How do you raise a pre-seed round with no technical co-founder?

didn't really matter to us how much they were investing What mattered more was that they were a part of it welcome to fundraising demystify the podcast where we uncover The Untold Stories of successful Founders who have raised Venture Capital to bring their Visions to life join me Jason Kirby your host as we dive into the hidden truce of the fundraising game we'll explore different strategies tactics lessons learned from these entrepreneurs who have figured out how to win the fundraising game in their own way whether you're a budding entrepreneur just getting started or an established founder looking to scale your business this podcast equips you with the knowledge and inspiration to conquer the fundraising landscape welcome to episode 11 of fundraising demystified joining us today we have Nick talreja founder and CEO of sidecar a deal execution platform specializing in spvs and fund management software they've recently raised an 8.3 million dollar seed round bringing their total Capital raise to over 16 million dollars in this episode we talk about their fundraising Journey from pre-seed to seed extending their Runway by raising a bigger round to prepare for the inevitable VC winter and how to think about calculating their Tam Sam and some all while raising from their Target customers and so much more let's go ahead and get started hey everyone welcome to fundraising demystified with your host Jason Kirby and our guest from sidecar CEO and co-founder Nick talreja welcome for uh joining on the show Nick thanks for having me Jason we're happy to be here now I'm excited to have you as well and you know we'd love to just jump right in you know give the audience a little bit of background on what side car is and then we'd love to kind of hear the back story of what led you to starting the company and you know kind of where you are today yeah uh happy to the sidecar is a company that automates uh the creation of vehicles for Venture investors so folks like yourself Jason who may want to spin up an SPV to invest in a single company or launch your first or second fund you can use sidecar as your partner in that ambition and we help you handle all of the the painful processes around creating a fund handling banking accounting tax distributions the whole nine yards we've automated legal forms through compliance so you can just trust us to be your back office partner and everything we do is automated and that's sort of our distinction from others in the market is that whereas in the past if you were engaging a fund administrator it would be a very manual Endeavor where there would be an actual fund accountant handling all of the different complexities for you making sure that you were reaching out to investors in a manual way for docusigns ETC but with sidecar everything's automated where you just hit a few buttons and that a vehicle is created bank accounts created you reach out to your investors in automated way best to be fun through the platform it's really seamless and we're excited about taking that approach further into the private markets as we believe that as more and more people want to invest in Alternatives there has to be a better way to do so no I know that's actually how I stumbling across you guys you know looking for you know basically an SBB solution for investing in some of our clients and orcas but you know from you know how how did you get up into this business what made you kind of want to go down this path what's kind of your background and led you to building this business great question it's kind of a unique feel to to end up in um so I ended up uh practicing law for about 10 years um after going to law school in La I worked in New York City at a major law firm uh running uh larger transactions like taking companies public representing the the investment banks of the world and and helping those those deals come together uh moved out to Cooley after a couple years in New York worked with emerging companies Venture funds everything in between as far as you know Venture financing scaling up a business helping grow a team dealing with IP issues commercial transactions uh so on and so forth and had a really great experience there and then I had an opportunity to represent my clients more directly started my own Law Firm brought a couple clients with me from Cooley ended up growing that practice to about about 30 clients and spent a lot of time just supporting Founders very directly when I had my own Law Firm I had the freedom to get more involved and not build for every minute of every conversation and that led me to just growing appreciation for for creativity in in behind so many of these Founders and that led ultimately to me wanting some upside behind some of the companies I thought were doing really really well and I had you could say an unfair advantage in that I knew a lot about these companies especially around how their capitalization looked when they fundraising so I always had an end to get in before they were planning a raise or to get into the race itself that they were they were planning for and that led to investing myself behind a number of these companies and ultimately realizing that I could raise some Capital to invest in these businesses and I had a pretty good judgment at least I could sell that judgment to some investors or on which of these companies would be more successful than others so I was able to raise some capitals together with my ultimate co-founder at sidecar and we raised a number of spvs we deployed about two million dollars across eight spvs and in doing so realized that the whole process around putting together these vehicles to invest in companies was more painful than identifying the companies themselves and building the pipeline and it didn't have to be that way who you're looking for and we'll be ultimately built for ourselves was a product that automated the painful parts of the exercise like the creation of legal forums banking accounting and we didn't intend for this to be a standalone business but long story short just having built something that worked for us led to us meeting about 