Daniel Bakh and Dorin Tarau are the founders of Fullview.
FullviewĀ is a customer support suite that lets you instantly monitor, control and analyze user sessions for faster real time customer support.
The guys founded Fullview in 2021 and in record time theyāve raised 10 million Euros in just 10 months from top investors like Cherry, Seedcamp and later on from Lightspeed.
During this episode we discuss about how to build momentum and create urgency when fundraising, how to hire player coaches and how Anouska from Lightspeed convinced the team to choose Lightspeed instead of another VC on a higher valuation.
Big thank you to Max from Cherry and Anouska from Lightspeed for the input in the preparation for this episode.
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/episode/7nouyslH3kb2kFIGISKTjO?si=00e6b0c1fb2f4fb2
Apple: https://podcasts.apple.com/nl/podcast/venture-europe/id1572789098?l=en&i=1000578571771
Transcript
Outline
- Venture Europe - Introduction - 0:06
- How they were able to get a competitive funding round - 2:30
- What questions did you get from investors - 5:27
- The difference between investors who understand the market vs investors who donāt - 8:42
- How do you convince investors that you are the right partner? - 11:33
- A funny story about how they got into the business - 13:54
- Whatās the strategy for hiring senior people from series C companies? - 19:22
- How to create momentum and urgency in your team - 22:25
- What was the most challenging period in their careers? - 25:49
- Why you need to hire only when youāre ready to scale your business - 28:54
SUMMARY KEYWORDS
people, investors, founders, fundraise, customer, pre-seed, hire, create, product, meeting, company, copenhagen, fundraising, build, startup, urgency, market, questions, existing, external factors
SPEAKERS
Calin Fabri, Daniel Bakh, Dorin Tarau
Calin FabriĀ 00:36
Let's start with the story of our burger in Copenhagen. It was September last year, and you're closing your pre-seed round. You told me some crazy stories about what VCs would do to try to get into round. Do you remember some of the calls, some of the stories, some of the situations?
DanielĀ 02:30
Yeah, it was pretty funny story, we were in the fortunate position of having a relatively competitive funding round. And then you know, especially back then, q4, last year, in 2021, the market was absolutely crazy. So I think some VCs were just, you know, head over heels, trying to figure out how, like, what what to do. And we were lucky that we had a plenty of options. And they knew that. So do some weird stories where like, one London based VC, you know, going to name any names here. But we had a meeting with him where he was like, Guys, let's know, we can do this at 1015 $20 million valuation doesn't matter. Let's just do this. Come on, let's partner up. And then just like really, almost as if you were buying a used Toyota, you know, like a used car. And I was like, Well, okay, chill, like, Let me think about this, let's have a discussion that's like, you know, get to know each other first, and then decide whether we're going to, you know, enter the interior into a long term partnership, or what's gonna happen. A lot of crazy stories like that last year, especially.
Calin FabriĀ 03:24
You mentioned that it was a very competitive round. And I remember you didn't really have a website yet. So I was wondering, like, what do you think you guys did very well, to create all this momentum and make it so competitive?
DanielĀ 03:37
Yeah, I think we were going to try to essentially create like a marketplace for our fundraise and try to cram as much into as short of a time period as possible. I think a lot of founders, they think that fundraising is something where you need to know take a lot of casual coffee meetings beforehand, or you know, 612 months leading up to fundraise, you need to do the exact opposite of that, in most cases, especially in the pre seed and seed stage. Later stage fundraising, perhaps is a different game. But especially in the early stages, it's better just, you know, focus on building something, focus on the narrative and your story and your initial user validation. And then once you decide to fundraise, then go all in and really fundraise. And then, you know, cram as much as you can into, for example, a two week period. So that's what we did. We said, okay, from this week to this week, we're going to be fundraising and we're not going to meet anyone outside of that period. So if you want to meet with us and be part of the discussion, you need to meet with us in this timeframe. And then we had literally back to back meetings every single day. Almost basically, yeah, literally, like, you know, more than a full time job. That's kind of how we were able to get it done so fast and also optimise you know the outcome for us.
DorinĀ 04:42
Yeah. And if I could add a bit on top of that, like, I think also the product that we building talks directly to a pain that is well known already in the market, like before, actually going out to fundraise but then myself, we started talking with a lot of customer support leaders, and it's kind of like everyone said, When can we start using such a solution, which showed earlier validation that oh, yeah, the problem is there, it's binding, and everyone understands it. So I'm pretty sure that it was the same with our investors, we did not have to explain whether or not this is like we offering like a solution that is for an existing problem, or is it something that we're trying to invent?
