Capital Conversations with VC Leaders

Michael Mendenhall: You've heard of the seven summits. This is like the eighth summit, I think. It's a little like a precipice here. Now, we have the privilege of introducing another one of my colleagues, our executive vice president of business affairs, chief legal officer and secretary here at TriNet. Please join me in welcoming Samantha Wellington.

Samantha Wellington: Welcome. I actually was chatting with Michael backstage. We were not given the opportunity to choose our own walk on music. He assured me that my music was going to be fine and I'm very pleased with the selection, so that's good. I'm super pleased to be here with you all today with everyone in the audience, and also everyone who's tuning in virtually for our Capital Conversation With VC Leaders.

We're going to be talking with two incredible venture capitalist leaders, Allison Goldberg and Anya Hayden. Allison is the senior vice president of Startup Engagement at Comcast. She oversees Comcast Ventures as their managing partner as well as the Comcast Accelerator Programs, Comcast NBC Universal Lift Labs and Sports Tech. Allison and her teams work very closely with early-stage to enterprise-ready startups whose vision of future of technology aligns with Comcast's initiatives.

And then Anya Hayden. Anya is the general partner and founder of ANIM, which is a top tier early-stage venture capital fund that invests in technology companies globally. Anya has been featured in Forbes, Vogue, never heard of those, not sure what they are, the Economic Times, Entrepreneur India and Silicon India. She's a delegate to the Middle East with multiple conferences and has spoken globally for Google and other technology leaders.

So please join with me in welcoming Anya and Allison to the stage. Welcome. Now before we start, I thought we might start with a non-technical poll, which is—are we noticing anything different about the stage at the moment and the fact that we're going to be talking about venture capital? There you go! We talked about it before we started this panel, whether or not we wanted to mention it or whether we wanted to just keep going.

And I think where we all landed was—we'd love to live in a world where it's not a thing and not a thing that we even mention. But it is a thing. And I think it's incredibly cool that now that I've finished talking about it, we're not actually going to talk about that at all. We're going to talk about venture capital and small and medium-size businesses and what founders can be doing to better access capital.

So, whether you're an existing founder or an aspiring one, the idea is that you should come away with some tips and tricks or some better game play, such that you better understand if you're a portfolio company, the role of your VC within your company. If you're considering VC funding, maybe you might walk away with a better understanding of what VCs are looking for in today's environment, as well as which industries’ product and service offerings are super interesting to investors today, and perhaps also how you can better position yourself and your business when engaging with venture capital.

We are going to have some Q&A at the end of the session. So, if we say something that doesn't make sense to you or if you'd like us to go deeper into something, please do submit your session questions throughout the session and we'll have some time at the end.

We're going to be asking some poll questions throughout the session. So, if you're attending live, you can manage answering those poll questions on the app. If you're watching us virtually, you can do it through the web platform. Now, I did share very brief overviews on each of you. But I want us to start just with a little more detail and context on each of you and the funds that you're investing for.

So Allison.

Allison Goldberg: Yes.

Samantha: How did you wind up at Comcast? And what have you not told people about Comcast Ventures that you want them to understand?

Allison: So, I've been at Comcast for about two years now. I spent most of my career in corporate venture. So, this was the perfect opportunity for me. I spent about 18 years at Time Warner where I was running our venture group there.

So I really believe in and love the idea of corporate venture capital, the idea of investing in companies for both financial returns as well as for strategic insights and strategic rationale. So I think, for me personally, it was the kind of perfect opportunity when it presented itself two years ago.

So what can I tell you? Comcast Ventures has been 20 plus years in the venture market, which is fantastic. And the goals are really—it's a dual mission fund. So it's financial return as well as strategic value and strategic insight for Comcast. So the venture group, which I oversee, we invest up to about seven and a half million dollars when we first go into a company and really looking for companies that are innovating in spaces that are strategically aligned with our growth initiatives.

Then I also oversee startup engagement, which are two accelerator programs. And it's a different way for early-stage founders to access a big company like Comcast NBCU. So not just through capital adventures, but in the accelerator programs, we're partnering with entrepreneurs, we're syncing them up with mentors and helping them come up with proof of concepts and different ways to grow their businesses.