20 uh individuals in ecosystem who were reaching out to saying hey I'll pay you whatever you want for this we just don't want to use a Marketplace to run our business and we don't want to use a standard old-school fund admin can we just use what you've built which ultimately catalyzed sidecars of business and a realization that what we were working on as far as building these tools for Capital allocators outside of a Marketplace environment was needed far into the private marketing Beyond Venture so we were super psyched about standardizing how private Market Capital flows and started sidecar in January 21 to chase that vision and over the last couple years I've had a lot of fun doing Excel the team's not 33 people we'll talk about the fundraising element in a bit but we've worked with with hundreds of GPS now moved about closer to 600 million dollars in capital through the product and in many ways we're still at the tip of the iceberg we're just we're just now uh you know turning on distribution for our product and different ecosystems that's an incredible story of kind of starting off uh in the legal side servicing you know who ultimately end up being your customers but more or less solving your own problem and realizing that there was a market for it and and turning your entire company into this now from the name perspective you know sidecar is that kind of taking a a letter from like side you know side letters is that kind of the original yeah the name sidecar is um you know with the why since it's not s-i-d-e it's s-y-d-e-c-a-r is a play on the term sidecar with an eye so like it could mean various things but it could mean a cocktail which some people think is delicious I enforce them to have a taste for it but it also could mean a vehicle that is alongside a main fund to deploy Capital into a certain opportunity that may not be either a good fit for the main fund or perhaps you have more allocation than you want to fulfill with the main fund so kind of like a motorcycle sidecar it's sort of similar concept where you have a sidecar vehicle to a main fund gotcha and you know just from me personally looking at the fun experience and all the different fun administrators being an LP in some fines and just seeing the atrocious documentation and delay on documents like it was definitely a need for for this space especially when VCS are all about backing innovators with their own industry is grossly behind so I could see why you know fundraising well actually let's step in uh let's jump into the fundraising Journey for you um you guys have raised a total of 16.5 million uh you know definitely an impressive fee and technically only at the seed stage so I'd love for you to you know share the audience kind of what was your process of deciding to go to market and kind of what that precede experience was like and then we'll go into the subsequential rounds that that came out of it happy to our fundraising journey is a bit unique in that our customers our investors um so that led us to fundraise uh because of the market pulling us in that direction an example of a sort of business poll starting before sidecar was a real independent entity you know back in 2020 during covid when you know the we were we were investing ourselves David and I um and came up with a concept for Sidecar we had a number of customers that pulled us in the direction of serving them with what we built for ourselves and then subsequently many of those customers pull us into the fundraise said hey we want you to build this product in Earnest we believe in the vision will you please take our money and that's what led us to raise our precede round in March of 21. took a couple months to pull it together we launched the company formally in January in March we closed about 1.8 million in a precede on a safe standard YC safe and um you know we're fortunate to have a number of investors that were very very passionate about what we were building and because of that passion they they opened plenty of doors for us to pull in that full 1.8 and what we learned then is that by catalyzing a few relationships and empowering our super connectors by making them feel heard and it wasn't like we were trying to game them or manipulate them it truly was just such a great relationship we built with a few super connectors that led to the whole round coming together pretty quickly doors open to literally every major fund we actually turned down conversations for some of those funds because we don't want to take a you know take a stab at convincing someone that may be a better series a investor rather than a serious seed or pre-seed investor but that's how we close at 1.8 it was really just a you know us getting pulled into the business and then subsequently uh having a few individuals that are still very very close friends today and very active today at supporting sidecar convince us to have conversations with larger investors that pull that pull that around together and then if we look I can keep going if you want to go through all the rounds or happy to pause there so you know if we look at sort of the pre-seed round raised 1.8 that gave us Capital to grow our team at the time we were a non-technical team two lawyers with you know a Ticky tack product that we built using no code software literally airtable some software called Anvil uh Panda docs it was it was really rough as far as how it all operated but we were able to sort of Jimmy a good enough user experience that exceeded expectations even with off-the-shelf software we knew with that money we had to do something real so we actually used that Capital to grow our team yeah that's a fascinating precede Journey but I know there's more to share so let's continue on on the story of your Precinct yeah happy with Jason yeah so the pre-seed round was you know one that came together very very quickly uh thanks to a few investors that did a lot of the bidding for us in in reaching a wider audience and those same super connectors that I mentioned around the precede round led to finding our lead investor deciens uh who let our seed round which closed in August and we met Death Scenes just after closing the precede in