Calin FabriĀ 05:21
So you kind of lined up all those meetings, I really liked the term just creating a marketplace for your shares. And make sure that our enough kind of competitors are enough people actually to try to get those shares. So in this period of two weeks, you met different types of investors, like the crazy type of investors that may became a little bit later on, they really wanted to get in, but also some good investors. You are also very, very early, I remember you actually telling me about this VC that asked you for financial projections. So I was wondering, like, What questions did you get that were good questions? And we're like, okay, they get it, they ask the right questions. And which questions did you get from some VCs that you're like, Okay, I don't think we should take the second meeting.
DanielĀ 06:06
Yeah, good question. It's a very clear distinction between the ones who really know what they're talking about and everyone else, when, for example, someone asked about a financial projection that happened to us, you know, it only happened once, actually. But still, it was very strange to ask, you know, at that point, we were precede company. And we didn't have a website, we didn't have a product built out. We just had, you know, some vegan ice, you know, me and Dorian and a nice couple of developers with us. But we didn't have a real business at all right? So if financial projection is kind of a joke at that point, we also told them that like, Hey, guys, look, this isn't, what do you want me to do? I can, you know, pull up a spreadsheet. And I can put a bunch of BS storytelling together for you, if that's what you really want me to do. But it's not going to get us anywhere. Let's instead talk about the roadmap, let's talk about what we're actually building, let's talk about the long term vision, the team people we want to hire with these funds, etc, etc, instead of some kind of, you know, it feels like kind of a box that people just want to check. Maybe it's part of the LP agreement or something like that, that they have to ask for it. I don't know. But this just seems a little bit ridiculous at that point. And then in contrast to like, really, you know, more tier one investors, and I would definitely put, you know, Lightspeed into that category as well. It's just a striking difference. When you talk to people like that there. Once you go into the meeting, they're already prepared. They already know everything they already know what you do, they already looked into space and all your competitors to know exactly the problem you're trying to solve. And the conversation from the get go is just so different. It's from the get go. It's more about long term vision. And how big could this thing really be? And where do you guys want to take it? Are you guys a real team, the right team to do this and so forth, instead of all the fluffy stuff?
Calin FabriĀ 07:38
So what are the good questions that you got from the investors that you chose at precede? Because you're just so early on? How do they try to validate if this is an interesting investment opportunity?
DanielĀ 07:50
Yeah. And maybe you want to shed some light of that?
DorinĀ 07:53
I don't know exactly. If I could point out some specific good questions. But I would definitely say that the people that wanted to talk to us then, as mentioned about like, what is the big vision that you have here? People don't understand how big is this problem? How big is the market for what you're trying to solve? I think those were the big questions. Because as Dana mentioned, at such an early stage is we were at precede. Like, as a VC, you bet on the team on the founding team, there is no tection, there is no numbers to be shown. So you bet on the team. And a lot of the good questions were like picking up our brains, and some even opens maybe even more our eyes to like ways to further expand further down the line, for example.
DanielĀ 08:36
I would also add to that, that, I think that a lot of people, they think about market sizing, which that's fair enough. But I think what you really need to think about is the market dynamics. And that's very clear kind of distinction between people who really know understand the market versus people who you know, to be fair, of course, you can't be an expert in everything. But some people you're coming into a conversation with a new startup to potentially invest in not knowing anything at all about the market, not having done any prior research, which I think at least that should be table stakes to do some prior research. But then the people who are more into it already from the get go, they'll talk more about the dynamics of the market, and also like what are the workflows of your customers existing workflows? How does your proposed solution and product fit into those existing workflows versus trying to, for example, create new workflows for your users, when just go into more granular things like that?
Calin FabriĀ 09:25
Yeah, actually, I can I can chip in what a good question that you guys got, because I'm a VC. So I always want to learn how to do better. And I remember specifically that I asked you guys like what type of questions did the investors that you choose? Ask and I remember clearly you guys seeing that they asked, what type of customer discovery did you do? And how did you go and talk with the support leader sounds like okay, that's the that's 100 times much more important than actually financial projections.
