meet thousands of founders across Australia and New Zealand per year. Pretty soon we’ll need to meet tens of thousands of founders per year. I would say that, from nothing, we now have a healthy local ecosystem of funds. And then I think the biggest thing that has changed is Silicon Valley moved out of Silicon Valley. I think the ideas of Silicon Valley and the approach to company building and the courage and the ambition, is now spread all across the world because of podcasts and because of blog articles and because of entrepreneurs just swapping stories, wherever they are in the world.

So I think the investor base in Silicon Valley has absolutely turned its sights outwards. It doesn’t specifically care about Australia or New Zealand, but it does care about where the best companies in the world get formed. And so that started off, I would say, a decade ago. They were happy to wait a really long time. I think Accel invested in Atlassian 12 years after it’s got started or something like that. And so now, with all of the success that all of the global firms have enjoyed in Australia, they are much more comfortable to invest earlier and earlier. I’d say still the series A round, the 10 or 15 million dollar round, that tends to be where they get most interested in starting to invest in the companies. And before then, it’s still relatively a local market of capital, but even that is changing.

So I think you have a healthy blend of investors, both local and global now. I think you have an ecosystem that is 10 times the size of what it was a decade ago. And then I also think there was a lot of hope a decade ago. I hope I could build a company that could get to a hundred million dollars a year in revenue. I could hope I could build a company over this long term horizon and cause the changes I want to. And now I just think people are very aware that these companies just keep on growing, keep on compounding, become the world’s largest companies, become… Google is still growing at 30% per year and it’s hundreds of billions of dollars in revenue.

And it’s just that I think people fully appreciate, particularly software companies, people fully appreciate SAS and what high quality companies they are, and just how humongous they can get. I think a hundred million dollars now would be viewed as a small outcome of success, versus now you can, I don’t know. Salesforce has 25 billion dollars of ARR, so you can grow into that. It doesn’t stop at a hundred mil. It doesn’t stop at the ITO. These are the best companies in the world.

Niki Scevak:

We’d love to invest in companies right at the beginning. So in the beginning you don’t have a product and you don’t have revenue. And so it is about, I think, the vision of the founder, the sense that they are doing their life’s work, that they want to build not only a great product, but a great company that survives decades. And, again, have this grand ambition. I think ambition is this powerful force where both, obviously it’s a large change in the world that will happen in a large company, but it’s a honey pot for the best people to come and work for you. It’s a honey pot for the best investors to invest in the best valuation. It’s a honey pot for everyone who’s doing business with you to say yes to friendly terms and so on.

So if you have ambition, it’s almost like this network effect or this gravity effect where you’re more likely to succeed, the higher ambition that you have. Versus I think also back a decade ago, Australians suffered from this ambition problem where it was like, Australians are not like Americans and find it hard to declare ambition up front and find it hard to say, with a straight face, the success that they’re aiming for. And so the environment of other successes have brought those barriers down to expressing ambition. But I think in the beginning you’re looking for ambition, you’re looking for this special type of person that makes something happen. Again, there’s lots of smart people in the world. Most of those smart people talk about smart things versus do smart things. And so you’re looking for that rare combination of has that vision and that clarity of thought, but just goes and does it, doesn’t complain.

Doesn’t complain because they don’t have much money. Doesn’t complain because they don’t have much structure. Doesn’t complain in general. And so I think it’s finding those unique characters and then venture capital’s a weird investing industry. And the first investment you make actually in a successful company, turns out to be a minuscule amount of your total investment. We first invested $250,000 in Canva before they had revenue, before they had product. But we’ve since invested $270 million just into Canva. And so, again, I think it’s having the courage to make that first investment, to begin a relationship with someone right at the beginning. I think investors, whether in Australia or even Silicon Valley, quite frankly as well, have this kind of like, oh, I’ll invest in you after you are successful or after I know everything or after there’s all of this uncertainty to be reduced.