March of 21. um the conversation with deci and started around just getting to know the business I then saw Dan Kimberling adesians tweet about starting or investing in a business just like ours and I was like oh that's strange I wonder if he's trying to compete with us but that was just his form of due diligence to get a sense of what other intelligent people thought about a business model like ours and as Destiny's was doing their due diligence in the background building conviction um they were having conversations with us around what working together could look like and over a period of about three months from the precede ground until roughly June of 21 we got to terms with deciens they gave us a term sheet we were super excited about the partnership we had built a lot of conviction in them as as leads we could see them opening doors for us already what we were looking for in a lead and I think this is something that a lot of people have different opinions about but we were looking for partners we weren't just looking for Capital we were also looking for partners that wouldn't necessarily have opinions about everything who would defer to us on business strategy largely but it would be very supportive in enabling us to to continue this Mission and as you know it's a marathon building a company isn't something you can do in a day so we're looking for Destinies to be those supportive Partners to us over the Long Haul and they proved to us over the three months that that's who they were as individuals so when they offered us a term sheet we had a brief negotiation on terms but then quickly moved towards accepting it and filling the round uh this was back in 21 you know we benefited from a bit of froth in the Marcus that was building filling their own didn't take much time we ended up being over twice oversubscribed we were targeting 6 million ended up having about 12 million in interest and we closed it with six and a half million of new money coming into the seed round so between the pre-seed and Seed raised what was it 8.3 uh in 21. that gave us plenty of Runway looking forward from that point it was Capital we needed to scale the team up Capital we needed to put fuel into marketing um and we put it all to good use and over the course of the next year roughly we built the team from what was then about five or six people to closer to 20 people and much of that Capital went towards growing our technical Talent hiring Engineers product managers engaging design agencies we also grew our sales team which is something that was non-existent before it was really just me and David on the sales cycle making sure we were telling the story to customers and and converting them we grew our sales team brought a couple members on and as we made Headway to 22 we were noticed by other funds of course we just you know of course continued to work with investors as customers they were taking note and over the course of 22 we had a lot of interest to continue to deploying capital in the sidecar from our from our customers and we had to make a decision do we take this capital or do we hold it for a later round 22 as as many of us know was a volatile year for BC there was no guarantee that terms would resume similar to how you know 20 and 21 were shaping up to be and given the volatility in the market we decided it would be best in the messengers of sidecar had taken some more Capital to extend our Runway further out from what was roughly I think 18 months at the time you know mid-22 to something north of 24 months and we had Capital waiting to be uh received from customers so we decided to open a customer around and the notion of this was was one that we felt optically would be better received by later investor it wouldn't be seen as just a bridge as was common last year but instead be seen as something that allowed us to engage with our most passionate supporters those who are already working with us we raised about a million in that customer around some great funds came into that round and over the course of last year although there was Market volatility we did pretty well we had our Revenue objectives the team shaped up really well our burden was under control we didn't scale our team up to a point that was too large for where we wanted to be and I have to scale it down the culture remained very strong morale was great and we were outpacing our competition and converting our customer base so come November 22 one of our existing investors had a tow hold in our in our seed round offered to invest more they said hey we'd love to put more money to work would you take it we didn't get the ownership percentage we wanted from the seed Round We negotiated terms over a period of two weeks decided we would just extend the seat around attribute a new valuation a higher a higher price per share but maintain all the same terms of the seed round to keep it simple from a legal perspective and we raised approximately I think it was seven and a half million in total if you count the uh the customer round in in January in a seed extension so today to spend roughly 16 and change and a lot of that is is thanks to our very very supportive customers and investors going into the series a we have a much larger story to tell the vision that that we're expanding into is one that we're very excited about I expect the series a will be more of a competitive uh type of Engagement less so customers pulling us to the run because the capital we need to raise and the type of relationship we want is one that we can't naturally expect to fall into and we've been very fortunate today to just you know fall into these types of relationships because of the good work we do on the product side so we're we're preparing to just have conversations to to take the Playbook from the precede round of working with our super angels and our existing investor base to catalyze conversations for the A and to keep those fires going until we're ready to raise the capital which will be likely sometime next year there's so much to unpack uh there are so many little nuggets uh in your journey that I think you know Founders can can learn from and yeah I'll be at your unique space in