DanielĀ 09:55
I totally agree with you like, how did you get in touch with your initial customers or or design partners or users or whatever you want to call them. And also, you know what, let's go into the feedback that they told you about. I think that's at the end of the day, you're building a new solution. Most startups are building something new in the world, right? Or at least a new take on something that already exists. So let's kind of dig into how the actual users of this they would actually interact with it and the value they create.
Calin FabriĀ 10:21
And for your pre-seed, you choose to go with two funds, Seedcamp and Cherry Ventures instead of kind of going with only one big fond, like, why did you choose two funds?
DanielĀ 10:31
it was a little bit of a hack in some way from our side that like, course, there was some benefit, obvious things like, you know, we wanted to have, you know, the networks of two different funds versus a network of one fund at our disposal. But then it was also like, we kind of knew how the game worked, we knew that most funds have some kind of ownership targets that they want to reach, whether it's know 10 15%, whatever it might be. So we decided, hey, if we have two co leads here, we can actually, you know, find a pretty easy way to get them below their ownership targets, which obviously, it's good for us, because then at the next round, it will make it more competitive, because they'll both have a very strong incentive to put even more money into the company and up their ownership percentage. So that's, you know, just a little hack that I'm just very openly sharing right now. But I think you know, why not? Most founders, they need to know that, who they're actually doing business with and understand the incentives of the investors on the other side of the table. If you can understand their incentives, you can understand you know, what motivates them and how to actually get the best deal for yourself.
Calin FabriĀ 11:24
So you've raised around 1.5 million euros in pre-seed, and then four to five months later, you raised around 7 million euros from Lightspeed. How does one do that?
DanielĀ 11:35
Dorin, how does one do that? Let us know.
DorinĀ 11:38
There's a couple of things. But I would say that the most important one is the urgency. And, of course, there's many factors, market conditions that were pretty good when we raise the seed. But I would say that when like both dinner and myself, we fundraise or precede. And then we thought we didn't have to raise again, our seats, we had plenty of runway. But we both thought from the beginning that we you know, and we still use that thinking now. Now we have even more Hanway. But we want to get to our goals. And we know that we need to get to our goals in a way as if we have maybe 1/3 of that budget, right? That creates a lot of urgency in the team. We've been creating all kinds of challenges, for example of software, dental and myself while building the product, like what can we do to further build like a good pipeline, we built pretty strong design by a group of over 100 Customer Support leaders. And I remember that I was sitting in the office together with Daniel. And then every single week, we set one goal, we exceeded the goal. And that was the new goal for the next week and the new goal for the next week. And we applied the same kind of thinking in product development. So I would say that, in my opinion, the number one reason was the urgency that we created in the team. And we sleeve to that event today.
Calin FabriĀ 12:56
Do you remember the first meeting with lightspeed? What was the process like
DanielĀ 12:59
I think the first meeting was actually really refreshing because we came into the meeting, met Anushka, and Adrian. And it was very clear that they had already done a tonne of research into the customer support industry and specifically also for us. And for example, they knew all about for example, some of our competitors and some of the legacy players and for example, also go into more detailed product things like part of what fullview does is also troubleshooting screen control. But a more modern take them for example TeamViewer Splashtop, these types of legacy players and they had already done a tonne of research and they showed us that research to detailed reports on these specific domain industry players. And then it was just a very kind of going into someone who was almost like talking to you know, when he talked to a customer you know, they're sitting there every single day and they know the problem in and out it felt almost like that, but except there was not a customer it was a investor.
Calin FabriĀ 13:50
Investor. How long did the process take and how did they convince you that they are the right partner?
DanielĀ 13:55
Yeah, it's a funny story. It's like I think they showed a lot of hustle as well that made us want to choose them as partners. Of course, we knew about them to have a good brand name and we knew about them beforehand, but especially in new special so much like hustle. It's a really funny story, actually you so we have a office here in Copenhagen. And then we have an office in Romania, where we have our development team on unify team but with two different offices. We were working from our Romanian office that week have arrived while doing the fundraising. Then Anushka said hey, you guys, you know let's meet in person even though she's based in San Francisco said let's meet in person and then she literally broke the last minute flight flew all the way to Romania, from San Francisco on like a super short notice and met us in person took us out for a nice dinner and everything and that was like okay, most VCs don't even want to fly from London to Copenhagen. That's like a one and a half hour flight. And she flew all the way from San Francisco. Last minute notice that also showed us okay, they're not messing around. They're serious about this showed a little hustle.