And I think, again, the way in which we’ve built Blackbird, and hopefully the spirit in which we’ve built Blackbird, is with this courage and with this openness to push boundaries, to go on journeys, to not have all the answers at the beginning. And, again, just to try and, again, reraise ambition and to be part of these special stories that turn into generational companies. And so, at the beginning, I think it’s vision. It’s that sense of the founders doing their life’s work and looking to make a big difference. That at a high level. And then it’s always the specific case. It’s always the opportunity that they’re attacking. I’d say largely also that, if you invest right at the beginning of being afraid of themes, people say, oh, this theme is hot this year or this theme is something that we’re looking to go after.

Whereas I think, if you break down the word theme, theme happens after all the companies have started. So when Airbnb started their seed round, they weren’t saying they were an on-demand economy. The world waits for a few companies like Uber and Airbnb and so on to be successful. Then the world comes up with the term on-demand economy. And then the company that’s starting after they hear the theme on-demand economy says they’re an on-demand economy startup. So you’re investing in the hundredth company versus the first or second or third, or the original company. And I think that’s always a dangerous aspect of investing in themes is, if it has a theme, it means that success has already happened to a group of companies, which usually is quite dangerous.

Niki Scevak:

Yeah, look, I say we invest in just ideas is to suggest that we are open to anything and there’s no minimum bar. I think that’s the key. Obviously having nothing is not a good thing. Having something is a good thing. So if you do have a product, if you do have revenue, and then you’re raising your first capital after those events, then that’s obviously better than doing it with nothing. So, to clarify on that specific…

Niki Scevak:

Yeah. The other thing I would say is that a lot of startups approach fundraising with this bank loan state of mind in terms of, if I just have these minimum requirements, will someone invest in me? I now qualify for a seed round and so on. And it’s not quite how it works. Is this the most successful version of this? Does it result in great change to transportation or to whatever the industry might be? And I think, in the beginning, if I just boiled it down, product and happy customers. I think if you have a small amount of really, really happy customers, that is the golden mix. If you have 10,000 people that don’t really use it, or you have a high number of low engaged, that’s actually practically nothing.

But if you have five or 10 people that are just crazy about the product, that is actually a lot. So if you do have something, it’s this small amount of really, really happy customers, and it’s clear that their lives have been changed, either at work or in their personal lives, whatever it might be. In terms of an idea, I think one good test of an idea is it’s crisply communicated, but as you go deeper, as you ask more questions, the answers almost get better and better. And one test we have when we’re getting to know a company is, was the second meeting better than the first meeting? Was the third meeting better… Do the meetings get better? Because usually bad ideas are like a facade.

Once you ask one question to say, oh, there’s actually no building behind the front. And then good ideas, the more you ask, the clearer it becomes that that founder has just thought through all different sorts of aspects, and has all different kinds of opinions, and has made all different kinds of trade offs. And almost becomes like, in the first meeting, they’re saying something at a general level. But the more you go down, the more it’s revealed, the more energised they become, the more revealed. It’s like they’ve got this inner chip on their shoulder. The more they’ve got this really passionate view about these small details. And I think that’s usually the test of whether someone has developed their thinking and developed a good idea. Is the second meeting’s better than the first meeting, the third… And if you can get to the fourth meeting and you’re still blown away by the depth of thinking and so on about the idea, then it’s not a facade. It’s not just a whatever, pet sitting for the Eastern suburbs, on-demand economy, buzzword, buzzword, buzzword. And you’re like, well, question, question, question falls away.

Niki Scevak:

Well, I think it’s… So we talked about that vision. And I almost think of if you look at some graph of progress, that’s the top. That’s mapping out where you’d like to end up, what does ultimate success look like. And then I think the other aspect is this bottom left corner where, how will you determine progress over the next 18 months? How will you hold yourself to account? Have you chosen the right goals to focus on? Have you asked the hard questions up front and attacked the hard bits and proved that the hard bits can be overcome? Does that person set high standards for themself? And it’s almost like they’re their own worst critic and there’s this insatiable competitiveness to them.