the sense that you're solving a problem both for a customer and you know the target investors so it's it's a clear uh path for them to you know consider investment they're the ones that have money so that's not necessarily like the relatable case for most Founders but you know the fact that you guys were non-technical Founders and have had so much success in raising Capital uh when in most times you know the typical advice that VCS give to Founders is like you know if you're non-technical you know get get a CTO before you raise money and so on especially the pre-seed stage um but you guys hacked away at it you guys figured it out you guys built that mvp that was able to convince these investors that you were the right guys to back yeah and what ultimately became a pretty competitive space you know there's quite a few you know different provided all different kind of models to some degree but uh you're working towards targeting the same audience so I'm kind of curious when you guys kind of decided to build out the tech you mentioned it was pretty janky it wasn't the full you know full thing you know did you guys get any pushback for not having a technical co-founder at all we did and if you were uh an investor looking at us back in our precede it would be one of the first questions you would have like who's building the actual product here what what I think is more nuanced about our situation is that while it while software is a big component of our success to date and our product speaks for itself and is is it the participle I'm most proud of there's an element of legal engineering and compliance and an understanding of the tax complexities that is also a major differentiator in this market and big reason for that is we're taking a view on standardizing how people engage in these transactions how both parties meet and accept certain terms as Fair just like YC has commoditized the safe which is what we in fact use for our pre-seed financing and our customer around we're trying to commoditize the notion of what an SPV needs to be or and and what it should be for the future which requires buy-in from stakeholders who are attorneys at law firms tax advisors Auditors Etc in this market we took the stab of getting that done first in a sense making sure that we could say within reason that we can put something forward that cannot be negotiated and still be accepted just like strike can put forward some sort of checkout mechanism uh for payments on uh for for e-commerce and that's what we went out the gates with so that's sort of a part of the puzzle that I think is maybe undervalued if not if not you know if not obvious what we had Improvement was ability to grow the technical team between our precede and our seed round is when we added a really really strong technical leader who came in with almost founder like equity and added to the mix so by the seed round which is like a truly negotiated price round we have the full circle we had the legal chops we also had the technical chops and now there was line of sight to growing a team really well to satisfy all of the the uncertainty that might otherwise be on the table that's an important uh note there and something I also want to kind of point out did you guys hire like a Dev shop at all or you guys did all the no code and built everything you guys the founders themselves the no code low code stuff we engage some consultants for help and and just making it work in a prettier way when it came to developing our actual proprietary code we engaged a couple Consultants early on that didn't really work out for us unfortunately when our first technical hire came on board he leversed a Dev shop through someone he knew really well to just get us from zero to one as we were building our engineering team and he was also varying the Weeds on code he basically did everything from Discovery to design to engineering with some support from a Dev shop and then we very quickly started to offload the responsibility from the dev shop and hand it off to people on the team as a team group gotcha now it's honestly a question I get often from a lot of Founders that you know can I hire a Dev shop do I work with a Dev shop and like there's as you kind of mentioned like there were some you know hit and miss with the providers you worked with and that's typical of the experience but it wasn't like zero to four you know with the dev shop it was basically just kind of that initial phase get things going get the momentum and then you phase them out with in-house and I think that's a more appropriate approach for Founders to consider as opposed to what some Founders that kind of come across that have an idea pay a bunch of money to a Dev shop now they have a static product that doesn't have life too and they run out of money and like that's usually the thing you need to avoid um yeah and so so we talked about you know you're kind of going into seed in series a like um right you're a precede going into seed and the the capital that you raised over this period um and how you went about scaling the team you know something that kind of comes to mind just being in the space myself and understanding kind of the Venture world and as big as it may seem to Founders and average capitals being deployed 100 billion plus a year whatever you know in the grand scheme of the financial markets it's nascent you know in terms of the overall large Capital markets like are you guys only focusing on you know Venture and that's kind of your path you guys going into other Alternatives and and just kind of what was your story behind the market opportunity and how did you come up with that and you know uh as far as where you know do you have that unicorn ability you know to be the next Carta or whatever you know type solution yeah it's a great question and something we've been thinking about since we decided to to pursue this business full-time you know had to be worth it for everyone involved in the get-go when you look at the private markets as a whole Vehicles like spvs and fund structures that follow the same type of approach as Venture like the gplp structure are prevalent everywhere it's not only Venture Capital