So we have a Sports Tech Accelerator, which is all focused on sports tech, companies innovating in that space. We've got great partners like the PGA Tour, NASCAR, as well as all the NBC Sports properties and Comcast Sports properties. And then we also have Lift Labs which runs accelerators that are themed.

So right now, the themes are all AI all the time. So our first accelerator was in generative AI earlier this year. The next one is launching in enterprise AI next month.

Samantha: And we will get to, I promise you, we will talk about AI a little later. So Anya, you came to VC through the time-honored path of consulting and iBanking. Could you talk a little bit about how you come to found and run your own fund?

Anya Hayden: Yes, thank you. So I think for me, I've always been a very tactical person. And so, coming out of university, consulting and investment banking both really lent a way to learn about very particular parts of running a company. From there, though, I started feeling like I missed building something. And so, I ended up working at two different startups before working at two different venture capital funds and then running my second fund, and which I'm in the middle of doing now with business school in between there. So, common path leaving investment banking is basically to go into private equity or to a hedge fund.

I wanted to go to a startup. And so my very first startup was on the consumer tech side, e-commerce, in the early days of that, and I was the first person really bringing in analytics to support the product team, the HR team, the engineering team and just was hooked from there. Once you see kind of the big impact you can actually have on the company in the day-to-day life of everyone working there.

And then from there, I went to an enterprise tech company, which was actually a self-driving vehicle company, so self-driving cars, self-driving trucks. And so, on the venture capital side I have really maintained both of those threads, which is a consumer side and an enterprise side. And so certainly for everyone here starting companies, happy to speak to either in the poll or Q&A or offline, startups in any of those spaces.

Samantha: Perfect. Thank you. So our point of the discussion today is to give people a bit of a peek, if you like, into the venture capitalist world. I think if you're not familiar with the world, if you sort of haven't lived it, there is a bit of a perception that perhaps it's a finance bro, high stakes, lots of chests and whatnot.

If your only exposure to it is through Silicon Valley or WeCrashed, I think that sort of is how you think about it. But if we think about sort of the various levels that people are coming at this conversation, let's just level set a little bit.

There are different methods of raising capital, right? So, friends and family, loans, crowdfunding, seed funding, angel funding, probably some other type of deity funding. And then of course, venture capital. And we don't have a lot of time to get into each, but I do want to get your thoughts on how VC fundraising is different from some of those other options and what our audience should know about VC funding from the conversation today.

And whilst we're doing that, I'm going to ask the audience to take a poll, so that should come up in front of your screen, but it is a poll around how you funded your business. So whilst we're talking, if you could do that and then we'll respond to the results.

So Anya, how is VC funding different?

Anya: Yes. So I think I would start off by saying you do not have to raise venture capital to have an amazing business. And nor should you automatically assume that is the default for your company. It depends what kind of company you want to build, what space you're operating in, how much capital you would need to actually achieve your goals, asterisk, before your competitors do. And so those are all questions that are very important to go through at the beginning of setting up your company.

As Samantha mentioned, obviously a ton of different routes there. On the venture capital side, that's probably a good bet for you if you're trying to go very quickly, the space you're in requires talent that is quite top tier, you are the type of founder who says, "Okay, I want to prove out kind of one question after another," because with VC you can stage it really nicely without giving away a lot of equity in your business.

So those are all things to consider. I think if you think about the person giving you that capital, which is the venture capital investor on the other hand, what they will be looking for is to generate pretty significant returns over, call it a five-to-seven-year period. And so just for you, when you're going out to market, if you're planning to be a small, but profitable company, that sounds like an amazing company to run as a founder for yourself and for your employees, but for a venture capital investor, it probably wouldn't fit with what they're searching for.

So I think it's important to think about, first and foremost, again, what is your company trying to achieve? What are you trying to build and what are the goals of the venture capital investor you'll be sitting across from?

Samantha: And Allison, is there anything you would add to that?

Allison: Yeah, I would just think about if you do go to raise venture capital, it's a long-term relationship. Sometimes VC can be on a board of a company for five to 10 years. So just really think about who that partner is, know that it's a long-term partner, and just understand what they're expecting from you. When we look at a business plan for a company trying to raise venture money, the growth trajectory that most VCs are looking for is quite steep, as you mentioned.

