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“Congratulations,” I said to “Ray,” a CEO I have been working with for over three years. “Getting funding in three weeks is quite an accomplishment.”
“Thank you,” Ray responded.
“Especially, after what you’d been through in your first two rounds of funding, you deserve a little bit of a different tune.” Then I paused and said, “But don’t let up until the money is in the bank.”
“I’m not,” Ray reassured me. “It’s my sole focus.”
Raising money as a new company is really, really hard.
What interesting, in Ray’s case, is that he is closing the company’s biggest round of funding, $50 million. Yet it took only three weeks to assemble a syndicate of investors.
Why was it so easy for Ray to raise his third round of funding?
The answer is really obvious. Ray’s company was hitting on all cylinders. He a had a world-class group of customers. His technical team was incredibly strong. Finally, the company’s first product was redefining their very large niche.
Three years earlier, when Ray was raising his first round of funding, the story was a whole lot different.
Ray was a solo founder with an idea that had the potential to redefine the very large niche…