as you know it which is a slice but also you know just outside of DC in private Equity more generally same types of vehicles real estate same types of vehicles hedge funds same types of vehicles really everywhere you look these vehicles are are prevalent all throughout the private markets and every sponsor driven investment follows a very similar approach of of infrastructure when it comes to the legal forms and the types of structures to the banking requirements the tax complexity and perhaps an audit requirement and these building blocks to support sponsor-driven investing are ones that have largely been driven by service providers that act as Gatekeepers and are very inefficient because there's an incentive to keep things as they are those service providers include law firms fund admins accountants Auditors tax advisors Etc our vision of the future is that as more and more people enter The Business of Being sponsors across this broader private Market they will need better tools that work more efficiently venture capital is a perfect Proving Ground for us as a sample of the larger private Market in that we still have to do a lot of work to convince even VCS to use our possible to VCS or more likely to try something new but if we can prove that within Venture Capital we can get people to adopt standardized terms to engage with each other and rely on software to run a very meaningful part of their business we can then take that learning and apply to different asset classes a more notable realization of late has been there are various other companies that are focusing exclusively on these asset classes outside of venture there are also many deals that are pulled together within hubs of where Capital flows like the Goldman's and JP Morgan's of the world as well as well as various asset managers like Franklin Templeton even law firms and an existing service driven fund admins all of these places where these transactions occur could benefit from software so sidecar thinks about the future we recognize that there's a ton of a ton of potential across different asset classes but we're debating now whether it makes sense for us to build out the whole experience for every asset class or instead pursue more of an embedded play where you can look at sidecar's infrastructures what's really powerful and extrapolate it across asset classes through different distribution Partners like these Banks asset managers Etc where we give them software to run their businesses more efficiently and I think regardless of how you slice it there's a ton of volume that still hasn't been tapped yet this still goes through a very manual driven process to connect the investors who want access to Alternative assets with the ultimate asset and we want to be the place regardless of whether we're top of mind or just a part of the process work the capital flows appreciate that and you know kind of understanding how you guys think about it and the overall you know Market opportunity uh you know just out of curiosity if you don't mind sharing like what's kind of that that Tam Samsung numbers that you guys reference to just to kind of help other Founders kind of understand you know how they should be packaging up their kind of Market opportunity slides I like how you're articulated but just from like a cure uh you know numbers perspective what do you who do you typically lean towards yeah I mean there's different ways to slice it you know if we were to go like you know sort of top-down you know total addressable market look at some massive number for private markets like 14 trillion and say we're going to have a percentage of it that's in resonate with us personally we couldn't really sell that but instead going from bottom up like talking about the different components like within VC what's the size of just the SPV market for emerging managers okay now add-on mid-station late stage managers the size of the SPV Market looking at funds what's the size of the fund Market with some decent assumptions looking outside of just VC if we look at private Equity start with let's say search funds what's the size of that market and we kind of built a picture of what the market looks like and what could be accessible to us looking at just sort of the early players each of these different asset classes and pull pull that all together come with a very compelling number but I think for different Founders it could it could be a different story there's an element also sidecar Market making to a degree because some deals that happen on sidecar would never get done given that we can offer a product of an attractive price point since we've automated so much of the pain since these deals will never have gotten elsewhere it's kind of like we made a market that wouldn't otherwise exist there's a justification there as well that adds to the market size it makes the market larger so I think it really is dependent though on on your business it's hard to say that you can apply that same philosophy and be successful across different ecosystems well I think it's important to just acknowledge that there are different approaches but I think the way you're looking at it is like each from the bottoms up First Market uh you know perspective you're capturing and understanding and researching the different customer actual customers that can actually spend money and how many of those are there out there and you know what's your path to kind of acquire more and then move up the chain and then so on and I think that you know Founders this is a really important exercise to go through whether it's what you end up putting in your your deck or not it's an important exercise to look at in terms of yeah it's like oh there's 14 trillion in capital deployed every year in all these markets like we'll get one percent it's like know that you know it's like why one percent and you know you know Revenue so there's a lot of uh you know ways to kind of to slice and dice the particular Market question but um yeah that could be helpful just Rook if we don't maybe interjecting is that for some of this these numbers that you might otherwise gloss over and just drop in a number that might seem attractive