There’s insatiable attention to detail, insatiable attention to quality in terms of, you have to… I know the founder is the hero in the journey, but it’s essentially a team that makes the company come true. And so you’re looking at do they have good taste in team? Do they have a good idea as to exactly who they need to hire in the next couple months, and are they making good decisions on that? And how would they go about the hiring and how they go about choosing? In the beginning, founders usually are doing it for the first time. Usually they’ve never hired anyone. Usually they’ve never managed anyone. Usually it’s not so much that management. It’s more like they just know exactly what’s in their head and they know exactly how they want to get it onto the blank canvas in front of them.

And they just need people to help them in that 12 or 18 month first unit of progress. So I think, again, it’s this almost self-critical sense of high quality, sense of uncompromising perfection. Just getting things done and setting the rhythm of the company as well. The best predictor of success is often speed. And so you would be surprised at the variates in even taking away hours worked, if people just worked the same hours. You would be surprised at the variates between some teams and the speed of progress they make and other teams and the speed of progress they don’t make. So I think it’s paying attention, again, in the early days is like the speed and the rate learning usually predicts the eventual success of the founder and the team as well.

Niki Scevak:

Well, if you were like, hey, how do you create a trillion dollar company? Oh, let’s look at all the trillion dollar companies out there. And let’s look at who started them and let’s look at their experience at that point in time when they started it. You get to, well, Microsoft and Facebook, they didn’t even finish university. Google had just finished university. Steve Jobs had worked, I think, part-time at Atari and that was it. And then he founded Apple. And so all of these companies are founded by unqualified people with literally, in most cases, zero business experience. Not even working in a job, just zero leadership, zero hiring, zero everything. And so I would say it’s not important from that point of view. One word that’s a very interesting word to me is naivety. People describe naivety with a hundred percent negativity, versus naivety leads people to do things and to change the way things work.

If you don’t have naivety, you’re more likely to say, oh, this is the way that things are done. Or you’re more likely to not even say it out loud. It’s subconscious. It’s subconscious so you don’t decide to do anything different because it’s just the way things are done. And so you need almost this fresh naivety to bring about change. You need the outsiders to bring about change rather than the insiders. So, on some industry product level, you need the naivety. On the flip side, experience can be useful. Again, if you’re a startup and just so you build a great product and you have really happy customers and growth takes off, because that market timing and growth and so on will happen independently of how good you are as a business person. So just say that starts to happen.

It is ugly to see a company go from zero to a hundred people, to 200 people, to 300 people in a couple of years. And the founders are going on this unlikely journey, from don’t have any business experience to becoming an expert on organisational design, and processes, and resolving people problems, and installing leadership layers, and building communication structures so that every team can get things done at a hundred people. Everything can get done at 200 people. And in most of those successful cases, I mean, nearly all of those successful cases, the founders did scale that vertical learning curve, scale that company building aspect. And, actually, it’s interesting because now you can look back at the archives of something like TechCrunch where, in 2006 or ’07, people were calling for the resignation or firing of Mark Zuckerberg. He’s inexperienced and get rid of him.

And now he’s like, oh, now he’s a leader and revered as a CEO and is probably going to write a book about how to build a company and so on and so forth. So it’s a terrifying journey. And I think also, in terms of venture capital or investors or advisors or outside help, I think the outside help rarely helps on the building of the product, but there’s two steps. There’s building a great product and then there’s building a great company. And I think there’s more horizontal or universal lessons in that second building a great company that, again, it’s those prior founders who’ve succeeded. It’s people, advisors, investors, other people around the company. I think that’s where a lot of the help happens. And a lot of the help, not in a direct sense, but in an empowering sense of helping that founder go on the journey from founder to CEO and beyond.

Niki Scevak:

Yes. Yep.

Niki Scevak:

I think the idea was so fresh and unique and Mel had taught graphic design at university and usually, to be a graphic designer, you had to go to university. Then you were a graphic designer in a company and then you bought $10,000 a year worth of Adobe products. And this 1% audience that was the professional designers and they were the only people to do design. And the idea of Canva being a hundred percent of the people who should be able to do great design. And her and Cliff had founded Fusion Books, which is a high school yearbook business. That was almost a microcosm of Canva. It was a specific use case of students and teachers and parents compiling and publishing a yearbook that led to then the foundational insights and the formation of Canva.

