How do you run a 200-investor Series A fundraising process?

I think people trying to capitalize on a good business in a bad market. And the way I saw it is like it's not my fault the the market is bad. I've built a good business. You should still pay a good price. Welcome to Fundraising Demystified, 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 truths 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 10 of Fundraising Demystified. Today we have George Richardson with us, the founder and CEO of Aerocloud, a cloudnative airport management and passenger processing platform. They've recently raised a $12 million series A, bringing their total capital raise to just over $16 million. We talk about how George switched from being a professional race car driver to starting his own company. how they timed their fund raise with only three months of runway left and their fundraising process that they use that helped them book a hundred investor meetings and close the round in just 3 months. George is based out of the UK and shares some incredible stories and just has a generally interesting background that I think you're going to love. Let's go ahead and jump right in. Welcome, George. We're so grateful to have you on the show. Thanks for joining us. Thanks for having me and look forward to getting into it. Yeah, I know. Me as well. And you know, I just want to kind of go straight into the meat here. You have a really interesting background as a professional racer. Um would really love to learn that story and have you share that with our audience and ultimately how that led to you starting a company. Yeah, absolutely. I mean the the the story is um I mean it for a start it feels like a a different lifetime ago, right? We're we're we're I'm now sat here at 31 and I retired like fullon retired at 26. So, it kind of feels like I've had another life, but there are an awful lot of synergies between professional sport, you know, whether it's in motor racing or tennis or table tennis, it doesn't matter, uh, and then also starting a business. But going back to sort of, you know, the old George, if you like, um, at 16, I had a skill, a talent, you could say, um, and that was backed up by a well- capitalized family. Um, that our passion was motor racing. My dad had uh been a very successful entrepreneur and unfortunately motorsport is not necessarily a meritous sport which means that even if you're the best driver in the world you don't necessarily get a ride. Um so we did this for a hobby effectively from the age of four years old. We were racing motocross bikes, go-karts, anything with a motor we were doing at the weekend. My mom was involved. My little brother when he came along uh seven years after me started to get involved and it hit the crux around the 2008 financial crisis. um and my age becoming that age where one could potentially turn it into a career if they wanted to that me and my dad sat down and said, "Well, you know, we're running out of money effectively." My dad was in the property business and had a um a great business uh that was affected by the recession. Um and I was left with one skill. I wasn't particularly great at school. Uh but I knew how to get to put together a program at a very early age. I was always one of those kids a bit old for my age. I was obviously interested in what people were doing. that was engaging conversations that was raising capital and sponsorship in order to go racing. So at that point we sort of had 50% sponsorship money and 50% of our own money and then over time that developed into what we would call professional from the age of of sort of 16 17 where you go into getting a funded ride which means effectively you go out you raise capital for that season you spend that capital on your season and then you do it all again and I did that 10 times over. So if you think about that and starting a business, it's incredibly hard. But what you learn is you learn customer retention, you learn how to build an evangelical customer, you learn how to negotiate, you learn how to deal with hard times with good times, etc., etc. But it's massively exhausting, very, very similar to starting a business. Um, fast forward right to the end of my career. Uh, I made the decision about 3:00 a.m. driving around the Nordife in Germany, which is called the Nurburg Ring to those who don't know, which is 147 uh changes of direction over an 8m minutee lap. 150 cars to do a 24-hour race and I'm doing the night stin. It's 3:00 a.m. It's frosty, bit of snow, can't see much more further than the bonnet. And in order to compete at that level and do an 8 minute lap time consistently at that level, there becomes a massive uh risk. And I was just getting to the point where the risk versus reward for me just wasn't working anymore. uh I wasn't getting paid at that time enough money for it to be worth it for me anymore. Um, I came home having made that decision, me and my dad and my manager at the time, uh, to see what our options were within motorsport, whether that would be consultancy, coaching, etc., etc. Uh, given I had a lot of experience to offer. Uh, and I just started making little small investments on the side and we we we sort of we sort of saw that year out. Um, I met my co-founder in a coffee shop. Um, we started talking about various ideas. We started investing together. We started a couple of companies together. One was successful, one wasn't. and the third one happened to be Eric Cloud. Uh, and we started in 2019. We've raised three rounds and we've never looked back. So, that's really how it happened. And, uh, and now all I do is build my business, which is very similar to the thrill that