from a sales perspective it's like take take the salesman hat off for a second and think about this like a rational investor like what is someone going to look at this and ask questions about answer that question instead because people like like you Jason who are very critical and look at the information and just try to parse what's relevant we'll look past that top you know top down approach very quickly yeah 100 and you know you know Founders do theirselves as a service and but it's it's so practical because there's times where it's like oh this could be huge this is a massive Market but it's like let's let's actually unpack where you're having your impact and maybe it's only a 50 million dollar market you know in terms of like what your actual Revenue potential could be and that's really what I encourage Founders to look at is like what's your actual Revenue potential if all goes well or you had X you know percent of that market um the question I want to you know shift gears to you know from like the fact that you had an over subscribe round you have lots of investors that have expressed interest their customers and you know maybe turning them down to being around might lose them as customer yeah how did you go about picking the ones that ultimately invested in you and did you ask others to write smaller checks so you can have more participants you ask for bigger checks how do you just kind of navigate the oversubscribe round experience yeah it's a it's a good question first and foremost for the larger text that wanted to come in fueling out the relationship making sure that these individuals would be true Partners to us that they were investing for the right reasons they understood the business we were building and understood the culture we wanted to create a sidecar and would be a part of it and you know these these rounds don't come together perfectly in that it's not like everyone shows up at the same time you get to then pick like five or 15 investors in over a subscribed situation we had made commitments to accept certain dollars as additional checks were coming in and that put us in an unfortunate circumstance of having amazing investors show up a little later who wanted larger pieces of the round well we would not go back on our word with the earlier investors ask them to invest less because that would that would change that relationship and dynamic so given that was the case for us part of the equation for us was one after validating that those who we said yes to for larger texts were the Great partners that we wanted them to be for the other investors who wanted a larger piece who had a certain ownership percentage in mind convincing them to still be a part of this with a smaller commitment and that took some massaging outside of those larger text I wanted to come in we did preserve a good amount of space for Angels a big reason for that is those angels were also potential customers and we knew those specific angels that could be customers and also had megaphones as far as personal Brands could be really helpful to us in a promotion stand so we made sure to carve out some space for those angels that one are really helpful already have proven themselves in Prior in the prior round too are helpful in that they are connected to Talent they understand how to build great products they have great design sense it could be great stakeholders and making this sharper or three had a way to help us grow the business so we preserved a decent amount of round for those individuals again it didn't come together perfectly but we tried our best to make sure that we kept a room for as many of those people as possible with this checks as small as 2500 didn't really matter to us how much they were investing What mattered more was that they were a part of it and I imagine with your technology taking a 2500 check probably wasn't a problem uh as far as why people use spvs for for Founders that you know maybe need an education on you know why use an SPV in their in their fundraise and you know as Angelus is kind of coined like the the ruv which is effectively just a founder-led SPV you know curious to kind of have you share just the overall concept to Founders that might not be familiar with what an SPV is and and why they might want to consider it for their angel rounds or safe rounds absolutely um as you mentioned Jason you know you can use an SPV to consolidate various checks into your round and the benefit of using an SPV which is an entity in its own right that's created to to receive capital and accept membership from all those individuals with smaller checks is once all those members come into the SPD it's just one line on your cap table another bit for the SPV is because there's one line on the cap table and maybe a single document signed from that SPD with the company is as you go through later rounds you need to Traverse certain governance obligations you need to go and Chase every single individual within the SPV you just have one counterparty to deal with and many of these spvs that counterparty could also be the company itself for you as an individual as a representative for those various sppv members meaning you don't have to really talk to anyone inside the company to push forward on governance items or deal with later rounds a final item that spbs help with and this is something that is debatable is it results in a cleaner cap table cleaner meaning less people on the cap table debatable as in there isn't really a problem with having more members historically you know having been a lawyer and seeing how people think about these things in the past investors will look at a captive and think wow you have a lot of investors which means you couldn't raise a lot of money from any one of them but I think investors today are pretty Savvy and know that there's a lot of benefit from including a a Grassroots uh fundraise as part of your story yeah I know I'm I'm glad we were talking about this just you know one of my my first Venture back startup we had way too many angels like it was probably like 40 people from checks from 5 000 to 100 Grand and it was and an absolute disaster chasing them down and subsequent