So companies growing, you know, very significant, you want to see a company potentially get to 100 million plus in revenue in pretty short order. And that's what the VCs are kind of going to be pushing you towards and expecting. And then they're also looking for returns commensurate with the risk. So they're looking for returns in the 10x, 100x, you know, very attractive financial returns, which would push the company toward to growing in a certain way.

So just kind of understand, you know, the motivation behind the VCs and why they might want to fund a company. It's important to think about.

Samantha: And Allison, how do you see if there is a difference, the difference between corporate capital funding and a fund?

Allison: Yeah. So the way I've always done corporate venture is to do all the things that a financial investor does in terms of how we help the companies, if we join the board, the role we play at the board level, the term sheets or terms that we would go in at would be the same as a financial investor. We wouldn't be looking for something extra. But we try to provide additional value. So for us, we try to provide introductions, help with business development, all the things that a VC does, plus help inside our company, and also help just across the industry because we're sort of very deep in particular sectors. But we don't want our terms to look different. We would want to act in the same way and be just as great as a financial investor, sort of plus. That's the goal for us.

Samantha: Awesome. Thank you. Okay, so we have the results of our poll.

Unfortunately, they're a really long way away from me on the stage, so I'm going to guess at what that says. I think the vast majority of you are telling us that you funded your business. Your business is currently funded through its own profits, so it's funding itself. We're then seeing loans, private equity and then VC. So that's how the majority of you are funding. I'm super impressed that the majority of folk who are attending are self-funding. That's really impressive. So congratulations to all of you who are doing that. For those of you who aren't there yet, that's totally fine. That's why you're here.

I'm hopeful that we can sort of talk through, a little more, about the different methodologies that are available to you. Okay, so VC backed companies raised 29.4 billion dollars in Q2 of 2023. Now that sounds like a lot of money because I just said $29.4 billion. It's actually a really significant drop from the first quarter of 2023, when about $44. 4 billion was raised.

That sort of aligns with the general way that we're thinking about the macroeconomic, I think, at the moment. And I do think that, you know, economic uncertainty and low IPO activity do continue to sort of hinder the late-stage market. I do think the thing that's promising that comes out of those numbers is the fact that Series A and seed rounds are maintaining their position from a proportional standpoint.

So it's not as though investors are not investing in seed and Series A rounds, but rather that the entirety of the macroeconomic funding is shifting downwards. So, I do think that's actually positive for organizations who are looking for funding.

It's not as though the funders have just stopped investing. It's rather just that proportionally, it's decreased across the board. So if we take all of that in, what should founders or aspiring founders be thinking about as they prepare to raise capital? And how should they be thinking about how they spend their time? Should they be conserving cash? Should they be preparing long-term plans? What should they be thinking about? And where should they be spending their time? Anya?

Anya: Sure. This is a question we get a lot, because as you bring up, early-stage companies are always raising capital and as today's conference was opened, now is the best time to start a company.

That is always true in my opinion. I think, with the context in mind that you just shared, one thing to keep in mind is what a lot of VCs are looking for now more than ever is a business that seems like it can be sustainable, so a business model that actually works, not a company that exists because it is surviving based on venture capital funding.

So to answer your question, what I would be doing as a founder in your shoes is really thinking about—what am I trying to build to, what is the specific thing I need to answer right now, what type of investor can help me in this specific stage gate I'm going into? And then going into your fundraising with that in mind.

First of all, that will save you a lot of time, that will save you a heartache because you won't be going to the wrong type of investor, and it'll just really streamline your entire process. Within that, we do a lot of workshops with our founders and with partners that we work with to really go through, you know—what should your data room look like? What should your presentation look like? How should you structure your fund raise?

But the main thing to really think about here is—you want to make that fundraising process as short as possible so you can focus on running your business.

So I would say one really tactical tip would be to send out all of your scheduling emails in ideally one day to get as many as you can booked in over a one or two week period, so that you can really have that feedback from all of your VC conversations and tweak your pitch as you go.

And ideally, if all goes well, get to a point where you have multiple term sheets at the same time and can use that to really set the valuation of your company in whatever market, whether today or in the future.