I get from winning a race uh, which doesn't happen happen often uh, when you're at the the professional level. Man, that that's an incredible story, especially the correlation just between being a professional raceh racing driver to the point of building a company and the applicable skills that you learned along the way. I guess, you know, I'm really interested like how did you guys come about the the idea for Aerocloud and, you know, clearly it's got, you know, appeal. You raised a decent amount of capital. Uh, kind of walk us through how you came up with the idea and kind of where the business is today. Sure. So, it's kind of non-traditional in a way and and I'm very proud of a cloud being non-traditional um because it's a sector that not a lot of people know about and it requires a in-depth you know expert knowledge and my co-founder had that he grew and sold a business in 2011 in this space that he sold to one of the legacy incumbents that we now replace ten pennial all across the world which gives us both uh great satisfaction. So, he had the domain knowledge and then all I provided was the naivity. So it's like why why do they do it this way? Why do they get paid in this way? Why do airports do this in this way? Etc. etc. And for me uh I was just there as a voice on his shoulder. And then occasionally he'd go, "Oh yeah, that's really good. Let's run with this and run with that and that strategy and this strategy." And between us, we built a business that was generating about 140 between 140 and 170,000 ARR before we even considered going out for money. So our plan was to build an organic business that was going to cater for us for for years to come. The advantage in our business is we're signing very long contracts and our solution is not a vitamin. It's a complete painkiller. In fact, it's you know it's an IV, it's a vitamin and a painkiller at the same time, right? This is mission critical stuff. So like from a risk versus reward perspective to go back to the analogy I used before, an airport operating solution that we do and I'll come on to what we do in a minute. it's very difficult to get in and replace or to put in for that matter. But on the flip side, you also benefit from that on on the flip side, which is very hard to get out. Uh and if you're doing a good job, it's very hard for them to come up with an excuse to get you out, right? Whether that be for a recession, a global pandemic, etc., etc. So, after raising the first round, you know, we didn't use any of that money for the best part of a year. And then we were like, "Oh, right. This is what bench capital's about. We need to, you know, expand now." And we went from the two of us around a boardroom table to like 20 people very very quickly. And as we sit here now, we're just just under 50. So I say I'm 150th of the team at Erica Cloud. Wow. So you guys have scaled pretty quickly. You got 50 people. Yeah. Um you bring up an interesting point especially in the fundraising game like vitamin versus painkiller and at least from what I'm seeing in this market only painkillers are getting funded. And how did you go about like walk us through kind of the customer acquisition journey? you you're basically selling to airports and as you mentioned that's like a completely unknown world for for most founders out there. Yeah. And many VCs as well. So um so what we do is we provide crystal balls by the medium software and AI to help airport execs predict the future. That's very simply what we do. Um the investor story is we've created the OS for the new age airports targeted at small to mediumsiz airports that operate from the passenger journey, the airport experience and the airport operational data piece. And then it's all tied together internally with computer vision using existing CCTV infrastructure. So this is a sector that has not been blessed with innovation despite everyone thinking that you know there's millions of flying aircraft every single day. Miraculously, most of the time they don't crash into each other. Miraculously, they all land at airports around the country or or around the globe every couple of seconds. But there's not that great tech. Um, and we are um probably the the the sort of the the company that's innovated in this space the most in such a small frame of time. Um, and our initial goal was just to replace the legacy incumbents, the incumbents that we knew needed replacing from my co-founder's previous business. And we just targeted them first. So in terms of customer acquisition, the minimum time that we're taking is about seven months u which is a really long time in order to acquire a customer. However, it's usually 100 plus ARR off the out the gate and we have products now that can sell to 500k 1 million ARR um on upsell and cross-ell as we as we develop. Last year we also acquired a business which is very untypical of a pre- series aid company. um we acquired a passive processing uh solution which we embedded into our technology so that we own the end to end and we're we're basically building something that is uh traditional using venture capital money if that makes sense. Um and it's a fresh look on an industry that no innovators have been present and uh nobody's raised serious amounts of money to disrupt 20 billion dollars of annual spend that literally go to five legacy incumbents. So, we're incredibly unpopular uh in the industry from a a competitor standpoint, but we're very popular with our customers. And what we found is our customers are starting to move on, move different airports. They're taking us with them and they're becoming massively evangelical. And that's stimulated a shedload of our growth. So, that's