Calin FabriĀ 14:47
Yeah, so actually for the people listening to fly from Copenhagen or Stockholm to Cluj where your office space is not that easy. Actually, when I fly to Cluj I have to take like maybe two two flights. I mean, I can't imagine how it is like Francisco,
DorinĀ 15:03
I still couldn't believe that. She's going to show up till the last minute when I actually saw her because I thought, yeah, it's kind of like a bold move. But what I would like to mention that is that it was also a lesson both for Danielle and myself. And then we applied the same technique when we wanted to make some new hires in the company. Like I remember we, one of our latest engineer, he joined from like a lightweight company from the US, but he was there from the beginning as a startup, then we really wanted him. So what we did on a Friday night, last minutes, an email came through. I was at the office with Daniel, and then we offered earlier that day to meet in person, but we didn't expect that. We're like, the developer will give course that invitation. So what happened was that then in the evening, on a Friday, we got an email saying that oh, yeah, I would really like to meet you. Next week. We were supposed to go to Barcelona for our team off site. So what we did, we just booked her last minute flight. And early next morning, flew to London, then from London to Cluj to met with him. And three days later, he joined us
Calin FabriĀ 16:03
Anoushka move right? :)
DanielĀ 16:08
When you want to close a deal with a customer or employee or whatever it might be, you show up in person, it doesn't matter how much of a pain in the ass it is to get there. Show up in person show, show your care.
Calin FabriĀ 16:19
Amazing. Love it. You've been the hype and cool kids on the block in Copenhagen and Denmark. And now the expectations to execute are kind of high. Probably the next round will be on the grounds of traction. Do you feel the pressure? How do you go about it? What are the next milestones that you want to hit?
DanielĀ 16:37
Do you feel the pressure? Dorin, what do you think?
DorinĀ 16:41
Definitely, and as you mentioned, Calin. So I'm an immigrant in Denmark, I moved here 10 years ago, and I'm quite proud to say that we've managed to raise the largest seed round in the history of Denmark. But that obviously comes with a lot of pressure. I know that everyone's watching us, we need to deliver on the promise. And we need to show really good numbers for the next milestone. But I think like there's other maybe more pressing challenges such as this big mission that we started on, what we're battling with, we want to build a solution, not a tool. And I know that there is this conventional wisdom that in the startup world, you need to start in a small. And obviously that comes with a lot of benefits such as like much faster time to market and lower r&d costs. But if you look historically, there has been so many tools out there created for the flow, right. And then in the customer support flow, we've seen that before we started even fundraising, we saw that there are so many smaller tools out there some small bits of this customer support training. But the mission we have is to build an all in one solution, not the tool, because the customer doesn't care that oh, yeah, you can solve this really three five cool features. But how is this going to be integrated into my solution? The challenge that is presented with so many tools out there, it's that all your data is scattered across all these different places instead of having everything in one place. So yeah, this is like kind of like a bold mission. I'm inspired with Wiz, the Israeli startup, which is now the fastest growing startup in the world.
DanielĀ 18:20
Yeah, fastest to 100 million in ARR. So basically, fastest SaaS company ever.
DorinĀ 18:25
Yeah. Then I was reading about the same mission that they have to build an all in one solution for cybersecurity.
Calin FabriĀ 18:33
how do you go about something that it's more complex, and at the same time, let's say showing the traction for the next round?
DorinĀ 18:40
Obviously, that puts a lot of pressure on everyone, especially on the product team. Of course, we started like smaller, and we found our wedge into the market. And then from there, we started expanding on the left and on the right.
DanielĀ 18:56
Yeah, exactly. That is a challenge, of course, trying to build what used to be, you know, multiple different products into one product with a very smooth and easy UX UI that can consolidate, you know, multiple players into one tool. That's definitely a big challenge for a small startup with you know, still limited resources, limited time to do so. But I think the only way to solve that problem is to execute with intensity and speed. So you can get there as fast as possible and iterate along the way.
Calin FabriĀ 19:26
I remember how Eleonore Crespo, previously Index Ventures and now running Pigment said that at early stage is all about people. So what is the strategy now you have cash in a bank accounts? Like what is the strategy to go about hiring senior people, let's say from series C companies that have been through the growth journey that you are planning to go through?