rounds and being able to get them to sign everything and you know participate properly we had some do like pushback because they weren't necessarily the right fit from an angel perspective and this alleviates almost all of that now you have to get them updated you know I would advise Founders to provide information rights and updates and so on to all the participants but nonetheless it gives you a lot more optionality keeps things clean and it's a vehicle that I often recommend to a lot of Founders that at uh you know usually are not familiar with the concept or the negatives uh once I closed around like it's I'll get all the checks get all the checks get all the checks but it's like well there's there's some you know problems that come with just rolling checks and those relationships that have to be maintained feature sending documents uh so it's a powerful vehicle for Founders to potentially Institute themselves uh or if they have a lead investor they have uh you know an investor that you you can kind of lead an spva on their behalf to kind of bring in smaller checks you know there might be that really amazing angel or value-add person that can come in but they can't come in with 25k or 50k you know they're coming with five or six or something along the smaller side but by them having that little piece they can amplify your brand participate feedback you know other value can come down the route so I think it's something that a lot of Founders should definitely consider in their and their their cap stack um so we talked a lot about uh your experience but something I'm curious just in the markets that we're in today you know how have you guys been impacted being that you know last couple years very frothy a lot more deals going on I'm sure you have like some kind of gauge on how the markets overall uh pursuing and the volume of a deal flow that you're experiencing kind of what's your take on the Venture market and just Capital raises in the early stage rounds hey Venture Capital still going strong earlier this year it felt a little bit more tepid I think there was more uncertainty in the market that led people to hold on to their checkbooks a bit a bit tighter but we're seeing a lot of great deals get done and you know we read about certain hype Cycles you can read like The Wall Street Journal we see a lot about Ai and news and of course AI is an exciting sector to invest in but you know it doesn't doesn't mean that deals are not getting done in the Life Sciences and deep Tech generally and Material Sciences um energy transition Renewables we're seeing deals getting done left and right all these different ecosystems and honestly as a as an investor myself because I still I still put some money to work every now and then I'm more excited about venture today than I was last year it seems like deals are getting priced more fairly there's more thought going into into a business's trajectory you know you asked about Tam and Sam that wasn't a conversation that came up for us in Prior rounds but it will come up in the future we're preparing for it um I don't think it came up for other businesses either as much as it should have but if we're being rational investors as VCS we want to know these things and I think there's more conversation happening around how businesses are doing what their potentials are which is leading to better deals getting done and the founders who are showing up today to raise know they're up against a battle if they weren't up for before so you're seeing stronger Founders come to the table as well in that they're more committed to the mission they know it's going to be harder they still want to be here still want to fight the fight and build the best business so because of all these factors rational investors are still deploying and deploying more so than perhaps irrational investors might have been deploying in the past and that means that sidecar is a business has been doing pretty well this is our best year by Far We've exceeded all of our last year's Revenue in the first half of this year and we're on a path to hit a very very good multiple on Revenue uh compared to last year over the rest of this year and we feel really good about about the future so you know venture's still alive uh I think that there's an element of the markets just generally being healthy as well unemployment's very low increasing interest rates hasn't seemed to affect hiring efforts too much it also hasn't seemed to affect consumer spend as much as perhaps the government might have hoped I do think inflation's coming down now which is great but the stock market's still peaky it's getting back to all-time highs and I think that results in more faith that Venture deals will translate to value and as a result you know we haven't really seen as much of a pullback as as people might have thought last year looking at all the headwinds taking them out of recession those things just didn't manifest in the way that people expected yeah it's great to hear and you know given your pulse on the market and just the fact that you're that's your job is seeing deals come in and you know going through uh it's great to hear that Insight I'm sorry to see someone on our side is just you know deal the good deals and great deals are getting done but uh there's overall a lot of people still trying to raise money that maybe aren't necessarily the right fit for money it's kind of harsh reality is some people have to reflect on but uh you know Nick it's been absolutely awesome to hear your story and have you join us on the on this podcast is there anywhere that people can learn more about you and sidecar or you know places they can follow you or reach out to you for sure uh our website great place to learn about side cards s-y-d-e-c-a-r dot IO and to learn more about me uh you can follow me on Twitter at nicktolaraja n-i-k-t-a-l-r-e-j-a I'm not as active as our marketing team would like me to be on Twitter but um if you reach out to me I'll be there I'll respond no I appreciate it we'll make sure to keep those uh those as show notes but Nick it was a pleasure having you uh insights that you've been able to share this year thank you Jason