really in a nutshell how we've done it and and and and what the ethos of our company is all in one really. It's it's a cyclical cycle of of um delighting customers and providing them solutions that they actually enjoy using rather than want to get rid of. You're saying a lot of I think what I consider the key words that VCs want to hear like disrupting incumbents, uh unsexy business. You know, basically no one's there's not billions of capital going into making this a very competitive space. So, this is an opportunity kind of win or take all. Yeah. You know, uh grab, which is great to hear. So walk us through you launched in 2019. You you guys put you put a little bit of money in between you and your founder. Yeah. Uh you also went out and raised in total around 16 million uh plus with the series A, you know, being more recent around 12 million. Yeah. You know, kind of share with the audience the the fundraising journey. How did you go about finding your investors? You know, when did you decide was the right time? Kind of give us some of the insights. Sure. Well, and that's kind of what I try and help some founders with right now. uh is I'm quite relevant because we closed in December of 22. So the I I suppose the start of difficult times. We did achieve a multiple that was a lot more start of 2022 than end of 2022. Um but we didn't achieve a valuation that was um that we were unable to hold on to which a lot of companies have done. Um, so I'm very proud that we kind of hit the timing right, but it wasn't necessarily intentional. So what I'm about to say worked for me. Whether it works for you or not is a different thing. And that's kind of what I say with with founders. But you got to think about where you're putting yourself first in the quadrant of, you know, u investors minds. We wanted to be sustained high growth, um, very capital efficient and at a metric that was about half a million more than the traditional ARR metrics that they would see typically because we knew that anybody's more likely to to to look at a business with higher ARR than the next, right? So, we wanted to put ourselves in that top right quadrant before we even started. The second thing was timing. So, when did the board want to go out for funding? when were we going to run out of cash versus if we didn't get funding, could we turn it around to be as quickly as 3 to six months? And that dictates your timing effectively. Um, and I would say that we nailed our timing in the sense that, you know, we we had two to three months left of runway at the point of raising. Um, so when you look back, hindsight's a great thing. It looks like it we absolutely nailed it, right? it was a perfect timing, but there was a lot of thinking that went into that and there what the what of there was a lot of problem prevention and thought processes to making that happen. So, they're the first two pieces that you need. The second thing that I always talk about is that you've got a business to run and a fund round to raise because if you take your eye off the business, the the growth will decline. A CEO is very impactful on a business at the early stages, way more than in my opinion in the late stages. And it's a very different CEO. I I was a very different CEO three years ago than I am now. And I might be different CEO in three years time or there might be another George that we employ to run our business. I I I don't know. But the point is I'm self-aware enough to know that we have a business at hand and we have a fundraising at hand. So I needed to split my time accordingly. The only way you can do that given that fundraising is a full-time job is create a team. So for me, I'm really not that good with numbers. So I needed somebody from finance, whether that's fractional or whether that's full-time hired. We actually had both. We had somebody who had raised multiple rounds before that we paid consultancy to to give us the highlevel cohort analysis ability to build a proper spreadsheet and to present our data in the most advantageous way possible. But we did the leg work ourselves. So we were paying, you know, one to 2,000 per month to an external consultant. The other thing is you need somebody to run the business while you're away actually doing these meetings. So I had my COO which was a recent hire who ran the business, stabilized the business with without me in it and continued its growth trajectory and reported to me basically every evening and every morning. We would chat for about 20 minutes about the direction of the company whilst I was in the thick of fundraising. The other thing we had was an analyst um and my assistant Alex. I'm big fan of CEOs having assistance. Uh Alex allowed me to manage my time and manage the investors, changing meetings, cancelling meetings, moving meetings, etc., etc. So then you you're set up effectively. Uh what we did then was once we've got the time frame and the team, the two T's in place, uh we then concentrated on the funnel. So we spent about a month building a funnel of about 200 investors that we thought would be highly likely to invest in AirCloud. We then to that 200 investors sent a coffee chat deck. This is a deck that takes no more than five minutes to read, if not three minutes to read. And the sole goal of the coffee chat get debt was to get a coffee meeting, whether that be in person whilst I was in London. I'm from Manchester, but I could go down to London at two, three days at a time and backtoback investors over the coffee chat deck. And the sole goal of that 20 minutes was to get us to uh the next meeting, which was effectively a deep dive. Between the deep dive meeting and the coffee chat meeting, we