DanielĀ 19:52
I think so there's a common trap that we almost fell into as well. And I think a lot of founders they think that okay, we should go hire people with fancy resumes, people from the hottest unicorns out there and so forth. And that's, you know, I totally understand why that's alluring. And we almost do the same thing as, and I'm very happy with that we didn't, because we actually realised, you know, what, you know, in the process of interviewing a lot of these people that, you know, despite how intelligent and talented they are, people who work in larger organisations, for example, let's say a head of sales in a larger organisation, is used to having an existing product and existing brand and an army of sales reps, for example, that can kind of execute on their behalf. And they're used to being more of a delegator, versus people who work in startups, they used to limited budgets, you know, buggy products, no existing brands, and just rolling up their sleeves and really like going getting dirty with it and getting the job done themselves. We were trying to find like the best balance, because of course, you also when you're hiring more senior people, you also need people who can have some leadership qualities to them as well. So we hire people that we now call player coaches, basically people who can, you know, if you think of like sports analogy, people who can be both a player on the field, and also be a coach, or like a quarterback to others. So that's kind of what we try to go after. And then we try to find people who also, for example, have shown a lot of entrepreneurial grid themselves, like had side projects that they've been working on small hobby projects here and there that they've grown, with limited resources in a limited time span as well.
DorinĀ 21:28
Yeah, definitely talk again, about like, for example, the last hire when we came and we met together with him, and then he started talking about all his side projects that he has at home, and like all the cool things that he's doing in the outside working hours. That's how you know that someone is really passionate about his craft, because especially in software engineering, and not only but I strongly believe this is, it's like a craft, in order to be really good at it, you have to enjoy it.
DanielĀ 21:52
Yeah, exactly. And also, for example, when we wanted to hire a head of growth, we looked for people who had, for example, some people who had their own podcasts, and people had their own blog that they've grown, or like super, like, for example, nerdy on SEO and help grow their own blog to you know, 10s of 1000s of monthly visitors, you know, just themselves on the weekends. So people with that type of grid, that's what we look for.
Calin FabriĀ 22:13
Are you guys hiring? I have a podcast as well.
DanielĀ 22:18
You are a VC, man, you're making the big bucks.
Calin FabriĀ 22:25
In closing, let's get personal. I got some feedback from your current investors. And Max from Cherry said that one thing that stands out about you guys, is the way that you can create momentum and urgency. I was wondering, how do you do that?
DanielĀ 22:43
there's a few different angles, maybe Dorin you want to talk about how we do it in the product team, I can maybe talk about how we do it on them or go to market side,
DorinĀ 22:50
everything, again, ties into creating urgency we all know, as a company like where do we need to get for the next fundraise, but that can be like quite a big milestone and I to digest. So we always break things down into smaller milestones. And we tie all the deadlines into external factors, such as we are going to have a meeting with this large customer in about two weeks. And there is these two, three features that are going to block the deal. We really need to get these features out. And the deadline is staked, we cannot postpone that. And everyone else in the team knows that we are going to be held accountable in front of this slider customer because we set the meeting with them. It's put in the calendar, and we don't want to waste our customers time. Right? That creates a huge sense of urgency in the team. It's not like a manufactured one, it actually is tied into external factors.
DanielĀ 23:40
Yeah, exactly. Adorn, just to add on that as well, I think, exactly. Tie things to external factors and tell people like, you know, give people also skin in the game to actually care about those external factors, right. I think a lot of people, a lot of founders in Europe, actually, they're very good at hiring, but they're not so good at aligning incentives inside of their team, which is super important. Especially, you know, you can do that through equity packages that, you know, that's a topic that people talk about all the time in European tech, because it's hard in many countries to give out equity packages. And there's also not so much of a culture around giving equity to employees. But I think it's absolutely vital. And there's many ways you can do it with a good lawyer. But I think it's absolutely vital to give generous equity packages to people. So they have a long term incentive with you. So they're not just there to collect a salary. Nothing wrong with that. But I think that you should hire people that care more about equity, plus a salary on top of that, as well with equity being the main piece, right to actually be owners in the business and have long term incentives aligned with the founders and the investors. And then be really, really crystal clear on your communication, to the mission that you're going after, the goals that you have and the problems you want to solve and why you're doing what you do every day. If you can nail those things, then you can create a really strong sense of urgency because then suddenly you switch. You hit us Which and people actually care about what you're doing. They have a reason personal reason to actually care.