Samantha: So, I'm going to ask you a follow up on that because you said, "Think about the type of investor that's right for you at this particular time." How do people do that?

Anya: Yes. So, I think it's scary raising capital. It's an uphill battle, but obviously critical for your business. So I think a lot of times founders are just thinking about how to get capital in the door as quickly as possible.

But as the founder, you're actually buying something with that capital. You're buying expertise for that specific stage, people who can open doors for you, etcetera. The way that we'd like to break that down internally is—are you trying to look for help that is more tactical right now or more topical right now?

So what I mean by that is, maybe topically, it's someone who knows this specific part of healthcare or med tech market in America or in this part of America, right? Maybe tactically, it's something like, "I now need to build an enterprise sales team. I need someone with experience building out enterprise sales teams."

And so again, if you've done the work ahead of time to figure out, here's what we're trying to answer, here are the types of people we need who would be most helpful, you can then structure your raise in a way that accomplishes what you're trying to accomplish.

Samantha: Perfect. Okay. Thank you. Allison, what sort of advice are you giving to entrepreneurs right now? As they're seeking to fund and find money, what are you telling them?

Allison: Yes. I mean, it definitely differs by stage. If it's a super early-stage company, it's a completely different situation than like a growth stage sort of series B into series C company. I think it's always important in trying to find the best investor, just really research the firms and understand, if you're raising a Series A, go after a classic Series A firm or a strategic that likes to do Series As. And really understand the partners, which partner makes the most sense potentially for you.

Make sure that they don't have maybe competitive deals in their portfolio. I just think it's really important to research who you're going to speak to. But I do think it's important to cast a wide net. I think, maybe when things were going crazy in 2021, in terms of the speed of fundraising, you could go to a few firms, get your financing done within weeks.

I think things have reverted back now towards time. Like, it'll take you a little bit longer. I think it's important to just meet as many firms that could be potential matches as possible. You never know, an intro from one to another might, you know, you just never know where those conversations might lead.

The other thing is just be very thoughtful about your intention with the fundraise. So if you're raising $5 million, for example, understand where that will take you. Have a very good sense of what these proceeds are and where it gets you. Like, this will take us 18 to 24 months. It will hit these milestones and then we'll be ready for the next round.

That's really important in this environment more so than it was a couple of years ago where cash was just really fast and really easy. So you didn't really have to have an answer to that because people just thought it was easy. You were just going to raise that next round no matter what. I think you have to prove out a lot more now and show progress and show trajectory.

So understanding what those milestones need to be, I think is really important.

Samantha: You talked about, if you're doing a series A, you go after a firm that's known for series A. How do I know, as a business owner, how do I know that this is the right time to go after strategic money versus your more…

Allison: …like traditional?

Samantha: Yeah.

Allison: I think sometimes it's just organic. You might be in biz dev conversations with a corporate and they happen to have a venture arm, that's a good opportunity to ask. Sometimes, you know, a bunch of different corporates will announce, "We're focusing on specific sectors." And then you understand they're looking for Series A or maybe they're looking for earlier stage, I think.

I think Series A and B is always a good opportunity to engage with corporate VC. I think it's important to have a strong financial investor too. But there are other ways to engage with corporations before they might put money in. So there might be accelerator programs like we have or other kind of sort of biz dev programs at big corporates, which you could start with and then that could lead you into the venture conversation maybe in Series A and Series B.

Samantha: I think that point's a really good point and I'm not sure that every business owner out there is aware of that, actually. As you're in your biz dev conversations with a strategic, they often do have venture arms and often from the strategic standpoint, it actually makes a hell of a lot of sense. If I'm entering into this long-term partnership with a particular company, it actually might make more sense for me to be invested in that company. And I'm not sure that necessarily a lot of business owners are thinking about that.

Allison: Yeah. Yeah.

Samantha: You also talked about, I think you mentioned, be aware of the fact that when you're going after VC money, you're potentially going to have someone from that fund on your board for 10 years. So that's a long-term relationship. How does the engagement change over the time period of the relationship? How does the relationship that a VC is having with its company change over that relationship?