had a notion page which we gave everything to. We put in cap table, investor sentiment, board decks, financial forecast, CFF, what we're going to spend the money, where we're going to spend the money, who we're going to hire in the next five hires, details on everyone who works for the business. The the the TAM, the sum, all the acronyms that you can possibly think of, we dumped in a very sophisticated notion room. After the coffee chat debt, we sent them an individual link. This individual link was unique to their fund, which means that we could track how many times that they were in uh the notion page for us um and how much time they were spending. And then in the deep dive, we would assess the key topics that that fund needed in order to take it to IC. And as sort of the hit rate, you'd want to go top of funnel would obviously be at 100%. So 200 leads into coffee chat. You're probably looking about 50% success. So 100 coffee chat uh meetings. and you try and get those done in a three to four week period, which is incredibly difficult. That's 20 minutes back to back for up to six weeks straight. You know, that's a real mammoth effort. And then into your deep dives. In your deep dives, you bring in the relevant people or have those relevant people on Slack uh to answer those very technical and difficult questions of yourself and then loop all the frequently answered questions into the into the notion page. So the investors that come later in the funnel don't have to ask you the same stuff all over again. And you if you run that, you should in in George's sort of way of raising money, you should get to a point where you are generating a number of term sheets. Um, and then postterm sheets is a whole different game and we can talk about that if you want to, but but that that's really my key. So, you really built a a system and you were very calculated on that system, I guess. How did you come up with determining that this was the process for you to pursue? Um, have you done this process before? What what kind of led you down this this strategy? So all I do is work, you know, and my girlfriend of seven years, who's my absolute ride or die effectively, she's bought into that as well. My family have bought into that and and I've been brought up in that way. So I like to talk to as many people as possible and there are a couple of individuals that swayed me into building a process and then and then articulated their concerns with building a process, their concerns with valuing around their concerns with investor sentiment, the market conditions, etc., etc. And I take all of that information, whether that be at the weekend, whether that be after working hours, before working hours, going on a run with some investors, was really great. There's a a guy called Hugh that lives near me that that runs um a later stage fund called GB Bullhound. Um and you know, we went on a dog walk at 6 a.m. And I'm listening to all of those, feeding that into my process before we launched. So, it took us about a month to build that process. But I feel like business is a process. And I think that if you hit your numbers um and your intention is correct, I think you will be successful. And I think that fundraising is no different. And I speak to a lot of founders. One just before this call actually, I offer about half an hour of my time per week to to founders in various Slack channels um and they were saying, you know, they went out to six investors. Well, you know, no one ever went to the nightclub and only spoke with six people and brought one person home. It just it's a numbers game, you know. It's like, you know, you you need a lot of people in the top of the funnel. Um, and that goes for everything. Sales, you know, candidates, hiring. You know, when we launch a job, we go out to a thousand people. We want a thousand applicants because we want to find the best. So, you know, life is a numbers game. And I think I think process driven approach to to most things is is highly beneficial. And how did you come up with that hit list of I think you mentioned 200 VCs that you wanted to focus on? How did you find them? Where did you source that list? And then how did you structure your outreach? Pretty simple. Um, current investors, you know, the job of a seed investor is to produce a list of potential series A investors. Very, very simple. So, I stress tested all of those guys, made sure that I was at the top of their inbox every single Monday morning. And if they weren't producing 20 to 30 names and 20 to 30 warm introductions um or lists of investors or contacts with lists of investors, then you know they don't hold much time uh for me, right? I think when you invest in a company at their level, they're professional investors, right? Their job is to help a company fund raise. They're they're monitored on the amount of capital they draw down and the amount of capital that they input into companies. um and the rate at which they do it in as well is very important to them and um I think it's absolutely essential that they lead that charge. So simply put, you know, you lean on your network. And going back to So that that's with the series A. So you lean heavily on your seed investors. How how did you go about landing your your seed investors? What was a similar strategy, different approach? How how did you go about that? Yeah, I mean I've collected an amazing phone book literally not because I was a professional racing driver and I was involved with a lot of high net worths and lots of global companies and stuff like that, but just because of the type of person I am. I'm the type of person that sits on a plane every every week. I fly twice a