Calin FabriĀ 25:05
What do you think people from outside get wrong about full view?
DanielĀ 25:09
I think we get a lot of people constantly asking us about, like fundraising and stuff like that. And that's, you know, we're not here just to fundraise all the time. That's not what we spend every day on. Despite, you know, what we're talking about on this podcast right now, or seeing that we raise one of the biggest seed rounds in Scandinavia and all of that are in Europe, I say. But I think what we're actually doing is like, the whole purpose of fundraising is to build a business at the end of the day. And I'm not mean darling, we're not in this to just keep fundraising, we're here to solve important and urgent problem for our customers and create value in the world and solve problems that we care about ourselves, our employees care about, and most importantly, our customers care about when fundraising is just a means to an end to do that. Got it. So I don't want to just be known as a hype machine that don't exist to keep raising money from investors.
Calin FabriĀ 25:55
I see the pressure there, Daniel, I can feel it.
DanielĀ 26:00
Yes, it is. It is pressure. But you know, we're here to We exist for our customers,
Calin FabriĀ 26:03
what was the most challenging period in your careers? And how did you guys overcome it?
DorinĀ 26:07
Yeah, maybe I can put the bit of light on. Of course, like when you're fundraising, it's quite challenging, especially because we set everything. And we've done it in a relatively short, if I may say, in a very short time span, compared to what we've heard from other founders. So we've done both the pre seed and the seed in about two weeks. That meant that every day from early morning till 12, in the night, because we had meetings with VCs from the US as well, day in and day out, we had meetings, I remember, I also had the COVID, at the time, didn't even have time to take breaks by having lunch or dinner. It was definitely challenging. But even more so maybe, at the beginning of the summer, we launched the second version of the product light will launch fully replace, which is the kind of like the second product within full view. And we experienced quite a lot of demands, which created, of course, a lot of stress on the system. But internally, it created a lot of stress on us as a team. But we overcame that. And we are ready to learn Boyd's much lighter customers. What about you,
DanielĀ 27:10
Daniel? Yeah, and I would also say a challenge in my career, I think maybe I, I always knew I wanted to start my own company, as far as long as I can remember, still, you know, very young, but since I was probably in middle school, whatever. And I think maybe I got distracted by, you know, I always was lucky to have great job offers and you know, climbing the ranks and whatever different companies I worked at, but then it's very easy to get distracted by that and get like comfortable with a steady paycheck and all that. And then I think I just got a little bit distracted by all of that trip. I just started a company with Dorian sooner. But I'm glad we did it. I'm glad we're here.
Calin FabriĀ 27:47
What is the worst advice you guys have received so far?
DanielĀ 27:52
As a lot. There's a lot of bad advice out there. There's a lot of bad advice from people who have not operated companies themselves, especially a lot of investors have very good intentions with wanting to add value to startups. And a lot of them they do add a lot of value to startups. And I would say we are lucky that our investors especially and not just saying this, because they might listen to those podcasts. But generally behind closed doors, we also they add a lot of value, especially Lightspeed, I would say they give us know a bird's eye perspective on which benchmarks we should follow and ideas that they see from other portfolio companies, which is an incredibly valuable asset for us. But there's also a lot of other investors we come across in our day that just, you know, try to give advice just for the sake of saying something. I think more specifically an example that was really bad that someone advised us to hire a head of people at the preseed stage stage, which now in hindsight, that makes no sense to me at all, like culture should be one of your number one priorities as a founder, and it should stay with you for as long as you possibly can throughout the life of your company. Or you should only hire ahead of people to help you when you want to scale your culture. Now, when you want to build your culture, it's your job to build the culture, lay the foundations stick to everything that relates to people management, and HR and culture and whatever it might be yourself and then only hire better people when your post product market fit and you're ready to scale
Calin FabriĀ 29:13
And what about you Dorin? Worse advice?