Anya: So I guess there are a few different cases for that, depending on if someone has invested, if someone is on your board, if it's someone you're trying to maintain a relationship with, with an eye toward the future. I guess what I would say is, in general for your process, if you come in and you say, "Here's what we're trying to get to," and that is very clear to the investor, then you can interact with a given investor at different stages with that in mind. To your point, maybe someone is more of a Series B investor, but you are currently raising your seed round.

You can still send them interesting information to stay in touch. Again, to kind of put a tactical spin on that, what people love is receiving information that is valuable. So if you say, "I'm obviously an expert in space X because we sit there and we do this all day long," if you occasionally are sending a paragraph to someone you really like saying, "By the way, this is what we're seeing in this space," that's valuable information, as opposed to just, "Hi, checking in."

High contrast to once someone has invested in your company. So, once someone has invested in your firm, I think a good way to really leverage that relationship is to, at any given time, you can set a cadence for yourself, every month, every quarter, half a year, check in with a way that they can actively be working for you.

So if it's, "right now, we're trying to meet potential partners in this space," or, "I'm tactically trying to work through this new strategic area," or one that we get a lot is, "we're trying to hire these types of team members," or, "we're trying to make the shift from our small band of five people who are all generalists and can do anything” to “okay, how do I build a structured team."

Those are the things that you can reach out to your investors to help you with, because they ideally have seen the differences that the team structure takes, the scaling your business takes over time and they can just save you time. And certainly on the network side you'll be very surprised to hear how many people are looking around for really interesting roles at startups.

We're having a hard time finding those roles. And so if you reach out to your investor, they likely have a stable of really qualified candidates as well.

Samantha: So you've taken me beautifully into a lovely segue about scale. So you're talking about scale and this ability to scale. And I think the concept of scale and how people approach the idea of scale comes about in different ways and there's all sorts of funny memes that sort of, there's someone going, "Oh, but does it scale?" How to sound smart in a meeting when you don't actually understand what's going on. Does it scale? And I think that question is often dependent on how a business is able to deploy people, process and technology, and which element of those things is working for them versus not. So you mentioned specifically the five person group.

And I think that's right. The five-person group that you've been working with from the very beginning of the start of your business is not necessarily going to be either the right five-person group or enough people to get you to where you need to go next. And I think actually, let's do another poll and we'll hope that… Oh, look, the polls already started.

That's great. And the question is—which areas of your business are most challenging to scale people, process and technology? And I'm not sure that there's any surprise. You were mentioning people. I'm not sure that there's any surprise that most people, most business owners find the people part to be the hardest part to scale.

And part of it's just because of relationships. Those five people that you worked with, but 24 hours a day, seven days a week, as Burton mentioned in his first talk, it can be hard to have the realization that it's not necessarily the group of people that are gonna take you to the next step. And then obviously next: process. Process is also, unless you have invested in a black belt that perhaps your VC set of portfolio companies has at the ready. Unless you've invested in that, you're also going to find a lot of challenge with process. I'm not sure, but does that surprise you where we've landed on the poll? People hardest, process next and then technology?

Anya: No.

Samantha: It's sort of what I expected as well. So that makes a lot of sense to me. Alright. So in terms of the deployment of strategic and practical advice and the guidance that you both give to your portfolio companies on scale, that all depends on a variety of factors, which one's gonna be the hardest and all those sorts of things.

You've got the founder and their personality, you've got their team, the size of their team, their sophistication around the topics. And even the market that they might be in will potentially shift which bit of your business is going to be hardest to scale. But I think the market that you're in takes us to the next topic that I wanted to go to, which is trends.

We talked about AI at the very beginning. I suspect it's going to come up as a trend. I'm not sure it's going to surprise anyone to hear that AI is attracting a substantial amount of investment. There was a Bain study published a little earlier last month that referenced that investments in the AI space is at about $94 billion in the second quarter of 2023.

So that's a lot. $94 billion. I mean, that's a substantial amount of money. Can both of you please share the trends that you've seen in where investments are going in the VC space? And maybe share some of the industries and topics that are currently piquing your interest or even some of the recent investments from your respective firms; what you're finding interesting.