week, let's say, and I'm I'm I'm talking to the person next to me and I I I'm a people's person, right? So, I'm building a phone book out and I will note and I have an, you know, almost like an encyclopedic knowledge for my network of connections in my head and we connected to a guy called Tim, me and Ian. And we try and do we tried to do stuff with with Tim before and uh Tim is um effectively a VC himself. He writes a lot of angel checks at at the lower end, but he also assists founders in developing um businesses and fundraising processes. um and he introduced me to Chris uh very early on in the process by the way for feed uh Chris is a managing partner at Playfair Capital um and we hit it off straight away and and one of the questions I I said you know to Chris very early on was what wouldn't I like about you what other investors would come in if you were only going to do half of this round could you produce the other money or could you write the whole check yourself and and over time your your network your contact book everybody knows somebody that invests in something that then might know somebody that invests in startups. I'm pretty sure about that and I appreciate that that kind of comes with um your your situation and where you're educated and what country you you're in, etc., etc. But, you know, if we're talking about like capital markets like the UK and the US, I I don't believe, you know, third and fourth connections are that hard to come by, especially with LinkedIn, especially with the internet, doing things like this, putting yourself out, attending those events. I I think again it relates back to a numbers game and I think that if you speak to enough people you'll find a wide enough net um to to to throw. Um so yeah I think that's my best answer but you just got to make of it what you will. I mean it's really difficult. I mean less than 1% of companies get funded right so it's not for the faint-hearted. And I think that a big part of the graft and the grind that a founder needs to do in this modern age is he needs to put him or herself in front of people with capital all the time and ask if it's not right for you, who would it be right for? Do you have a network that you can help me tap into can you provide any introductions and put a load of onus on people who have done it before? And something you brought up earlier is the coffee meetings and I want to expand on this is I think a lot of founders make this I just got like four pitches this morning where it's like invest in my startup now. you know, it's like they ask straight for the the the sale. And I think what you were smart about doing, this is what I try to help founders with, is you're not asking for an investment. You're asking for 20 minutes. You know, you're asking for that that initial meeting. And so, you set up, I think you said hundred coffee meetings, you know, back to back. What was it like when um you set up the dynamic of, you know, V one VC rolling out, one VC rolling in? Did they cross paths, you know, how did you manage that? Was it all the same place? Were they really back toback? Kind of walk us through the reality of what happened Yeah. So, the ones in in uh in person had about a 10-minute turnaround because I think at, you know, week two, we say in the UK, you don't know your backside from your elbow at that point. I mean, you are regurgitating the exact same pitch multiple times per day. And you are often answering a very similar question multiple times a day, and you're trying to think to yourself, have I already told this person or was that the person two meetings ago of of the same answer? um it requires the team and and whether that's your significant other or or whether you can do it yourself and you just do it over a longer period of time. We decided to go for all fundraising a very condensed effort and roll them back into each other. Um but yeah, I think investor crossover is not actually a bad thing because I think a lot of investors co-invest. Not every investor wants to lead. In fact, I found in this last round that not many want to lead. They want someone else to go first. They want someone else to price. They want to to say, "Oh, we're investing alongside Liz or Jason or whatever it may be." So, I think that like the the question is is like, you know, would you be want to be part of this round? Is probably a better question than would you want to invest? Because what you usually happens is at the end of the meeting, they go, "Yeah, I'm I'm good. I I I want to see more." And at the end of the the detailed meeting, they're like, "Okay, cool. This could work. we we could go to IC to co-invest or we could go to IC for 100 grand or 5% of the round or whatever it may be and then you get this jigsaw effect which is post TC uh TS right and I think that you know what founders should be doing is in the meeting saying okay if this is not for you who would it be for or if this is not in your network could I speak to them and then they could bring it back to you and would you would you want to co-invest behind them because they've got the domain experience or whatever I didn't quite have that advantage but what I do have is that ability just to talk and and to ask I'm not afraid to ask a stupid question which is okay do you know anybody this might be better suited for you know and I have those you know you could some people could call them cojones other people could call them confidence whatever it may stupidness I I'm not prepared to ask a daff question like that so I think that you know if they were seeing people coming in and out that might invad that might um increase the FOMO nature I've never really been in for