So it was very clear that that was their life’s work. And then I think Canva is also a great example of a good idea, such that the idea for Canva was actually so well thought through. It was a 10 year idea. I think even Mel had a slide of here’s what we want to do in 10 years. And it’s still, amazingly, relatively the same 10 years later, as to what they actually did. And so I think that was the case where, to me, when I think good ideas in the sense of how well thought through it was, how opinionated, how many trade offs were weighed and viewpoints formed, Canva was really one of the great examples of a good idea. And then, in terms of just the type of business that we love to invest in at Blackbird, were people all around the world going to use Canva from day one?

Yes. In terms of the monetization was very unclear in the beginning and very unclear even once the product had launched, and then they settled on the Canva Pro subscription. But they were always, it’s almost this guiding principle within Canva to lead with building up the free product. Almost like build so much value into the free product that then some small portion of that audience will choose to pay them. But the choosing to pay sales decision is actually so low friction, people just enter their credit card and so on. It’s just spend all your time thinking about how to create a great free product experience for people, and allow design to be done by a hundred percent of the world, not 1% of the world. And I think we love those kinds of bottom up, low friction sales model or that product-led growth or whatever you want to term it, is the kind of business that we do love at Blackbird.

Niki Scevak:

Yes, absolutely. And I would even say, even though the social media was just in its early years, it was still very person-centric versus it was still quite foreign to think that business would have a social media presence. And it was still an unanswered question as to whether a company should have a blog or not. And so I think that was the environment. And then that was the first wave of inbound marketing, content marketing, businesses communicating with their customers through social platforms, that the company rose. And then I think in more recent times, it’s almost transitioned into this Canva personality or graphical design personality bringing to presentations, has been a great success of Canva and Canva has infused its own personality into how people create presentations now, such that it’s right up there with PowerPoint in terms of the most used presentation software in the world. And presentations are using that once or twice a week or once or twice a day, versus maybe you’re updating your YouTube cover picture or your social presence once a month or something like that.

So I think that going from a single person use case to a team use case, going from infrequent graphical tasks to everyday graphical tasks, is also part of the almost second chapter of Canva.

Niki Scevak:

Yes. We used to say back a decade ago, this is less common now, but entrepreneurs used to have an exit slide, which is our most hated turnoff of it used to be people, they would think that investors would like to have an exit slide where in seven years, or five years or whatever, they would sell to some big company. They’d name the company, Google or whatever. And then they’d name some price to three decimal places, and pretend to have some idea about the exit versus, again, as I said, we’re looking for people doing their life’s work. We’re actually looking for people who would say no to those acquisition offers. So, again, you’re not going to get acquisition offers if you don’t do something successfully, usually. But if you are doing something successfully, you will get many acquisition offers. And so to become a hundred billion dollar company, you actually need to say no to the hundred million dollar acquisition offer, the $1 billion acquisition offer and so on.

So I think we’re looking for someone doing their life’s work, both from a positive case and a negative case. So the positive case, it goes really well. We want that person to build an independent public company over many decades. In the negative case, and usually it’s guaranteed the negative case in the beginning when things aren’t going well, that life’s work gives that founding team the energy or the petrol to get through the hard, early stages where it’s not quite happening. And it’s more of a up and down period rather than a straight up until the right period. And so I think, again, that sense of the path of the founder to the company and to the idea, and why are they doing their life’s work?

I think the other misconception in founders is you have to look like other startups. It’s almost like this camouflage instinct where you’re like, oh, let’s search for a seed round template or let’s every slide you’re making yourself appear like another startup that you think is what investors want. Whereas I would say investors want something to be unique. They want something to be weird and fresh. And, again, they want you to be you. If it’s camouflaged into all the other templates and buzzwords, then I would say, at least for us, at least for me personally, that’s actually like, you have Nelly no chance. If you are yourself, if you are unique and strange and fresh, and then you have a super high chance, particularly with Blackbird and myself personally. If it is unique, that is the… And also, as I said, the more you dive in, the more energy you get, the more you learn. That’s actually where we are the student, rather than the teacher. As soon as I think I’m the teacher, I’m like, well, actually, stop.