Allison: So yeah, AI obviously has been the hot topic this year and last year as well. I think a lot of that money is going towards the large language model companies, which are raising hundreds of millions of dollars. Companies like Open AI and Cohere, Anthropic, AI 21. There's a bunch of these language model companies that require a lot of capital to run the technology.

So that's where I think the bulk of the money is going. There's also a lot of companies innovating in the application layer, building applications on top of these large language models that are serving both consumers and enterprises. So it's been really fascinating. It's definitely interesting for us at Comcast across a range of applications across our company.

We've made a couple investments in the space to date. One is a company called Resemble AI and they are selling into enterprises generative audio platforms. So helping to create in real time synthetic voices, which is super interesting. We also invested in a company called Hume. They're building an AI toolkit and language model to really understand human expression.

And their mission is really to use technology to improve well being. So that's a really interesting company based here in New York. And we're continuing to look at the space. Our accelerator Lift Labs, as I mentioned before, our new class is all going to be focused on enterprise AI and finding companies that can help innovate for us for some of the use cases we're developing internally.

So it's fascinating. The technology is incredible. I'm sure you've all seen a bunch of the different demos. It's really amazing. So that's really interesting. It's not the only area we're focused on. We are spending a lot of time on it, but that's not the only area. We also are really interested in digital health companies, especially in home. We're also looking at the future of work, energy and sustainability property tech. So it's pretty broad mandate.

Samantha: That's actually very broad. Anya, how about you? Where are you excited?

Anya: Yes. So the first thing I'll say with ANIM as a fund is again, from early, we invest globally, we invest across stages, but we really start early, early-stage. And we're actually quite a bottoms-up firm, so we don't come in with a prescriptive take on, "here are the sectors we will look at."

Our firm is very ecosystem driven. So my entire background is in this, which is to say, how do we put all of our energy into cultivating angels, operators, really just incredible people in a given sector or geography who then come to us as trusted partners to say, "this person is amazing, you need to speak with this founder." Or, "This space, you may know nothing about, but it's incredible. Let them tell you why." And that's actually how we've made the vast majority of our investments. So I'll start by saying that. So always reach out.

The second thing I'll say is, I guess two areas, of course AI, of course ML, huge buzzwords. I think you can Google actually and find a chart of just how often AI is used in pitch decks and it's literally like that, for better or for worse.

Like, not every company is an AI company, so worth keeping that in mind. But I guess one toward this idea of scale we were just talking about, and then also this idea of being a responsible investor; not just the VC firms, but their investors. So the limited partners are actually giving money to the VC firms.

So on the scale side, AI, ML, feed really nicely into this. We invested in one company, for example, that is helping any company that does robotics or kind of automated learning to do that more quickly, which if you can imagine, has a tremendous application across sectors. Another one on the scale side, that company was called ReSim and I actually worked with them at the self-driving car companies. That was a very fun transition.

Another company we invested in is called Meow, M-E-O-W. I'm sure you can remember that name. But they originally were helping corporate treasurers to scale their financial base. Originally, they were doing the crypto side, they launched T bills, and in response to the ever-changing environment, I'm sure you all saw what happened on the SVB side and some of the financial uncertainty more broadly, they launched checking accounts.

And that has been really incredible to see how do you scale the resources that you do have in a way that is lower risk but still accessible capital. So that's been really interesting to see. So again, multiple versions of scale out there that are all receiving funding today. I think toward this idea of ESG and responsible investing, it's interesting because limited partners today, they saw, you know, quite a downgrade in a lot of their investment portfolios.

And so, they were retrenching and really saying, "what are the areas that we think will be important for a very long time?" Climate change is a big one for us here. We just invested in a company that does carbon removals. I think for us as investors to see the lot of limited partners are looking at—what do the managers themselves look like?

What is their background? Are we investing in diverse fund managers? So again, this idea of scale really crossing a lot of applications and then ESG limited partners being responsible and that really trending down into where the VCs are focusing their time.

Samantha: Perfect. Thank you. So there's obviously a lot of excitement in AIML. We've had a lot of conversation about ESG investing over the course of the last, call it three years. There's a lot of excitement in those particular areas, but for those founders, business owners who are still wearing rollerblades and bike shorts and maybe aren't in the trendy space. What can those entrepreneurs be doing to adjust to the current climate? Do they need to or are rollerblades coming back? Are bike shorts coming back? Should they just focus on exactly what they do well? Do they need to make themselves more interesting?