DorinĀ 29:16
Maybe also ties into the previous question like sometimes what do people get wrong about will view the fact that we placed such a massive seed round doesn't mean that we are going to go out there and start hiring people because I strongly believe is David Sachs once said that, like the best companies out there have 2x more than what they would need and the worst companies have 3x What that tells me is that everyone over hired, right. So we didn't the fact that we raised such a big sit down, even though we wanted to do we were tempted to go out and hire a bunch of new colleagues. But as Daniel always says, like we need to hire only when there is a very based on burning fire. And yes, everyday is a burning fire and you can always use Some extra hints. But we were planning to do that, once we see that, okay, like we've reached the stock product market feeds. Now it's time to put my call on the fire. I
DanielĀ 30:09
totally agree with that don't keep your headcount as lean as you possibly can keep your burn rate low, especially when your pre product market
Calin FabriĀ 30:17
fit and check. What do you guys think makes a good entrepreneur or good founder?
DanielĀ 30:22
That's a tough one. I think we're still trying to figure it out. But I would say like the trend that I've seen for people I look up to, they have like a relentless sense of focus. They don't get distracted by like, they don't have shiny object syndrome, you know, don't get distracted by every little potential opportunity out there. But they stay focused on the bigger picture. And they say no, a lot. So that's really important. You could build a million different things, you could go a million different directions, but it's important to focus on that keep the main thing, the main thing. So I focused, I would say, then, incredible sense of urgency as well.
DorinĀ 30:55
Yeah. And I would say, it's totally believed that people make or break a business. That's why like, I think it's one of the main jobs of founders is that you need to keep the spirits high, and keep the team motivated. Of course, there is always going to be challenges, sometimes challenges that, like, maybe you cannot even see the light at the end of the tunnel, but you just have to be perseverant and resilient. So who
Calin FabriĀ 31:17
do you guys look up to now? Who is your role model?
DanielĀ 31:21
And it's hard to say a role model? I think it's we like to do things our own way, obviously. So I would say, but more people that I'm definitely very inspired by say, Yep. Ryndam from Leo, super, super strong entrepreneur. And he's also lucky to have him as an angel investor in full view. Gokul Rajaram. He's also a great investor that we have, He's a board member at Coinbase. And was, you know, he basically built Google's AdSense business back in the day and Facebook ads business as well. And he's just a amazing operator, and you can do things, you know, at a scale that most people can't. But people like that I definitely, I'm quite inspired by
Calin FabriĀ 31:56
and for founder's listening, in closing, what would you tell them? Founders listening now, maybe raising their precede seed?
DorinĀ 32:03
Maybe what I would mention is that, don't overthink it. Just if you find a problem there in the market. Or you find something that you're super passionate about, overthinking, just go out there, give it a shot, there is nothing you're going to lose like the worst case scenario, you're going to learn a lot of good things along the way. Like I've done it myself in the past, I bootstrap to other companies, it was fucking heights. It took a real mental toll on me. But yeah, eventually I just kept pushing. And I also believe in life that sometimes you It's not me who said it's I don't remember exactly who it was. But like sometimes things happen to you in life kind of as like individual points, and you don't see the thread. But over the years, if you look back, you can definitely see a thread in the correlation between all those
Calin FabriĀ 32:50
I know that you can never connect the dots looking forward only looking backwards. The Steve Jobs.
DorinĀ 32:55
Exactly. Exactly.
DanielĀ 32:57
Just to add to that as well. Specifically I was also say like to most founders, they they wait too long, I think now that you asked specifically about people were closing their pre seed and seed stage funding rounds, like you know what you have today, like if you don't focus so much on your KPIs and your numbers right now, like at the end of the day, if you want to work with smart investors, they know that what you have today is not actually what you were going to be they don't judge you by what you have today. They'll judge you by your potential and your vision you have for the next you know 10 plus years. So focus on that at the precede stage craft a beautiful narrative. If you can show a great product early MVP product and then don't think that okay, I need to you know, get hit these numbers first and then we go on and fundraise. I need to like do this thing first and then go out and fundraise like, smart investors don't care about that. Anyways, if you have a precede stage if you have X MRR or x x MRR it doesn't really matter at that stage.
DorinĀ 33:49
Yeah, and if you it doesn't matter how many noes you get. It's only about getting one yes. So if you've got 99 noes, but you've got that one nice, you're good to go.
Calin FabriĀ 33:58
I got 99 problems, but fundraising is not one.
DanielĀ 34:05
The title of this
Calin FabriĀ 34:07
Exactly. Thank you very much for taking the time guys. I know that's during you have to jump into customer meeting. Thank you very much for taking the time. Thanks for having us.
DanielĀ 34:15
Thanks a lot. I really enjoyed it.