playing games also be very honest with investors like saying who have you got term sheets from I'd tell people you know how many people are interested in this round I'd tell people do you have any co- co-investors or lead investors lined up I'd tell people and I think that that then comes into creating this teamwork around building a round when you say about the pitches that you've just had saying do you want to invest it's such a wide and and frankly a useless conversation if I find an investor that I want to work with I want to work with them in order to complete my round because don't forget they're in the business of investing in companies. We're in the business of running companies that that the both parties need each other each other for for the for the respective goals to happen. Uh if you pick venture capital as as as your method of financing, but I think you know it should be a togetherness and and you know immediately with the investors that invested in Ericard, you know immediately if they're if they're on or they're off and after the detailed meeting, you know if you can work with that someone, you know, I know within 25 seconds of meeting someone on if that's somebody I like or I dislike. That's good. And you know, having gone through that experience, you had back-to-back meetings, you had the numbers game, you had momentum going for you guys. At what point, you know, when you started receiving term sheets, you kind of mentioned that was a bit of a story. Would love to unpack that and what the experience was in terms of, you know, from the time you went to um getting those meetings to the point where you had, you know, term sheets in the in the in the inbox. What was that experience? Sure. So all in all our fundraising was about three and a half months uh end to end and I would say that at least after that there was probably six weeks of legals and I think founders need to factor in that legals can go terribly wrong or they can go terribly well. If you're prepared to sign whatever people put in front of you um and you're running out of capital etc etc you need to find factor that in and I think a minimum legal process is five weeks minimum absolutely minimum and especially when lawyers get in the room you know people are swinging all sorts of things right and it's it's ridiculous so um if we talk about term sheets so term sheets then presents you with the jigsaw right is the jigsaw is you've got your co-investors on the right hand side of your screen and you've got the the leads on your left. And if you're in a fortunate position like we were, you pick from one of the three leads, you try and uh get them to become cos obviously. So your co-pipe builds. In my case, I probably had about six to seven combinations of investors that could make it work. Everybody has their investing criteras. They need a board seat. They need a observer. They need a one times prep, a five times prefer, whatever it may be, a liquidation preference, whatever it may be. So I would be asking them right let's just not waste any time here co and leads give me you know what your standard terms are let let's give me your starting piece and I've never tried to be clever with you try not to be clever with me type stuff we're not we're not letting the market decide the valuation here we're coming to the valuation together we're coming to the terms together uh let's do this with high conviction if we all want to get this done um and then the jigsaw takes three or four weeks because you have some codes that are full of hot there and they waste your time. Of course, that happens all the time. Or they had the right intention, then things change, the fun dynamic changes, partner goes off on holiday. Um, you know, whatever happens, we we had all of that in every round. Um, and over time, the jigsaw pieces start to fall off and and and then come together and then you you build your round and then you go into your legals. Um, and then in the legal process, again, I just have, you know, pretty high level of honesty. I I can't accept that. I don't know how you would expect me to to work in that environment. Um this is what I want. I don't think it's unreasonable. Is that something you would like too? All these sorts of questions that are very basic human questions to get everybody around the table. Um in all rounds, I picked up the pen effectively. So our lawyers did the docks, which I think is also a little bit unusual. Um but this this means that I can control the pace. Um and also I can control the cost. Um because at the end of the day, you know, I don't want to be firing out 100 grand to a US law firm to to tell me how I build my round. I think my current board know what parameters we want to negotiate and the incoming investor knows what they need in order to satisfy their IC. So for me it was about um getting everybody around a table and having those conversations and and and legals then follow um and uh and you just got to pray that expectations through the legal process don't change and that you all have the right intentions through the legal process which in my case I was very lucky on on this last round it took about six weeks um previous rounds it took less way less different market but um I'm very happy with the deal very proud of what what me and the team have achieved so so for me it was essential You know, it's not often that we get into the opportunity to talk about kind of postterm sheet because I think everyone sees the the goalpost as getting a term sheet, but you you bring in some interesting points of what to expect, you know, in the legal phase. And, you know, with your situation, you had some options. You had