Allison: I like bike shorts.

Samantha: You like bike shorts?

Allison: They're not good? I run in them. No?

Samantha: Yeah, they're never coming back. Rollerblades might come back, but I'm not sure about bike shorts.

Allison: I used to rollerblade. I would say do what you do. I don't like, you know, companies that just throw AI into their deck or add it into their name, but it's not core to what the company does. It's just obvious. Like, I don't think it works. So I think you have to be really authentic to what your vision is, what your mission is, the technology you're building and do that.

And so, when we're looking to make investments in companies and any VCs are a big part of it is the founder. You know, you talk about product market fit, but also like founder company fit. You know, is this person or is this team uniquely suited to solve this problem that they're trying to solve? And are they passionate about it? And why are they doing it? And will they be successful?

And so if you're just trying to fit like, "here's the new trend. You know, first we were metaverse, then we were crypto and now we're AI," like that's not gonna hold, I don't think. And I don't think it'll be authentic. Even if you can raise the money because it's a hot, trendy sector in that minute, I don't know where it takes you.

So, that would be my advice, you know, do what you're actually passionate about and build what you want to build. And then you raise the money or you don't raise the money if it's not a venture type business. You figure out what the right fundraising or financing path is for what you're building and you go with that.

So, I'm very wary of, you know, the multiple pivots into all sorts of things. Pivots can work and be great. One of my very best investments was Discord and they started as a game and then they moved into Discord. So, pivots work but the founders, you know, still in the game space, right? They were passionate about that.

Samantha: All right. So the past few years have given us a lot to think about and a lot of different things to work with. You talked about the future of work, Anya, and sort of investing in that and what that might be. But we've been through it, we got through it, where else? Those of us are still here. So good for us.

It has been difficult for some of some companies due to economic uncertainty. And companies might have been burning cash faster than expected, whilst also trying to conserve cash. So I want to ask the audience one last question, which is—how much runway is optimal for you to have when you start raising more capital?

And so the response that we're seeing at the moment, the top response there, is six months to one year. Does that resonate for both of you? Does that sort of make sense? You start thinking about raising more capital when you go, "I've got six months to a year to go."

Allison: I mean, most of my founders are always thinking about raising capital. I think it's like always be closing. I mean, you're always thinking about it if you're on that track. If you're on the track of raising venture money from friends and family slash seed through growth stage. It needs to always be top of mind of, "What do I need to be doing? What does my plan need to look like? What milestones do I have to hit to get to that next fundraise?" But you don't want to be out in market with less than six months of cash if you could help it because you lose a lot of leverage at that point.

Anya: Yes I would definitely say it is taking notably longer right now to raise capital than it was before and I do think it's worth being realistic about that and knowing that is true. I certainly would hope that folks are thinking about it at all times. It's why I really like this idea of kind of these stage gates and raising capital at very specific moments because, similarly to what you were just saying, if you have not thought about what will enable you to raise your next round of capital, you have a really hard time measuring how much cash you actually still need to get there.

And you have a hard time saying, "I thought I needed 2 million in order to prove X, which would make someone really interested in investing in me. But I'm actually only, you know, halfway there and I'm through 75% of my capital." Like, it's important to know not only, "Here's how much cash I have in the bank and what my burn rate is, but here's the thing I need to unlock to actually raise more capital."

So it really is a tandem kind of process, actually.

Samantha: Yeah, okay. One last piece, I think. What would each of you add as a call to action for the founders, for the business owners that are here in the audience? What is the call to action for people out there with a bright idea and someone who's inspired to do something with this information? What's the one thing they can do differently tomorrow?

Anya: I guess I would say for me in this market, go home and get very clear on what your team and team scaling needs to look like in order for you to hit that big goal that you're trying to hit. So again, toward building a successful company, toward fundraising, well, you should know, "I'm trying to get here, right?"

And that's what you should be leading with when you go into these fundraising conversations, etc. Because the market is so crazy, because fundraising is so difficult right now, because so many people already mentioned in this poll that people was the hardest thing for them to scale with the company.

