How I met my first investor

Happy Sunday :)

I’m trying another format for my weekly newsletter.

Let me know which one you like better!

This one is a story behind the story I shared lately on LinkedIn.

In case you missed the post, it’s about how the first startup that I founded raised funds extremely easily because I gave 5% of equity to serious grownups in exchange for their support.

This is the story of how I got that meeting with the investor.

It started with four kids — myself, in my early twenties, my younger brother, one of my friends and one of his friends. We had an idea, a combination of somewhat relevant skills, and a desire to be rich and known.

We understood that we need money to hire people who actually know what they’re doing, so we set out to find an investor.

We had no idea where to look — none of us had rich parents with richer friends.

Facebook was rather popular back then, and so were pyramid schemes.

When some guy reached out, trying to recruit me to his pyramid, I agreed for a call. I had no intention of joining his thing; I wanted to pitch mine.

I pitched my idea—the small startup will be bootstrapped to create the big one. Lot’s of money in gaming, you know. We found a way to connect casual gaming and multiplayer adventure gaming (MMO RPG). That will be a hit by itself, but we really care about the next step — an immersive world, making right all the wrongs in existing games.

Greed is a powerful motivator and I pressed all the buttons.

He connected me to his friend, who had a small group of investors. We had a lovely call; I repeated my pitch, told him about the team and the total addressable market. He was intrigued but couldn’t offer the money we wanted to raise.

So he connected me to another friend of his, someone who did have correct depth of pockets. That guy had just written a book about a world in computer games, so we were right up his alley. We scheduled to meet a week later.

Yours truly, being the goblin that I am, left everything to the last minute…

We printed the presentation deck in the morning before the meeting. Did you know that printers can smell urgency? Well, they can and they’re allergic. Everything that could go wrong with a normally reliable printer did that twice.

Once it was clear to me that we won’t arrive on time, I called to let the investor know that we are coming later than the scheduled time, but don’t fret — we are bringing croissants!

We were “fashionably late” times eight (I’ll save you the mental math. We were 40 minutes late). The investor and his team waited for us. They enjoyed the croissants. They didn’t care much about the garbled presentation. They listened to us, and we got to the next step.

What I learned from this:

1. Don’t leave printing to the morning before a meeting.

2. Being calm and resourceful when sh*t hits the fan are qualities in which people invest.

3. Pitch to everybody, and I really mean everybody. Six degrees of separation and all that. Your ideal investor could be the guy that goes to the gym with the brother-in-law of another mom at the playground.

“Audacity, always audacity—the soundest principle of strategy”  

— Stranger in a Strange Land / Robert Heinlein