multiple term sheets. You got to kind of pick your partner. You scared me when you said 5x like prep. I hope that wasn't actually a term you saw from that'd be pretty odorous. Um, I had I had some terrible offers though, you know. I think people trying to capitalize on a good business in a bad market. And the way I saw it is like it's not my fault the the market is bad. I've built a good business. You should still pay a good price. And I I've always felt like, you know, that you know, it's like property value. Pal Mau will always be Pal Mau, right? It's, you know, the best property will always attract the best price. And I think the same with companies. I think the best companies survive because they're the best companies, right? And I think, you know, if I was building a company out of hot air, I might have signed whatever. And I think people have signed whatever. But on the flip side, if I've taken great effort and gone to great lengths and sacrificed a lot of gray hair to build a great company, you know, I don't have any time for people to to to lowball. And and we did get two low balls and and those VCs I would strongly recommend against ever working with and I would never work with them myself. But then there are other VCs that realize that fair price good company uh is usually a result of a bad market and they they still understand that they have to pay good money for a good company and and that's how you determine the price. Um and and post term sheet is all about that. It's about sorting, you know, the the children from the adults, right? It's about having those open conversations. In my case, stage two, the lead investor in series A, they flew over within 48 hours uh of a deep dive session, spent 48 hours, including the plane journey, reading things like my sales bible, leading things, and picking our spreadsheet apart to to the nth degree, did all of their due diligence. So, when they landed, Liz gave me a term sheet and says, "We're not leaving this room until we're signing this term sheet." Super high conviction. Flew over from Boston into the UK. uh picked her up from the airport and put her back on the plane at the end of that day. So, you know, when you've got a lead that wants to do that with you, even if they're not paying the best price, you know that that person is going to kill for you. And I think that that's much more important than the best price at the behest of some shitty terms. You know, that's some valuable insights. And let's talk about UK versus US. So, it sounds like you brought in some US investors and some UK investors. And you know of your time split in terms of targeting investors, did you spend more time targeting local UK investors or more time spending US? How how did you kind of decide uh how to kind of divvy up the No, I I looked for funds of decent size that had follow on capital was one of our like big things. So, you know, the ability to invest again is is key for me. I don't want an investor in one round and then not in the next. Every single one of my investors invested in every single one of my rounds. Not one person has ducked. Uh that's really important for me and I take it massively personally if anyone was to question that. Even the seed the seed investors um sorry even the angel investors people you know $10,000 and below effectively when when we pick them up we want to keep them right. Um so that was the first criteria. The second criteria was B2B enterprise SAS. So um preferably experience of selling to either large enterprise fortune 500 companies um and backing companies that were doing that and also experience of investing in companies that sell uh in into government. Uh we sell a lot of data to government for example. So it was very key that we have that understanding and it can avoid any potential fit pit pitfalls. Um and then also the past success of the fund I think is is another big uh factor and then the people. So, past success of the fund, what um exits have they had? Um how quickly and the founders that did exit, what do they say about them? Did they pressure the founders to exit? For me, I think it's irresponsible to exit too early. Uh I don't want someone on my board that's going to pressure me to sell too early. I want to dominate in my space. I want to take over and I want them to understand that vision and they're not just pushing me into a fun cycle. Um and then, you know, the people. So, I want operator experience. I'm not really interested in somebody who um doesn't have any operator experience, frankly. And so, I gel a lot more with people who have been in the trenches like I am, you know, not every day, but and and those days are getting less. But starting a company and getting some off the ground is is really not for everybody. And I want to know that that person that sits on my board has done that at least once, if not preferably three to four, five, six times, whatever, how many more we can get. Right? So for me like the stage two uh piece is really good because you they work in a cohort. So they work as a partnership between somebody with you know vast industry from a VC perspective experience and an operator. So Liz is our operator, Dan is our VC experience. Um and that gives us a really unique mix and and makes their fund quite special. If I look at my previous funds that have invested in Aracloud seed and seed plus um heavy on the operator side um and Chris who is my personal mentor and sits on our board now has done it a few times and and knows what it's like when I'm calling him at 1:00 a.m. I think you've listed out some incredible criteria for founders to consider when they think about who they accept into their their cap table. I