If you've gone home and you've done the exercise to say, very specifically, "When I unlock these product lines, or these new features, or these new markets, here's what my team needs to look like in each of these areas," and either try to update your processes to fill those gaps as much as possible, but ideally, and start thinking about now, "Okay, I'm at the five person. When I'm at that big goal, I need to have X number of people. This is the team structure I will be building to," and really thinking about how you're going to bridge that through each of the stage gates. And the reason I say that is because again, the market is very turbulent right now, very unpredictable.

If you've been out there recruiting folks now, you'll be able to nab them as soon as you do close on that capital. So I would say, start to think about that now, as opposed to when you have the capital in hand. And then you have to wait another six to 12 months to actually have that person on your team.

Samantha: I love the idea of thinking about the future of your company. "In six months, I want it to be this. In 10, 12 months, I want it to be this, doing this thing. And in order to do that thing, the organizational design inside of my company needs to look like this. I'm going to need this talent. I'm going to have to organize it in this way."

I think sometimes business is going so fast and you're moving so quickly trying to just get the deal and get the revenue to continue to come in, that you perhaps don't take the time to step back from it and say, "What do I need this to actually look like from an org design perspective so that it can serve the company?"

How about you Allison?

Allison: I mean, the only thing I would add, because I think that's really important advice and just being very tactical and being very strategic about what you want to build and how you want it to look and what capital you might need to get there, is just thinking about the team and the mission and energizing your organization and building product for customers.

I think one thing that sort of gets left out sometimes is just thinking about the day-to-day of building the product, getting feedback from customers and making sure you're building something that either a consumer wants to pay for, or will want to use on a regular basis, or an enterprise is going to find really valuable and want to pay for. All the internal stuff that's important, but I totally agree on thinking long-term and tactically about sort of what you need to achieve to reach your goals.

Samantha: Yeah and the things that I would add, I do love a call to action. You all were sitting here for quite some time and it would be good if you had something to do differently as a result of this talk. So I think what I'd add is—identify your trusted advisors. Set up time to talk to them.

Talk to them regularly. Don't just show up when you need them. Identify time to talk to them regularly. Work out who those trusted people are. We talked about ecosystems and networks, who the people are that you know. People like to help people. People love to feel needed. The people in your network want you to need them, because that makes them feel good, because you need them.

So don't feel like you're imposing on people's time. You're not. You're actually giving them a gift. You're allowing them to help you. It's amazing. So, identify the trusted advisors and set up time to talk to them. For early-stage companies, think about your elevator pitch. Think about your deck. Think about your data rooms. Think about what all of those things are going to need to look like at what point of your fundraising journey.

And then for more seasoned founders, share your knowledge. Give the gift of your knowledge. So if you've done it a couple times before, TriNet has a series of fireside chats that we do with founders. If you'd like to be part of it, please reach out. You can always reach out directly to me. And we also have it available on our website on our historically underrepresented businesses page.

If you know others in your ecosystem with a bright idea, you talked about this, Anya, the idea of ecosystems and bright ideas, opportunities come from everywhere. They can come from this session, they can come from the lunch that you'll go to next, they can come from drinks this evening. Seek those opportunities out. We have multiple networking opportunities here at this conference.

If it was me, and I am doing this, so I'll give you all a goal. How about this? So, connect with at least one new person here at this conference. One new person who you've met here at PeopleForce, who you will meet for coffee, drinks, lunch, whatever it is, in the coming weeks. Just one person, that's outside of your network that's going to become part of your ecosystem.

So it's going to be super easy for you, because when you go to drinks this evening, or when you go to lunch, in a few minutes you'll say, "Samantha told me that I had to go find a person. Would you like to be my person? Because we have to go have lunch." The worst they can do is say, “No. I'm sorry, I already found a person, but I'd like to have another one."

So, that's what I'd ask you to do. Really lean into that idea of ecosystem and networks. We all found each other through ecosystem. The reason we're here is through our ecosystem and the networks that we have. So, do what you can to lean into that. Alright, this has been wonderful. Thank you so much for sharing the stage with us.

Thank you.