That’s a really negative signal if I’m an expert and particularly on a market or a product. And if it’s just fresh learning mode of, oh my God, I hadn’t thought about that. Or that’s a unique way of doing it, or that’s a unique approach to customer acquisition. If it’s student, if I feel like a student, that’s a less super adrenaline rush moment for me as well. So I think don’t be afraid to be yourself. Again, you’ll only regret your startup journey. Again, unfortunately, most startups are failures, but you’ll only regret it, not because it’s a failure. You’ll regret it because you didn’t do it to your own personality or you didn’t do it your way. And so I would say the other observation of lots of universal misconception is people try to camouflage themselves versus be yourself. If you are weird and unique, you have more chance, not less chance.

Niki Scevak:

Yeah. Well, yes. You’ve struck on an important point. Each different investor has their own approach to investing. So I think the other thing people can do is to say, oh, VCs are bad because they said this. Just categorise all VCs as VCs and, even if you took it to its logical extreme, you could say, oh, there’s a bad person therefore all people are bad. Or, oh, I hired an employee and they didn’t work out so I’m never going to hire an employee again, because of all employees are bad. And so, again, it’s just the same as everything in life, there are good people and there are bad people. And every person has their own approach to life. Even for all of the successful people, they’ve all tended to have success in their own unique ways. And so that’s going to skew them to certain ways of doing things or certain things that they appreciate.

So, again, I would, in terms of when raising from venture capital firms, there are different firms with different strategies. There are different people with different philosophies. We talked about when we first started in 2012, the Australian VC firms were unimaginative, they were uncourageous. And so the important thing is to know, again, or get to know. When you’re raising capital, it’s like a sales process. You have to know the customer, you have to know the audience, you have to target the message, you have to understand how they make a decision, if you want to give yourself an extra chance of making a sale.

Niki Scevak:

Not from central casting.

Niki Scevak:

Yeah. I mean, look, certainly people who are clear communicators, who have that clarity of thought, who have that ability to articulate a vision, that is a great thing. However, I would say many of the best companies at the beginning did not have that ability. And, particularly in Australia and New Zealand, there’s more likely to be a lost in translation, sort of oh, that person’s not ambitious or that vision isn’t exciting. So it is a sales process, but I also think about it as it’s like people showing you baby photos. If you ask them to turn up and say, okay, here’s 10 different babies and you need to go out and talk to other people about these 10 different babies and you be a good evangelizer for how cute these 10 different babies are. You’re like, oh, I can’t do that.

You say, talk about your own kid. And they’re like, oh yeah. Here’s where we went to the zoo. Here’s this beautiful moment we had. And it’s so natural to talk about their own baby that, even if it’s not cosmetically a great presentation or cosmetically this laser level of detail, it’s still obvious the passion, the love that comes out when they talk about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it. And that’s also, I think, again, the cosmetic storytelling works at the first line of defence, but that’s why it’s so important to go to the second, third, fourth. Because, again, the bad presenter is unlikely to do well in the first meeting. But if there’s enough glimmer, there’s enough spark, by the third or fourth meeting, it’s like, again, the shackles are off in the way in which… And the more detailed and the more low level in terms of the questions, the more comfortable they are, the more passionate they are, the more articulate they are. So I would say you do figure it out. It may not be pretty in the first 30 minutes, but it does become apparent over time.

Niki Scevak:

Yeah. And the other piece of advice I would say is don’t go to investors first, in terms of presenting. If you are raising a seed round, just say, I don’t know, you’re raising a $1 million seed round or a $2 million seed round, whatever it might be. First go to those companies, again, that have nothing to do with whatever market you’re going after, that have raised a one or 2 million dollar seed round from, I don’t know, similar situation. They’re in Australia or they’re in some other connected sense. Ask them out for coffee. Normally, no one asks a person who’s a five person company that’s raised a million dollars. No one ask those founders. Everyone asks Mel from Canva or Scott and Mike from Atlassian, but no one asked the 1 million seed round founder. And then say, we’re about to raise a seed round.