think there's a lot of as you mentioned like people just accepting whatever terms I get and like okay I'm done fun fun fundraising let me just sign and move forward and not really take the care and quality of time into the detail of what you just discussed there because you know it's a 10-year relationship you're going to spend a very long time with these people and I think you bring up some valuable points for founders to to take into consideration so as we kind of come to a wrap here something that you kind of mentioned earlier in the call is that you like to invest in startups you like to help startups um tell us what uh what founders should look for, what you look for in founders uh if you were to take into consideration either an investment into them or looking to to take them under your wing. Yeah. So, I'm interested in companies that are disrupting large legacy incumbents. So, I like markets that are dominated by, you know, 10 companies maximum, you know. So, uh in that's that's my scenario. I like and specialize in long sales cycles. Uh so people that are selling into you know large enterprise um that is a complex almost like lawyer like or or legal sales process you know in terms of the degree of the contracts and the negotiation periods and the time it takes and the relationship build. That's the sort of founder that I can add value to because that's what I've done most recently and that's what I'm the most relevant my most relevant experience in this frame of time. Um and then I'm looking for a founder that has the ability to stay in the saddle. I think that you know the biggest thing that um makes a successful uh VCbacked CEO and co-founder or founder um is the ability to stay in the saddle, you know, ability to grind uh 247 literally um the ability to um raise money. So high sales ability, high EQ, emotional intelligence, high self-awareness. Um, and three, uh, the ability to hire great people. So, I ask a founder, you know, what's your hiring process? Who have you hired before? How did you hire them? Why did you hire them? What was the metrics that you tracked against the other candidates that you had in the pipe? What was the attributes that that person showed over the over the number two candidate? And what aptitude tracker are you using? And what core skills are you looking for within this role? If a founder can answer and demonstrate those three topics, for me, that person is investable. Now, you then you apply that to uh what they're trying to raise money for, that's a whole different ball game. And and you know, I'm not an analyst, but if I can spot those three traits, which I think are very rare in in people, um then they've got my small angel check, uh for sure. And and you don't you don't find many of those people. No, that's great. Well, you know, how can uh our viewers follow you, learn more about you, or learn more about what you're doing at AOCCloud? Yeah, sure. So, I'm I'm I'm not massive on LinkedIn, but I see all of my messages. Um I am also a member of a couple of sort of fundraising groups uh locally to me. Uh I'm looking to expand uh my network. I offer about 30 minutes of my time per week for for anybody that that wants it to either just chew the fat on what it's like to run a series A company or what it's like to raise a seed round and how I should spend the money post post any sort of founder to founder advice that's completely unbiased and I don't want anything for it. What I do want for it ultimately is for that to come back around. I'm a big believer in what comes around goes around, right? So, and for me, I would hope that further down the line, maybe an opportunity presents itself either post ERACloud, post George CEO, post George investor, whatever it may may may come come to me. Um, my email address is also on my LinkedIn. Um, I I have a really busy box, but I I make sure to bring it to zero as often as I can. Um, and also, yeah, just I have my own podcast on Block Offblock, uh, which is a company podcast. um and any support, any help, any guidance, or if people think I'm full of it. Uh I' I'd love to be called out. Um and uh if they think that the way I've looked at this or or demonstrated on this podcast, I'd also like to know. I'm not easily offended and always eager to learn. Awesome. I really appreciate that. And if you could uh if you can leave our audience with just one piece of advice that you think would be ultra valuable to founders raising capital that you haven't mentioned to this point, what would be that one piece of advice? Stay in the saddle. Persistence. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there is there hardly is any skills that that trump that for me. I think if someone has the determination to win, they'll end up winning. And I think that, you know, I hate losing more than I enjoy winning. And I think that if you have that like inherent hunter nature, uh I think you'll be you'll be successful. I just think that that's over glorified. And I think that you got to be really careful if that's if you want to drink from the poison chalice, be careful because uh you're going to get a lot of gray hair and it's going to be very stressful and you may well not be successful. Um and I think if you know that and you're willing to give it a go and your risk versus reward calculation at the time says give it a go, just give it everything. Not 99% 100%. Leave absolutely nothing on the table. Um that would be my advice. Stay in the saddle. Well, hey George, I really appreciate you joining our podcast. Really love the story and, you know, can't wait to to share this with our audience. Thank you for joining us. My pleasure. Thanks for your time.