I’d love to get your advice as to your own experiences in raising around and who was good to speak to, who wasn’t. And, if you’d be open to it, can you rip my presentation to shreds and give me some negative feedback? Always invite negative feedback. And so you go to the coffee and, if you get along, you’re not going to get along every time, but you probably get along 50% of the time. And if you do get along, usually that person will go, oh, let me introduce you to my own investors. Or let me introduce you to some people I met in my own fundraising. And so you get feedback on the pitch, you get to warm up on your pitch. You get introduced to some promising leads for your seed round. And if you do that, if you do five coffees or 10 coffees, it really sets you up in that, after you’ve done those, you’re in a good rhythm, you’ve got a bunch of introductions alongside your own meetings, and you’re ready to launch into the processor.

Niki Scevak:

I would say once you have raised money, the temptation is to do things that don’t really matter. They’re positive things, but they don’t really matter. The only two things that matter are building your product and talking to customers. And, as much as you can concentrate your time into those two activities, the better. Sometimes you’ll be tempted in, and there are other things like PR or partnerships, or I don’t know, whatever else that might be positive down the line, but certainly aren’t going to be positive in the next 12 or 18 months, that people can fall in love with. People can fall in love with the theatrics of startups, like under 30 lists and going to conferences and winning awards. And, again, those are all great for mom and dad to feel like you haven’t thrown your life away, and your own ego, but that is doing nothing for your startup.

And so I would say that just build product, just talk to customers. And anything under those two headings, building up the product team or whatever it might be, getting advice on how to get introduced or how to determine who’s a good customer, who’s a bad one, how to get advice as to how you should measure your sales outreach and sales cycle, and set up the CRM with different events and different stages in the funnel. And all of these, if it’s to do with talking to customers, if it’s to do with building product, do those. And I think, again, the people that are just focused on the customers, it’s just so clear. And those are the people… That’s the forward predictor of success. And in the early days you talked about if you’ve raised a couple million dollars, you’re still building a product stage. But once you reach probably 20 or 50 people, you have to build a great company.

You build a great product then you’ve got a great company. And when you’re building a great company, again, you’re thinking at a meta level. You’re almost building the product that builds the product. So you’re building this environment that attracts the best people, gets them to do their best work, and builds a great culture and so on and so forth. And so usually people who are thinking in that sort of building a great company mindset at the early stages, that’s always a good… Whereas I think, if you’re operating in this window closing mindset of, hey, I’m doing a… I don’t know, Groupon succeeds in the US, I’m going to do a daily deal site in Australia and shit, I just need to hire 40 sales people. And yeah, that person will do. And versus the people that run them through three technical interviews, define their cultural values.

Alex Cleanthous:

So how does the choice of the VC firm that they go to actually affect the support that happens after the first investment round, let’s call it?

Alex Cleanthous:

Yeah. That’s awesome. And just on the problem side of things, because I had this conversation last night. Cool, so everything’s going well, then are you doing enough then? Because there should be problems with growth. Because that’s the faster you grow, the more problems you have and the bigger the problems. And what you want are the biggest problems because that’s where there can be support. If everything is going well, what are you actually doing? How can it go well, because it’s not a hundred million dollars yet? So it’s just a fantastic [crosstalk 00:54:20].

Alex Cleanthous:

Not going fast enough. That’s like Mario Andretti or something like that. He’s got this fantastic quote. Final question, what are the most exciting industries that you are looking at across the next three, five to 10 years?

Alex Cleanthous:

Thank you so much for sharing the journey of a startup founder, just from idea to presenting, to raising, to post funding and so on. How can a company or a startup founder or a person who’s interested in speaking with Blackbird, actually start a conversation with you guys?

Alex Cleanthous:

That advice that you just gave is pretty much how you should email any successful person who’s busy, because they get lots and lots of emails every day. And so I think that’s just a fantastic protocol to have in general. But listen, thank you so much, Niki, for coming on the podcast. This has been such a great conversation and thank you for sharing the journey, and we’ll talk soon.

Alex Cleanthous:

Thanks for listening to the Growth Manifesto podcast. If you enjoyed the episode, please give us a five star rating on iTunes. For more episodes, please visit growthmanifesto.com/podcast. And if you need help driving growth for your company, please get in touch with us at webprofits.io.